I’m pleased to report that I am now properly at work on a
new and updated edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times, originally published
by Faber more or less exactly ten years ago, and so certainly due for a fresh
lick of paint.
‘Time is a funny thing, huh’, as Tom Waits says in Rumblefish. ‘Time
is a very peculiar item...’ I first met Sean Penn in 2001 and later that year secured
his consent to do an interview-based ‘oral history’-style book about his life
and work. I began work on that book in the autumn/winter of 2002 as Sean was shooting
Mystic River with Clint Eastwood and then 21 Grams with Alejandro Gonzalez
Inarritu. One day in the midst of that I called his office to check his
whereabouts. ‘Baghdad,’ came the unexpected – unexpectable? – reply. The first
Faber hardback edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times came out in October 2004,
six months after Sean won his first Academy Award. A paperback edition followed
a year later, with updates that concluded as Sean embarked on a journalistic
assignment to Iran and secured the film rights to Jon Krakauer’s book Into the
Wild.
So that was then and this is now, a good while later. Of
course, lots of people lead very lively lives, whether or not they have the
attention of a wider public, but Sean is livelier than most, and so the new
section of the book detailing 2005-2015 is going to have plenty of good and all-exclusive meat in
it. I hope it will appear around the same time as the release of The Last Face - Sean’s fifth feature as director, starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem, on which he is presently at work, the progress of which I have had a fortunate glimpse, and for
which – based on the quality of the material, cast, crew, and the calibre of
Sean’s previous productions as ‘helmer’ – cinemagoers would surely be right to entertain high
hopes.
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