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Pop Culture
May 08, 2025, 06:27AM

I’ve Sold the Rights to HBO

A 1999 The Missouri Review interview with author Ernest J. Gaines vs. a 2001 Index Magazine interview with actress Scarlett Johansson.

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Ernest J. Gaines: You try to not answer things but to perk the interest or the intellect of the reader and let him ask questions. It’s a catch-22.

Scarlett Johansson: It’s so nice to come home and have this fluffy, warm thing purring and rubbing your leg. Samuel L. Jackson got eaten whole.

Gaines: Danny Glover plays a social worker who visits prisons.

Johansson: All I could think was, “I’m being interviewed by David Letterman.”

Gaines: I’ve sold the rights to HBO.

•••

Johansson: We got the last seats. [Laughs] Thank God.

Gaines: I don’t lecture. If it sounds good, then it is. It’s all concentrated.

Johansson: It’s totally out of control.

Gaines: That helped me get through 1959.

Johansson: We did this weird virtual reality ride where you become a raindrop in a thunderstorm in the city.

•••

Gaines: Yes, we cut out some sexual terms and then added illustrations to make it a children’s book.

Johansson: It makes me cry every time. That’s not really a pleasure.

Gaines: I’m not interested in seeing one side of anything.

Johansson: It was in this part of L.A. that’s totally overrun by wild parakeets.

Gaines: I learn about their ways of thinking and describing things, their backgrounds and social lives. There is very little action.

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