
"I think if you asked Charlie, he would say he’s the hero of
NOS4A2, no doubt. He is absolutely the good guy. He has dedicated his life to saving children from death, from shame, and all the painful stuff that comes with adulthood. The only problem is it’s cost them their souls, so I don’t think that that is a good trade-off. But one of the mistakes you get in a lot of genre entertainment, whether it’s horror or fantasy or science fiction, is you have these bad guys who are so horribly bad, to the point where you just have to write them off as sadistic sociopaths because there’s no reasonable moral position for their arguments, for their beliefs. Real life doesn’t really work that way. When someone commits an atrocity, and you ask them why did you do it, they say, 'I had to.' They can explain, not always very cogently, but they can explain why they had to do it. It had to happen, those people had to die. Oftentimes, it has to do with their being wronged, or the world is unfair, the world is unjust, and so someone had to get shot in the face a couple times.
I really wanted the bad guy in
NOS4A2 to be someone who could say, 'No, no, you misunderstand, I’m the good guy, I’m the hero here. It’s these other people who are to be blamed for the evil in the world, for the evil in this story.'" --
Joe Hill( Scans under the cut... )