

And in desperation, they actually end up being open to this goofy journalist and tell him their story. They can mess with these big powers, they can extract a measure of social justice, they can call attention to these problems. And then you realize, these pirates can be perceived by their own people, just like Robin Hood, as somebody who’s changing the balance of power.

Black Hawk Down is a movie that was made about supposedly one of those great adventures. And then you realize they’ve been visited with wars that they really had very little to do with authoring. And suddenly you have, you’re introduced to the fact that their fishing land, historical fishing land has been fished out, and they’re not going to be–by Koreans, by everyone in the world. And then you realize there’s a very, very important point being made: that these ships that are passing in the night and everything, they in fact have messed up the lives of people who don’t have much to hold onto to begin with. You go through this whole exploration where this guy risks his life to try to find out who these pirates are, what’s going on in Somalia, why are they stopping all these big ships and demanding ransom and everything. And that was the case of Somalia, a small country that has been screwed up so many different ways by foreign intervention. And except there are other people out there in the world who say, wait a minute, you’re screwing up our water, you’re screwing up our livelihood. And they think they can order the world with globalization and shipping and digitalized age and everything, and everything is going to go their way. Because it’s really, if I can be so presumptuous as tell the director here what the movie is about, it seems to me it’s about, basically, how screwed up and arrogant people who have power are in this world.

And then you realize, it’s a deadly serious movie. And you know, you think this is going to be kind of an interesting farce, and it is funny it is easy to watch, and so on. And he decides he’s going to be a journalist, and he wants to go to this place to find out who these pirates are. And he decides he’s going to be a journalist instead of a marketing expert who runs, goes to Thrifty’s and places like that and tells them where the toilet paper should be on the shelf. And it gets to explore it because there was this one guy who, you know, I guess was inspired by Redford and Dustin Hoffman and All the President’s Men, you have that poster throughout the movie.

But right through the nineties, and up into the present, people in Somalia who call–or some call pirates, they don’t like to be called pirates, and the movie explores who are these people.
