Where did the impulse come from to make a movie about Americas love affair with guns?
Right after Columbine, my first reaction was, “I’m going to run for president of the NRA. I’m going to win because they’ve got 4 million members, but there are 285 million people in the United States.” I thought I could get people to join the NRA and vote for me with the promise that after I won, I’d dismantle the organization. That was my grand plan, and then I thought, “No, that’s too much work. I should just make a movie.” In the movie, there’s never-before-seen footage of the Columbine tragedy. How did you obtain those videos? I asked for them. The truth of the matter is that we have a lazy press in this country. Lazy, lazy, lazy! There were CD-ROMs of the 911 calls–which are public information–but they were encoded by officials so no one could really hear them. I gave these CDs to kids with computers, and it only took them a few hours to break the codes. The most chilling call is from Eric Harris’ father to the local cops. He says, “Yeah, I was wondering if my son had something
