Marilyn Roth asks:

What did you think of the Ayn Rand documentary, “A Sense of Life?”

Nathaniel Branden responds:

There is a lot in the film that I liked and was deeply moved by. I loved the early photographs of Ayn Rand. I enjoyed the evocation of the struggling years in Hollywood. There was much in the film to reconnect me with everything I had admired and loved about Ms. Rand.

What was quite ludicrous, of course, was the treatment of the Rand/Branden relationship. I was the man who created the Objectivist movement. I was the man who for many years Ms. Rand was in love with. For Leonard Peikoff to dismiss all this in a minute or two, mutter something unintelligible about my being an actor who somehow fooled Ms. Rand, was just plain silly, and not very complimentary to Ms. Rand’s intelligence.

There was no serious commitment to tell the truth about her life. Not about her and me, not about her marriage, which was often very unhappy, not about the magnitude of her struggles with depression.

The film was worshipful and adulatory, which diminished its power greatly. Ms. Rand did not need these foolish lies about how “perfect” and mostly “perfectly happy” she was. She was a great enough human being to be seen in the full light of the truth—conflicts, shortcoming, suffering, and all.

As a condition of having the cooperation of the Ayn Rand Institute, producer/director Michael Paxton had to agree not to interview me. The irony is, had I been interviewed, I would have had very positive things to say.

What did I feel watching the film? Mostly, serene happiness. Great affection for Ayn Rand. And more than a little sense of distance from it all.