There are many mysteries surrounding Tommy Wiseau. His nationality, for example, or where he got the $6 million he used to make The Room. (Wiseau told Entertainment Weekly in 2008 that some of the money came from importing leather jackets from Korea, but he won’t say beyond that.) And now EW brings us another one: Why Wiseau would dislike the book version of The Disaster Artist, actor Greg Sestero’s memoir about working on Wiseau’s accidentally hilarious terrible labor of love, but love the movie.
That’s a disingenuous question, though, given that Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And the simple answer, based on The Disaster Artist director James Franco’s new interview with EW, is attention. Tommy Wiseau loves attention of any sort. Here’s how Franco tells it:
He didn’t see it until SXSW, and we were unsure of what he was going to think, especially because he said, [mimicking Wiseau’s accent] ‘Greg book only 40 percent true’ … It was like, well, that’s what we based it on, so what are you going to think about our movie? And that screening was so successful, it was like a rock concert … I was like, ‘So, Tommy, what did you think of the movie?’ And he said, ‘I approve 99.9 percent.’ And we were like, ‘What was the 0.1 percent? He said, ‘I think the lighting, in the beginning, a little off.’
Maybe it was the cheering crowds, or maybe it was the fact that the lighting fixed itself as it went along. But if you had any qualms about seeing The Disaster Artist, you can set those aside. Tommy Wiseau approves.