What is King Saud about?
It’s about the rage of the country right now, how 49% of Americans, left and right, believe we’re headed towards civil war.
Do you believe that?
I think things are gonna get hotter in this country, but it could be an evolution to something better. It’s like boiling water causes a reaction.
What do you think people are angry about?
Our idea of how the economy is supposed to work collapsed in 2008, but nothing has really risen to take its place. The two headed angry monster you see is a response to the void of leadership and belief, the vacuum of power and consequent economic insecurity. It’s not just corruption, people honestly don’t know what to scientifically believe in any more since that model collapsed. Most people, right and left, rich and poor, feel powerless and victims of a corrupt system, even the rich are scared, as well they should be. I’ve never seen such bloodlust towards the rich and towards power as we’re experiencing now.
What’s the solution?
A movie can only express the emotion of it, which King Saud does, better than any movie out there, of any budget, in my humble opinion. Now the two leads get to a better place in the end, they find something worth fighting for and save each other, and they’re in a better place at the end than if they’d never suffered at all, but that’s emotion, not politics.
You could look at it as a political metaphor, that we can either come apart or emerge to a better tomorrow out the other side of this crucible, but you can’t preach politics artistically, you can only convey hope, redemption and resolution emotionally. It’s sort of funny because I actually believe this is good news in some way, if we look into it, we’ll find that what we’re capable of economically is dramatically better than what we had. But part of the process of doing that, you realize: we’ve been suffering all this crap and we didn’t have to? And you sort of get angry!
Without getting into specifics as to how, what would that better world look like?
Oh fuck, we could work half the time for twice the money, people don’t understand what a real 21st century economy looks like, it’s the difference between a cell phone and two cups on a string, pure political superstition holding us up, not economic necessity preventing that. If people understood what is scientifically and economically possible in our time, with existing technology, what our political bickering and stupidity prevents, we’d be even angrier than we are now. What’s at stake is not incremental, it’s revolutionary.
You see the process of change as inherently violent?
I don’t know, it doesn’t have to be, but I agree with the mob, we’re headed that way right now. Maybe we just need to go to the brink to break through and can still avoid violence, like a bird needs to struggle to break out of its shell, or a mother struggles to give birth.
If you want to look at a country which is inherently violent, the punishment for not going the route I advise, both towards its own people, and to other countries, either intentionally or not (it breeds terrorism even if it doesn’t mean to), because its top heavy and teetering, violence is the only way it can keep its people in line, that would be Saudi Arabia, they’re a textbook example of that.