SAN FRANCISCO -- Sean Penn has once again called his El Chapo interview a failure, but not in the way you might think.
During an appearance at the closing keynote of the RSA security conference Friday, Penn said that the media has largely misinterpreted both his original intentions with his Rolling Stone article and what he meant when he previously called the piece a failure.
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Penn appeared on 60 Minutes in January to defend his
Now, it seems Penn thinks he may have been more successful than he originally thought.
"I have found throughout my life that — and it well be by me — that I am taken very literally and I don’t know if I mean anything literally," he said Friday.
"What I meant in saying that the article failed was that the interpretations at large by mainstream media virtually failed to see what the article was about. Not only in the lines but between the lines and what I really meant by failed was to get them to say ‘oh it failed’ and to keep talking about it. And I sit back at home and I watch them talk about the drug war every fucking day now. It was a very good failure."
Regarding his motivation for doing the interview, Penn said that it was both his curiosity as a writer and his feelings about the current drug war that made him interested in the opportunity.
"I had felt very strongly that we were repeating in this war on drugs, the mistakes of the prohibition era, that we were in my view, complicit in all that comes with them. And as somebody who writes, I was interested in what would happen between that interaction and my pen. So that was it."