14 DAY TRIAL // Julian Assange isn’t making a secret anymore of his desire to see “The Fifth Estate,” the film inspired by the WikiLeaks scandal with Benedict Cumberbatch as lead, fail. However, director Bill Condon believes Assange could use a lesson in maturity.
While he’s definitely in his own right to not agree with some, if not all of the things shown in the film, Assange is wrong in criticizing it on all platforms made available to him, the Oscar-winning director says in a new interview with The Verge.
Assange is no longer in a position to understand that his name and WikiLeaks are no longer synonymous, and neither can he understand that he can’t possibly control everything written or said about the latter.
“He takes exception to anything, honestly, written about him that isn’t completely laudatory. He’s very thin-skinned and he very much — in a naive way — tries to control what people say about him. There’s something strange and adolescent about it, you know? He’s like the teenager who has to prove he was right about everything,” Condon says when asked if he expected Assange to react so negatively to the film.
The director also says that he tried very hard not to respond to Assange but, “it is frustrating. Because he just flat-out makes things up.”
“The Fifth Estate” will be out in theaters in various territories this Friday. Condon says that he hopes all this criticism coming from Assange will eventually sell the movie by convincing the people at home to go see it to decide which side they’re on.