So I’m reading an interview on Wired with a bunch of the people behind the 1983 hit WarGames, and I stumble across what I think may be the funniest sub-interview ever to grace a sidebar.
It’s with Ally Sheedy, the then 20 year old love interest of the movie (who set many a heart pattering in her day, I can tell you)
Wired: So it wasn’t a love for microprocessors that drew you to this role.
Sheedy: I couldn’t make heads or tails of the script. It was easy for me to do the part where she’s asking questions.
Wired: What about now?
Sheedy: To be honest, I haven’t seen the movie since it came out. It’s probably kind of quaint.
Wired: Nowadays, cybercrime might outrank nuclear warfare as a source of collective anxiety. I sometimes feel really at sea with technology. I love email.
Sheedy: All this communicating has created a world where no one’s accountable. And I have a 14-year-old daughter, so I worry.
Wired: Wow. You have a 14-year-old daughter. That just set off a wave of cognitive dissonance among the hackers who’d like to hit on you … Do hackers hit on you?
Sheedy: No, I don’t hear so much from hackers. No. No, no, no. I don’t. Thankfully. No.
Wired: Just one no would’ve been fine.
The rest of the Wired piece is actually kind of fascinating too. Those guys really did their research.
ok, ok, one more funny quote, from the director (they had a stack of geeks on set the whole time)
You could get all the hacker geekiness you wanted just by standing on the set. We were dealing with things like when Matthew sits at the computer, we’ve got an actor who can’t even type. I’d say, “No, I just really want him to type in ‘David’ and have him get on.” They said, “No! You can’t do that! You have to go through all these elaborate sequences!” I said, “No, we’re not doing that. Audiences will have left the theater by the time he logs into the computer one time.”
