An Apology To Sono Sion

Let's just jump right into this, shall we?

Four days ago ScreenAnarchy published an interview conducted by Pierre Hombrebueno with director Sono Sion at the Venice Film Festival which was meant to cover the premiere of his latest work (now award winning), Why Don't You Play In Hell. It raised some eyebrows due to comments ascribed to Sono as regarded fellow directors Miike Takashi and Kitano Takeshi and among those eyebrows were Sono's for the very simple - and very reasonable - reason that he hadn't said any of those things while meeting Hombrebueno in Venice this year.

It turns out that Hombrebueno had pulled excerpts from an earlier interview with Sono which he conducted in 2010 in connection with the premiere of Cold Fish and spliced those statements into the text without delineating what was said when or, indeed, why the old stuff was even relevant. And the end result was a piece that made it appear Sono was - for lack of a better term - spending part of his time in Venice this year shit-talking both Miike and Kitano when that had not, in fact, happened and all there was to tip people that something off may be happening was a one line note at the end of the interview noting that some pieces of an earlier interview had been used, though which pieces was never made clear.

To put it simply, I personally - along with the rest of the ScreenAnarchy editorial team - was appalled when I learned that this had happened. As is the case everywhere, we have to assume a certain degree of responsibility from our writers when they join the group and simply don't have the ability to double check the audio tape of every interview conducted before running the articles, but regardless, this should not have happened. We take accuracy and integrity very seriously here and offer a sincere apology to Mr Sono. I'm sure we're not as upset about it as you are, but we're not far behind. The article in question has been removed, will not be re-published in any form and Hombrebueno is no longer associated with ScreenAnarchy.