Writer Niels Mueller makes his directorial debut with "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," a project that's been in the works since 1999. In this exclusive interview with Mueller, the first-time feature film director discusses his respect for Sean Penn, his producers, and the story behind "The Assassination of Richard Nixon:"
INTERVIEW WITH NIELS MUELLER:
One of the most interesting aspects of “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is the fact you had actually started on a script that paralleled real events without knowing about it. Was it like a “Twilight Zone” moment when you found that out?
Yeah, you do sort of say, “Okay, I guess I am supposed to tell this story for some reason.” You feel like, “Okay, it’s my destiny to write this thing. I guess I won’t argue with it.”
And you had 30 pages written when you uncovered the true story?
Yeah, I had written 30 sort of loose pages. The way I work is if I have an idea, I try to spit everything out before I do the research. So I wrote a bunch of stuff and I was interested in telling the story of an assassin whose assassination attempt is not noticed. That was sort of the key ingredient for the story that I was interested in telling. So often you read about somebody who lashes out in this indiscriminate violence or has a target like a political leader, and they have this notion that society is going to change based on their violent actions. And it doesn’t. Life goes on and we continue. So that was part of the story I wanted to tell.
I choose a President, LBJ, who nobody tried to kill - as far as we know - and I had a way to make this work. He was going to, my character, was going to meet his demise before he even got close so nobody would be able to put two and two together. And then I also was writing a guy separated from his wife and child. I had him obsessing on the American dream, talking into a tape recorder. I hadn’t figured out the justification for the tape recorder yet, and I had this guy who it was very important to him to succeed in sales.
Cut forward, I take 10 books out of the LA Public Library on assassins and only one book had this slim chapter on Sam Byck, this man I’d never heard of. Separated from his wife and children, obsessed on the American dream, spoke into a tape recorder. He gave me the justification for it in that he was recording, as you see in the film, the motivation for his actions that he wanted to record for posterity. He actually sent tapes to Leonard Bernstein among other prominent Americans, so that he would have a record for all of his actions. And on top of all this, it fit my original notion of an assassination attempt that was essentially unnoticed. I mean, it was reported in the news but not as an assassination attempt. It’s largely forgotten. It’s become this very forgotten footnote in American history. So, yeah, it was a big “Twilight Zone” moment when I discovered this guy was so close to the guy I was writing. I shifted the script from ‘64 to ‘74, changed the title, and then, of course, lost some things that didn’t fit the true story and integrated a lot more of the truth. I started telling the true story of Sam Byck.
Was there any aspect of the true story you wanted to include but couldn’t because it didn’t fit into the continuity of the film?
Oh yeah. I mean, there’s just no way you can put everything in a 95 minute drama so you have to just make your choices. But I think we captured the true spirit of the man. To tell the story we had the transcripts of the tapes. You had this first-person narrative from the grave, essentially, where somebody’s talking about both his reasons for what he’s about to do on a political level and you also get a sense of the man personally. So I think we were able to capture the spirit of the man.
Did you include any of those transcripts word-for-word in the film?
Yes. There are sections of his taping for Bernstein that are verbatim. I would say at least a slim majority, if not a greater majority, are ‘inspired by’. He talked for two pages on one topic and then you condense and find a way to get the essence of that and focus it. For instance, I think the opening scene where he begins tape number one to Bernstein, he says, “I consider myself a grain of sand on this beach called America. There are 211 million grains of sand. Three billion on the beach we call Earth.” That’s all verbatim Sam.
