Michael Lynton

Most of the times it worked, meaning the pictures delivered, sometimes it didn't.

In this particular case, and what you're referring to as a movie called The Interview, the movie is about two hapless journalists played by Seth Rogen and James Franco who go off to North Korea under the auspices of the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un.

And when we agreed to make this movie, before we could get it out, the North Korean government, through a variety of circumstances, informed us that they did not want us to put this movie out and ultimately hacked our systems.

But specifically what happened, why it was a mistake, was

Everybody at the studio who was involved at the time on the creative side of the business and the marketing and finance really wanted to make the movie.

It had already been sort of through various hands, and it was really down to me.

We were in a competitive situation because Universal had a relationship with Seth Rogen, who was going to direct the movie and was in it.

And he knew that if we didn't and we knew that if we didn't want to make the movie, they would.

So it all came down to a day or a day and a half.

I asked if we could do a read through, which means that you bring the actors together and you typically do it with a comedy to see whether the jokes actually play in a room.

And that's exactly what happened.

We had all the actors there.

All the creative executives involved were there.

Everybody, as I walked into the room, I was actually the only suit in the room.

Everybody else was dressed casually, jeans, T-shirts.

And the eyes were on me because I said earlier, everybody wanted to make this movie.

We went through the read-through, it was really funny.

Everybody was laughing, myself included.

And normally what I would have done at the end of a meeting like that was I would have said, okay, fine, we'll assemble this afternoon in another room and go through that process I described earlier.

Instead, I jumped up and said, let's do it.