Since it’s illegal to talk about assassinating a President, what did you go through with your lawyers in making a film about that subject?
“It’s illegal to talk about assassinating a President if that is your intent and if there’s malice behind it. This film is in no way, there was no way in which this film could be seen to be inciting anyone to commit this act. The assassination is portrayed as a horrific event with terrible consequences, so I think that anyone who sees the film, for anyone who sees the film, it would be very clear that this is not that.
I think the initial knee-jerk reaction was based on the notion that this film was in some way a piece of wish fulfillment, that it was some kind of liberal fantasy and that it would somehow celebrate in the assassination of President Bush. In actual fact, it is none of those things. It is a serious film which does not take the assassination of President Bush as entertainment. It takes it as the starting point for what I hope is some very serious questions about some issues that face us all, that have faced us all in the last five years.”
Why was it important to use the actual sitting President?
“Although the film is set in the near future and although it’s fiction, it is absolutely a film about the world we live in and I wanted to make the film as realistic as possible. I wanted it to be, as much as possible, about the world we live in. So where it is set in the future, and although it is fiction, every twist and turn in the story is in some way inspired by a real life event. The purpose of the film wasn’t really to try and build a very authentic ‘what if this event were to take place’. It was really more using the assassination of President Bush as a very arresting and very striking way of looking at some of the things that have happened in the last five years.”
How did you put the footage together?
“The film was made using a huge range of different things. The film was made using a mixture of archival footage from other events that we made our own either through adding characters, using computer effects… There was also footage of President Bush that I filmed myself when President Bush came to visit Chicago on a couple of occasions. There was footage of Ronald Reagan’s funeral. There’s a huge variety of different sources of archives, which I hope combine to make the film very real.”
Were all the interviews scripted?
“I think it’s a great credit to the cast, actually, because it is an enormously difficult form of acting, I think because as an actor, when you do a two camera interview, you don’t have any of the tools that are normally available to you to get through that performance. I think that the performance is absolutely under the microscope because we, as an audience, are used to looking at real people give talking head interviews.
The way I worked with the actors is really to, first of all, give them an enormous amount of information on their character and their character’s job. I think that the actors worked incredibly hard to absorb a vast amount of information, a lot of it very technical, so that they could inhabit the world of those characters. We also had on set advising us, we had the real-life counterparts of many interviewees. We had a very senior member - former senior member - of the Presidential Protection Detail on set advising us. We had an FBI agent who headed one of the most high profile terrorist investigations on set advising us. So I hope those combine to make the interviews feel very real.
The other thing is there is a script and they were scripted, but what I tend to do is give them the information and then try and workshop around that. And then give the actors the script maybe the day before or a couple of days before and tell them not to learn it because as soon as you watch an actor remembering lines, recording lines, then you can actually see that on camera quite clearly. It was important there was still an element of spontaneity in the way the interviews were done.”
How difficult was it to get technical advisors to sign on?
“I think once people understood that there was a journalistic intent to the film, and once people understood that it was not liberal fantasy, that it was going to be heavily researched, I think once they got beyond that then they were comfortable with the political position of the film, then they were delighted to open up to us and talk to us about their jobs. I think there are plenty of people within the bureau who are also critical of the way the War on Terror has been handled. I think there are plenty of people caught up in the War on Terror who don’t necessarily agree with the way it’s being prosecuted.”
