Michael Lynton

Let's make the movie and disaster ensued.

So that's the mistake.

Well, the threat started in a subtle way.

We weren't even sure where it was coming from because we didn't have, the US didn't have established relationships with North Korea at the time, relations with North Korea.

And that started in June before the movie came out.

And then over time, when we didn't back down, they amplified the threat, particularly once they started hacking our systems.

We continued to put out trailers.

We continued to say that we were going to release the movie in the fourth quarter of that year, in the Christmas period.

What wound up happening was they hacked our systems.

And they started exposing not just emails from the studio, which were salacious and involved a lot of celebrities, but also actually movies that we had not yet released, like The Karate Kid, which was a full blown movie that was just put out online.

scripts like the new James Bond, which was confidential and had been released.

And with each release of these, the threats got bigger and bigger to the point where they finally started threatening the movie theaters themselves to say that if they put the movie into those theaters, they would physically attack the theaters, the theaters back down the big chains.

And what wound up happening is we wound up scrambling around to try and figure out how we could get the movie released.

We wound up doing that through a bunch of independent movie theaters, not the big chains, as well as by releasing it online through our own downloading service, as well as Google Play, who participated with us.

No one else was willing to do that.

Well, there was a moment in time where the heat was coming on the studio very hard because of all of those leaked emails, and in particular, Amy Pascal, who was running the actual film studio at the time.

And I was invited to come to New York to speak on Fareed Zakaria's show and explain what was going on in a brief segment.

And I chose to do that because I thought this will take some of the heat off.

People would really properly understand what Amy and others at the studio were going through.

When I get to New York and get to the studio in the green room, Fareed Zakaria said, the US government just announced that they had figured out that the North Koreans was responsible for this attack.