The deepest level of the movie is not political, I’ve always maintained the movie is about the redemption of a lost soul, that universal experience everyone goes through if we’re not going to destroy ourselves. She starts out in darkness and ends in light. The underground critics got that, but that’s not what most mainstream critics fastened on, they fastened on the politics of course. I’m not going to deny them, but they’re almost incidental. All of the women who worked on the film considered it a feminist movie in some way, whatever that word means, classically feminist I guess you could call it. But the mainstream critics didn’t see it that way, they saw it as anti-feminist. The movie has a feminist heroine, what other movie, male or female has that? You don't go through the hell of making a movie about something you consider unimportant.

I guess maybe it’s because in a movie you’re trying to take things to extremes, you want to see what lays under the surface in everyday life by taking things to extremes, in the way that in a war, or in a divorce, or even a litigation, tensions that lie beneath society get blown to the surface.  So we weren’t trying to have a reasonable conversation, we wanted to take things to extremes to examine them, and that might have stirred people up.

If I had to be more reasonable about it and reduce it to a political level, which is definitely a reduction, it’s less than what the movie is, I’d say the movie glorifies a woman like Elizabeth Warren, but vilifies maybe Hillary Clinton.  But again we’re taking things to extremes, Hillary Clinton is not as evil in real life as the villain of our movie, that’s just the sort of political landscape of the movie.  It’s believable to me Hillary could actually do some good things if she were elected, in the way Nixon or LBJ did, even though you might not trust them personally or politically.

I gotta say I had it coming maybe by being so confrontational, defensive or unclear, and I’ve got no complaints from a business standpoint, the controversy helped.  Even so, I was a little disappointed in some of the political reaction from the press and frustrated at being misunderstood.   It’s like, "What?  What are you talking about?  Golddigging?  Amongst American women?  Women using sex for power and to get ahead?  Surely you jest.  How offensive of you to suggest such a thing.  You pig.  Where?  We don’t see it.”

It’s missing the broad side of a barn, to miss the scale of this, to the point of denial.  Especially when we’re on the brink of having a woman President, this is important to discuss, what sort of woman do we want to reward with power?  What sort of behavior?  That’s got implications far beyond the Presidency, it determines how women behave in this country, and female behavior determines male behavior as well.  If you’ve got a country full of women who can be bought you’ll have a country full of empty suits who’ll do anything for a buck, which is pretty much the Wall Street culture which has damaged the country so much.  Look at what women do, rather than what they say. 

What are the most popular artists of our time amongst American women?  And that’s not just a fashion statement, it’s the best macro indicator you can find as to where American women are emotionally and psychologically.  And what have American women bought the most during my adult life?  Madonna, Sex and the City, Fifty Shades of Grey.  What do all of these have in common?  Being obsessed with sex for money, sex for power.  I personally like Madonna as an artist, I think she’s aware of what she’s saying, and even mocking it on some level.  But the other two?  Completely unaware.  Sex and the City?  For most women to have that fantasy - in their forties, not to grow out of it yet - that some troubled millionaire is secretly in love with them and is coming to take them away?  And what possibly could they see in that character, Mr.  Big, except money?  There is nothing else to that character, he’s entirely two dimensional, it’s just a fantasy about fucking money, like some teenage boy whacking off to a Playboy centerfold, we consider that pathetic in men, when they never get past that fantasy, so you can imagine how pathetic most men consider women when this is their secret fantasy, how little respect we have for that.

Shades of Grey is even worse - it’s laughable as erotica, like something a 14 yr old boy would send to the Penthouse forum.  The writing is awful, the sex is tepid - it’s a fantasy about being tied up and fucked by a billionaire, that’s all there is to it, and that thing has sold billions.  This is where American women are at emotionally and psychologically?  Do they dream about being tied up by a janitor?  A school teacher?  A Nobel laureate?  That I could respect, or would at least find less pathetic, so lowest common denominator.  It’s like some fat truck driver jerking off in a porn arcade, that’s about how attractive we find that mindset, that those are your standards in life. 

Now you have to think about this to perceive it, but frankly, I expect a top tier critic, from say the New York Times or Variety, even the Village Voice, I expect them to be a little more thoughtful, a little more perceptive, to lead a little.  But these days, you can hit them across the head with a two by four, and they refuse to see it, all of them, male and female, either completely pussywhipped, or so brainwashed by doctrinaire feminism, they can’t or won’t see it if you came and stuffed it up their tight white liberal asses.

And I say that as a liberal, I’m a liberal and a Keynesian, just not a pussy-whipped or brainwashed one.  I don’t consider this the deepest level of life or the movie, but if they want to have this argument, ya’ know what?  Maybe it’s time.  You’re telling me you can’t find one woman in the country who didn’t get her big break or wouldn’t be where she is if she hadn’t had sex with some guy with either money or power?  That’s pathetic if it’s true.  Thankfully, it’s not.  Elizabeth Warren passes that test, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi do not.

That’s not the only reason I love Liz, I mean she’s the best on financial issues, I love everything about her, I would vote for her just based on who she is and what she believes in and fights for, ahead of almost anyone, male or female.  Petraeus is maybe the only other person I’d campaign for for President, but he’s gotten all in his own head about this ridiculous affair.  Nobody cares about that, he’s just being nervous about making a bid for the Presidency. People who criticize him about Iraq are ignorant, if it wasn't for Petraeus we'd have had 2 million dead in Iraq and a genocide for the Sunni, instead of 200,000, he salvaged a terrible situation.

SYNOPSIS

Prince of Swine is a wild and revolutionary new comedy, a metaphor for the state of the country, and a rowdy send up of everything from the new feminism to Wall Street to the American religion of celebrity.

When Jiggle King Jerry Farber gropes a dimwitted B-movie starlet then fires her from his latest T & A extravaganza, an idealistic young attorney vows to bring him down and make him pay for the cruelty of swine everywhere. To do so she must make a deal with the Devil and get in bed with her new boss, another Prince of Swine who detests everything she stands for.

People ask me what the movie's about, I just say, "It's about 100 minutes." We were protested by the lunatic fringe on both the left (militant feminists) and right (the anti-gay marriage people) basically for having a healthy sex life. It was the happiest day of my life, figured, if we were p'ing them off, we must be doing something right. The middle 90% of Americans seem to enjoy it.

"Jerry Farber is a metaphor for the corruption on Wall Street right now, as Prince of Swine is a metaphor for the country as a whole. We're on the brink of revolutionary change, economically, militarily, every which way . . . "

The iconic French filmmaker Godard was hitting on my ex-girlfriend once and said to her, "With ceen-ema, when eet ees right . . . the entire universe ees reflected een eets arc. What do you say, baby? Let's go home and make love." Godard, as it turns out, was full of crap and a lousy lay to boot (I fell for that line too) but that's actually true of my film.

This is basically what Prince is saying: a real feminist is what you want in a wife. But where would you find her nowadays? This disease that's crept into feminism, that it's OK to be a golddigger because men are evil and the enemy, how can we respect that? They start from a mindset that men are evil, or worse they think it's not important to know anything about men, I remember one feminist consultant sending Al Gore a memo on how to behave like an alpha male? So now we're taking written instructions from feminists on how to be men? It's like, "Be sensitive, be sensitive, respect my rights!". Then you go out in the world and get your ass kicked, and it's, "Act like a man, dominate!".

" . . . Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. The chaps who win gold medals - even those as geeky as Michael Phelps - are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.

But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely note it."