Empathy For The Devil: An Interview With Director Niels Mueller
By: Dave Canfield |
Tuesday January 25, 2005 |
| The story of how writer/director Niels Mueller came to make "The Assassination of Richard Nixon" is serendipity personified. With a fabulous cast and a complex post 9-11 sensibility about the mechanics of desperation, politics and the American dream, the film offers equal parts heartbreak and humor. |
| The story of how writer/director Niels Mueller came to make The Assassination of Richard Nixon is serendipity personified. From the early scripts eerie similarity to the real life history of would be assassin Sam Bicke, to the relevance that story has for today. Featuring a breath taking performance from Sean Penn, a fabulous cast and a complex post 9-11 sensibility about the mechanics of desperation, politics and the American dream this film offers equal parts heartbreak and humor as it explores both Sam Bicke and a 1974 America still reeling from a decade of shocks that included assassinations, the Vietnam war and Watergate.
Dave Canfield: Can you give our readers a rundown on the genesis of this project? Niels Mueller: When I was in my early twenties there was a shooting at a McDonald's. I wasn't there when it happened, but hearing about it really, really bothered me because I just couldn't understand how a human being could lose their empathy to such a degree that they would shoot innocent women, kids on bikes, defenseless men. Years later I also became really interested in this period of time from 1963 to 1974 that authors have called America's decade of shocks when America lost her innocence and became more cynical. It roughly covers the period between the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. I think those ideas got combined because I found myself wanting to tell a very personal story of the loss of humanity, while also pointing back to the change our country was going through. I started writing a fictitious script that I titled The Assassination of LBJ. We would follow this assassin whose assassination attempt isn't noticed. I had completed about 30 pages about this fictitious guy separated from his wife and child, obsessed with the American Dream and becoming a self made man. I even had him talking into a tape recorder because I needed that voiceover type narration. Well, I had checked out about ten books from the library for research and in one of them I found one slim chapter on Sam Bicke, whom I'd never heard of before. And there he was! I barely had to change anything I'd written. The major details were all there. At that point, you almost feel obligated to tell the story. I shifted the story from 1964 to 1974 and finished the script. The theme of losing empathy in the film is also deeply tied to Sam's idealism. The film stops short of suggesting that he was a victim in the usual sense, suggesting instead that we should be in a state of dialogue about how people like Sam get lost through the cracks. Does Sam have other choices? Clearly and emphatically yes. All of us are responsible for ourselves, and what we believe but the film is trying to take a look at how in a society obsessed with winning at all costs we inevitably wind up with a lot of losers. Not everybody can be a self made man. Society can't function if everybody chooses that road. The flipside of the American dream is that is the road we point everyone down with our incessant Cadillac commercials. We are a society that values the individual, and I love that about us, but there seems to be an imbalance and a lack of a sense of communality. People talk a lot these days about the "death of the presidency." Would you care to comment on that, especially since your film has Watergate so prominently featured? 
Well, certainly with Nixon you get this idea of the death of the Presidency, but did it really last? Look at Reagan, the great communicator. I mean he definitely became "the president" for the people. Don't get me wrong; I believe that term great communicator implies a certain lack of substance even though I also believe there was substance to the Reagan Presidency. But the term implies this idea of "talk" right? I think the interesting thing about Nixon is how simply by watching tapes of the hearings reveals a man self-destructing largely because he didn't have the kind of handlers we see in politics today.
But that sort of candid self-destruction is sort of inevitable for any "un-handled" public figure. Do we just hunger to watch that tragedy enacted over and over again? I can't help but think about Phillip Baker Hall's amazing performance as Nixon in Secret Honor and, of course, Sam in many ways is the everyman here. We're talking about a lot more than just the destruction of Sam - the destruction of the ideal of the Presidency is just one. Certainly I found this story relevant to today. Take the character played by Jack Thompson - the older businessman, the successful self-made man who tries to take Sam under his wing. There's a solid comparison there to American foreign policy right now. "I know what's best for ya. Shave the mustache, that part of your culture ain't workin'. Get rid of it." There's this paternalism that you just can't get away from if you look at it honestly. To some degree it means well, it's convinced of itself, but it doesn't see past it's own nose or what it will do to the world or in Jack's case, to Sam. It certainly makes for some of the movies most amusing moments. But of course Sam isn't really any more awake than his boss is he? Did you see the humor inherent in Sam's situation right away or did it emerge from the filming and editing? Well pathos, the low places we go as humans, certainly implies humor. I think the laughter in our film clearly stops when it should, but earlier on there is certainly an uncomfortable yet funny sort of earned humor, it comes from a place of truth. I think the great thing about Sean and the cast is that all we wanted was the truth from each scene and the humor was just implicit. Sometimes we even worked against it actively. A few days ago I was watching a Simpsons Halloween special and one of the gravestones they pan through in the beginning said "Subtle Political Satire." I laughed out loud because, let's face it, 2004 was not the year of the subtle political satire. I have to say I am really disappointed in our mainstream comics. I understand not every late night show should be about politics, but there does seem to be a cowardice in the comedy world. Look at the material provided by Washington, but instead of seeing that commented on, we get this ridiculous notion of balance- one Republican joke, one Democrat joke. I'm sorry, but many of us don't see much separation from between many Democrats and Republicans. Comedy isn't being used as a tool anymore. Where are the Lenny Bruce's. The comedians seem as ruled by the sound bite as the politicians. And the sound bite is safe. And too much of the filmmaking is safe. This is why we need an independent cinema in America. As good as a lot of the studio independent films are, they aren't films like Assassination. An independent cinema is our safety net against censorship whether it's being imposed on us by corporations, or government, or some weird mix of the two. We all saw what happened with Fahrenheit 911. The studio ditched it, even though they knew it would make a lot of money. They were concerned about the broader image of the studio and the way that would affect their bottom line. Don't get me wrong, there are good things about the studio system. I work in it. There are a lot of good people in it. Unfortunately, there are reasons why that system keeps important films from getting made. Was there ever a moment when you thought you'd never get this film made? I think Kevin Kennedy and I made the decision early on that if it came down to that we'd just shoot the film on digital ourselves. We we're writing around the time that Clerks was released so everybody was just realizing that technology was available. Sam in one of his recordings talks about being a grain of sand and that he can still make a difference. Of course the irony of the film is that he goes unnoticed in history- he becomes a grain of sand. But then Niels Mueller comes along and makes this movie. Where do you see Sam in history? You happened to have picked a section of Bicke's recordings that we used verbatim. Certainly in a personal sense, however twisted, Sam was fighting to matter. But what was more interesting to me was how a person loses sight of what's really important. The details of the ending of our film match up very, very closely, almost exactly, with what we know happened historically. The question is how did Sam Bicke get to a place where the people on board that plane meant less to him than the way he had chosen to matter. I think what's really important in our lives, whether you're a filmmaker or selling office furniture is how you deal with the people in your day-to-day life right in front of you. Those are the people that matter. Add up our lives and, sure a lot of people will hopefully see the movie and draw important things from it, be entertained by it, but oddly the way we treat the person at the 7-11 probably makes a much louder picture of who we really are. That's what Sam lost. He became obsessed with his own principals and his own ideology and he lost track of the humanity in front of him. In interviews you've told people that if you only got to make one movie this was that movie. So what's going to be you're next movie? Well while the financing for Assassination was having some problems I had about four years to work on other projects and I got a good start on what I call my Milwaukee story. I had gotten to about fifty pages and put it down but recently I picked it up again and I think I've figured out where it's going now. It's nice ensemble drama that has an undercurrent of humor. I've also been getting some directing and writing offers but I'm trying to figure out what's right for me. |
