The director of The Golden Compass, Chris Weitz, has forwarded us his written response to the Atlantic Monthly regarding their article we reported on last week.

Dear sir or madam:

Hana Rosin’s hatchet-job on my film of Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass (and by extension, me) is so comprehensive in its disdain, one might go so far as to imagine she had seen the movie!

She hasn’t, of course, though that fact was not mentioned in her assemblage of carefully cut-and-pasted quotes and surmises pumped up with paraphrase. One is put in mind of a line from the Good Book: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” For example: it is true that I said that clerics and religious people had been presented as boobs and hypocrites in many Hollywood films in the last few decades. But her statement that this was to me a “solid explanation for why [I’m] not selling out” is entirely her own invention. We were talking about entirely different things at the time during our interview, and the notion that I somehow regard myself as doing the religious right a solid is grotesque.

Elsewhere she simply seems not to have finished her background reading. If she had, when she got to the end of my script she might have noticed that the Genesis story she says I have stricken from the movie is addressed, though in the mouth of the villain Mrs. Coulter. “A long time ago, one of our ancestors made a terrible mistake. They disobeyed the authority. And that is what brought Dust into the world. And ever since then, we’ve been sick. Sick with evil – sick with Dust.” It shouldn’t take much for somebody with half a brain to understand this, and Rosin, who writes about theology, ought to be able to catch it, but evidently it didn’t suit her thesis, which is that I “sold out” the book I happen to love. What did I sell? Who sold the rights to the books? Not me.

From the article we discover all sorts of new and interesting information – Hollywood studios are afraid of controversy! Actors sometimes don’t have an easy time answering press questions! — and, indeed, some fascinating paradoxes. A page after a lengthy description of religious imagery in the film, we find that one of the characters, “flies over a land denuded of religious imagery”. Eh? I suppose one can blame an overenthusiastic caption-writer for that one.

It has been an interesting experience to be accused of forwarding the aims of a stealth-atheist conspiracy and of selling out the secular ideals of a great work of literature in the same month. Thank you for expanding my sense of the absurd!

Yours,

Chris Weitz
Los Angeles, California
November 11th, 2007