Is A History Of Violence specifically about America?
I don’t think so. You know, there’s a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally. I don’t think of this film as an attack on America. Having said that it is specifically about a mythology of America, which is a western mythology, which is also a cinema mythology, of a man standing alone, defending his family with a gun against other men with guns. And that’s very, very American. And one could say that the Bush administration has adopted that mythology as its foreign policy. You know, we were attacked and so anything we do to defend ourselves is justified. So to that extent it is a criticism of America now. But at the same time violence is a universal human fact, and a very complex one. Tell me about your take on the media’s fascination with violence in the film. Well it was done very simply but I think a lot of the paranoia that you find, particular
