William H. Macy is still remembered for his performance as the beleaguered porn-set First AD in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 “Boogie Nights.” However, the Oscar-nominated actor said that he’s also lost a work for his opinion that gratuitous violence in movies is nothing more than pornography.
Macy said during Brett Goldstein’s “Films To Be Buried With” podcast that “Hollywood is doing a lot of damage” with filmic portrayals of violence onscreen. “You kill 18 people, it’s just porn,” Macy said. “The only thing you can do to make that more dramatic is kill 18 more.”
His disdain for over-the-top violence comes down to the “truth” and authenticity of what’s onscreen.
“What offends me is films that aren’t true,” he said. “And I guess the most obvious example — and I can see the will to live just fade from people when I get on this kick — but I think Hollywood is doing a lot of damage to the world with our portrayal of violence. It’s not true, and it’s not a good place to be lying when it comes to our portrayal of violence.”
That opinion has “cost me a lot of work,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, one thing any story has to be is true. It’s got to be true to the human experience. And I think the test is if you put it out there and a couple of million people see it, that most of them recognize the issue and it moves them.”
Macy is writing a Western film script with his daughter Sophia (whom was infamously part of the Varsity Blues scandal) set to co-star. He opted to have less deaths in his own script to prove a point.
“When I first started off, there were nine bodies on page four,” Macy said, “and I lobbied for us to go back to the real West and not to Westerns. Don’t imitate films.”
Macy has also pitched a TV series that shows the realistic aftermath of being shot.
“I’ve tried to sell this a couple of times. I want to do a thing where you take three episodes to have you fall in love with one of the major characters, and then shoot him,” Macy said. “But don’t write him off the show. And every week, you can see what a bullet does to a human body. You can see how it wrecks his marriage. You can see how he gets infections. You can see how he has to learn to walk again or use his hands again. You can see the deep, dark depressions. Let’s tell the truth about it, because I swear to God, you kill one person, there’s nothing more dramatic than that.”
