ACTOR & DIRECTOR

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, 2009

I LIKE MILK

"I was graduating high school the year Harvey Milk was killed, so I was in California, and I was certainly aware of it — it was national news, anyway. I didn't know anything more than this openly gay politician was murdered alongside the mayor of San Francisco. I think it was only a month after the Peoples Temple [Jonestown mass murder] thing had happened, which was mostly San Francisco people, so it was kind of a crazy moment in Northern California (...)

The main problem was that normally, to tell a whole life in two hours, you want to get somebody more charismatic than the real person. And in this case, one could only aspire to that(...)

The joke was that my son's problem was seeing his father kiss [James] Franco, and my daughter's problem was seeing Franco kiss her father (...)

The only significant speculation [if Harvey Milk had lived] I make is if you look at the timing, what an incredibly powerful voice he would have been when the plague hit, which was a year after. You had an entire administration that never said the word "AIDS." He would have pushed that issue, and there would be people alive today that aren't. That seems a pretty safe bet."

(SEAN PENN)