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Not one to mince words, Penn Jillette had a simple answer when asked for his opinion on Donald Trump in an interview with Vice’s Desus & Mero. 

Penn met the gameshow-host-turned-leader-of-the-free-world during his time on The Celebrity Apprentice. 

I was told… I guess there’s shame in this now, but I was told Donald Trump himself wanted me on. As the season went on, Donald Trump liked me less. I was asked if I would support him for president, and after I calmed down from laughing, I said, “absolutely not.”    

When asked what the current President of the United States is like in person, Penn’s answer was characteristically blunt:

He’s an asshole. You have to remember if he weren’t president we’d be talking about how great he is. Because one thing, to be on television, especially on a reality show, you want to have almost no filter, you want to be capricious, you want to be unpredictable. Those are really good things, that’s what you want. 

But those aren’t the qualities Penn wants in a leader.

The idea to have those same qualities going to a president is insane. You want someone who’s measured.

The short interview also covers Penn’s experience crowdfunding his new movie, Director’s Cut, and what it’s like being really tall. Spoiler: It’s great.  

UPDATE (4/18/2018):

Penn Jillette recently confirmed via Twitter that Director’s Cut will be getting a physical Blu-Ray/DVD combo release in stores on May 29, the same day it’ll be hitting video-on-demand services.

Original story:

We’ve covered Director’s Cut, the wild, fourth-wall-breaking meta-thriller written by and starring Penn Jillette before here at GeniiOnline, and ever since we found out about it we’ve been dying to know how it turned out. Looks like we won’t have to wait long, as Penn has announced via Twitter that the film will finally be released in theaters and video-on-demand services in May.

If this is your first time hearing about the film (or you’re need another explanation to try to wrap your head around it), Director’s Cut is a movie-in-a-movie, where amateur film maker (and 100% creep) Herbert Blount wants to make the definitive version of one of his favorite crime dramas. To do this, he kidnaps the lead actress and films all new scenes, which he then splices into the film. The film itself is the result of this bizarre collision of fiction and “reality”. If all this sounds too weird to believe, see it for yourself in the trailer below.

Director’s Cut was originally conceived by Penn as a challenge to himself, according to Entertainment Weekly, “to see if I could justify two plotlines, running simultaneously, and have it be believable.” After pitching the film unsuccessfully to Hollywood, he finally found director Adam Rifkin (Look), and the two successfully Kickstarted the film back in 2014. It appeared at film festivals like Slamdance back in 2016, but a wider release was uncertain until Epic Pictures’ horror label Dread Central picked it up back in 2017. 

Now, the film will open in select theaters on May 10 and 11, and will also hit currently undisclosed VOD services on May 29. I for one can’t wait for Penn to find another way to turn my brain into liquid.

In what is either the worst decision ever – or the best – but Epic Pictures will be releasing Penn Jillette’s “Director’s Cut,” the movie about a crazed superfan who goes to extreme lengths to make his own movie, perhaps as early as spring 2018. If you’re not familiar with the film, here’s the extremely not safe for work trailer: 

If you didn’t follow all that (and totally fair if you didn’t), here’s how director Adam Rifkin tried to sum up the film when he spoke with Entertainment Weekly: 

Director’s Cut is a movie about a film-obsessed stalker, who is played by Penn Jillette and is fixated on his favorite actress, Missi Pyle. He gains access to the set of her current film by contributing to that movie’s crowdfunding campaign. Once on-set, he kidnaps her, steals all of the footage from the film, and, in his dungeon-movie studio, he films additional scenes of the movie, casting himself opposite his captive leading lady as the romantic hero. He takes footage from the real film, and footage from his amateur production, and cuts them all together into his version of a director’s cut.”

Penn says he wrote the movie as “an intellectual challenge, to see if I could justify two plotlines, running simultaneously, and have it be believable.” He pitched it to various studios, all of which turned him down. After connecting with Rifkin, Jillette turned to crowdfunding to finance the movie, and the campaign’s backers are the only audience he’s really concerned with.  “If we can get money from 5,000 people, and please 5,000 people, we’ve done it perfectly,” he said. 

Intellectual exercise or hot mess (or both), whatever – we’re 100% on board. It seems a virtual certainty that Director’s Cut is headed for the same kind of cult status as Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Oh, hi, Mark.