Harper Lee

Oh my god, that's a personal question.

Her name is Scout Lee, named Scout for Scout Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lee for Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.

And she's cute as the buttons, but I can't play favorites.

I miss my old dog so much, it's tough.

Scout Lee.

Solid literary flex.

I respect a dog with a full name and a backstory.

But I still very much look at Alabama as like kind of my roots and where I'm from.

And but both are very are have some similarities, obviously, in that kind of like southern and the southern gothic tradition um i think like in terms of literature and what i read i grew up reading the very southern authors like um flannery o'connor and carson mccullers and harper lee who wrote to kill a mockingbird she's from alabama and so um And like just growing up with the stories of my family too, as I was older and writing books and I had people come to me and say, oh, this is very Southern Gothic.

I'm like, no, this is just what I grew up with.

This is just my family, right? You know, like, and...

One of the things that I think has been pretty consistent in recent years, you do a film and you've then been actually going back to the theater more in recent years, right? So Molly's Game is 2017.

2018 was the Broadway debut of To Kill a Mockingbird, which obviously Harper Lee does the book, Horton Foote does the screenplay, and then years later, here comes the theatrical production.

How did that come about? Why was that something you were interested in doing? And is it scary even for Aaron Sorkin to play with something that's considered so perfect?

Scott Rudin, a name some of you might know, Scott Rudin is a very powerful, very successful, very good producer of Hollywood movies and Broadway plays.

He produced The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs.

I'd worked with him a lot and he called me one day and he said, I've got exciting news.

After a couple of years of back and forth, I have gotten Harper Lee to license me the Broadway stage rights to do this play.

And she has approved you as the playwright.

picking up what you're putting down.

Harper Lee is a leftist.

There's a lot of

good

Here's where I think they went wrong.

Sandra Bullock plays Harper Lee.

So...

I think they fucked up there.

King is too.

Harper Lee wrote that mockingbirds simply sing their hearts out for us and that it was a sin to kill one.

And I thought it would be a broadcast sin to silence this bird, this sui generis being, this one of one.

There was nobody like him doing the job.