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Niels Mueller on The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Sean Penn leads The Assassination of Richard Nixon
The Stanley Kubrick Masterclass with Niels Mueller
following a preview of The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Presented by The Script Factory & National Film & TV School
The Gate Cinema, London
Wed 30 March 2005
Niels Mueller is in conversation with journalist Wendy Mitchell
Wendy Mitchell
Can you give us some background about yourself? I know you went to UCLA Film School, and you’ve done some TV and some screenwriting…
Niels Mueller
I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - which is about the same size as Liverpool and I think they could be similar cities - I went to UCLA Film School which figured prominently in me getting this film made because I had a number of classmates which were hugely instrumental. Kevin Kennedy, who I wrote the script with, and his UCLA classmate, Alexander Payne (who directed the much lauded Sideways) was the first person who got the script to a producer who got the script to Sean [Penn]. Alexander was able to get some financing. Sean stayed with the picture while it was being financed and after it fell apart. I also directed a little bit of television, not a lot. But it helped out too because I directed Toby McGuire in a short-lived Fox show in the US called Great Scott. Alfonso Cuaron, who was over here directing Harry Potter 3 while we were making this film is my financing producer, along with his partner Jorge Vergara. So, the financing came strictly from Mexico – we could not find financing in the US for this subject matter. I tried everybody too – just about every studio. We finished the script for the film in 1999, which was when we first got the script to Sean, but after 9/11 happened we had to ask ourselves, do we still make this film? But after some contemplation, just because something is based on truth and has become more relevant, shouldn’t mean you should shove it into a corner somewhere. But when it comes to financing, relevance more often than not has an inverse relationship with finance-ability. And if the film was difficult to find financing for before 9/11, it became virtually impossible after. Sean said to me two weeks into the shoot that it was a miracle that we’re actually making this film. I think we found the only financiers who were willing to go for it and make this kind of film….
WM
So thank you Mexico!
NM
Absolutely. And there are such great films coming out of Mexico, and I really got to ride the coattails of the whole Mexican cinema phenomenon.
WM
So as I understand it, you were writing a screenplay about a fictional assassin who talked into a tape recorder, was going through a divorce and was a salesman, and then you read about this actual historical character. Can you tell us about why you wanted to tackle that subject matter and how you discovered Sam Bicke.
NM
The seed for the script was planted without me realising it. There was a shooting at a MacDonalds in San Hacidro, California which is outside of San Diego in the mid-eighties. I had just moved to California to go to film school. I was still relatively young (in my early twenties) and I hadn’t yet quite grasped the human capacity to lose all empathy for fellow human beings. I didn’t get it when this happened. And I wasn’t trying to take notes for a script, I just had a journal and I wrote that this guy must have belonged to another species in order to open fire on kids, women and men. I was puzzled about how a person went from point A to point B with point B being where they have lost all empathy and moving towards indiscriminate violence. I ended up exploring that notion and started writing a fictitious script which I called The Assassination of LBJ. I was always interested in the period 1963 to 1974 in the US which some authors have labelled the decade of shocks to the American system. In hindsight they talked about the period that started with the Kennedy assassination through the next Kennedy assassination through the King assassination, culminating in Watergate as the decade during which the US lost her innocence and people lost their faith in government and became cynical. Personally, I think we could use a bit more cynicism in the US toward leadership right now. There’s something about those bumper stickers that were around that said “question authority”. Now it’s blind obedience. Forty per cent of Americans believe that the US is in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11.
WM
So, just going back to how you found Sam Bicke.
NM
Oh yes, I was writing a fictitious script about a guy who was separated from his wife and child, and who obsesses on the American Dream and who talked into a tape recorder. I hadn’t figured out how to justify the tape recorder, I just knew I wanted some voice over. I then started researching assassins, and in one book out of ten that I took out of the LA public library was a very slim chapter on Sam Bicke, whom I’d never heard of and was very much the character that I was writing: separated from his wife and children and obsessing about the American Dream. He gave me the reason and the justification for the tapes because he made tapes that he sent to Leonard Bernstein as depicted in the film. He sent to other prominent Americans, but we distilled it down to Bernstein to simplify it.
WM
How much liberty did you take with the actual character? Was he a furniture salesman?
NM
You hit on one of the prominent things that I changed. He was a tyre salesman, with his brother, and applied for an SPA loan to start his own mobile tyre business. That was exactly his plan: filling the bus with tyres. He had a friend that we based Bonnie on that was going to be in the business with him. But this was an instance where we moved away from a surface fact to get to a deeper truth because in ninety five minutes you have only so much time to tell a story. And on the tapes he spoke obsessively about his desire to achieve the American Dream which is so often epitomised as being a self-made man, which I think is an American notion. In the tyre business, anyone wants to buy tyres, but with office furniture, you have a much more specific clientele. One which is indexical of the society in which he desperately wanted to belong. We took the inspiration from the tapes where he spoke about that segment of society, and we changed it so that the people coming in all the time were these self-made men – at least from his perspective. But the broad strokes of the story are all very true. He was separated from his wife and children, he was sympathetic to the Black Panthers and donated to them, the ending is almost verbatim-truth and Bonnie is based on truth. We just changed the names to protect privacy.
Did you ever think of including any of his normal years before he snapped and went off the edge, just to humanise him a little?
NM
I feel like that he is depicted as human. We started with three of his fingers on the ledge – he could’ve pulled himself back up. But if you want to tell a story of someone going from point A to point B, with point B being the ending that we did, and we have ninety five minutes to tell it, then you have to make a choice of where to start. We would’ve had to do a lot of condensing and would’ve had to make a longer film. We had to start where we started.
WM
As the character is so dark, was it something that people had to overcome with regard to getting financing and distribution in America.
NM
Yes.
Naomi Watts and Sean Penn in Assassination of Richard NixonWM
As a first time feature director, and working with Sean Penn, Naomi Watson and Don Cheadle, how do you walk in on day one and say, “I think you should do it this way”?
NM
The benefit of the financing falling apart after I met Sean was that it gave us a chance to get to know each other, and build a level of trust. That said, it was still an intimidating thought to direct him. He has clearly established himself as one of the great actors. I started on day one with Sean and Don Cheadle, and I forgot to call action and cut. I didn’t listen to a damn thing they said for the first five takes. I was just walking along side the cameras. The first shot was a tracking shot were Bonnie is working on the bus, and he says, “What are you saying, that I should just swallow something like that?” and Bonnie is saying that it’s not a big deal. I didn’t hear a thing – I just thought, there’s Sean Penn and Don Cheadle! But at some point you have to snap out of it. And I was quite impressed with myself, and gave myself a pat on the back for snapping myself out of it in five takes. I was concerned it might take longer. As I have a father that hails from Germany, I’m both a European and American football fan and I grew up playing soccer. But there’s a story about a quarter-back that started with the Dallas Cowboys, Quincy Carter, and he was handing the ball up to Emmit Smith who’s a very established running back, and when he did it for the first time he said “I can’t believe I’m handing the ball off to Emmit Smith”, and Emmit Smith’s response was, you’d better get used to it pretty quickly, you’ve got to be a part of the team. Sean or Don didn’t say that to me, but I said it to myself. A lot of people are counting on me, and I’ve got a job to fulfil.
WM
What did you learn from them?
NM
I could speak for hours about that, it’s endless. Sean is an incredibly generous actor, meaning that he gives everything even when the camera is pointing at the other actor in order to keep the world that they’ve created going. He wanted to help me realise and shared my vision as a director, and he wanted to support me in that. He was a partner in making this film, and the film only got made because he committed to it on a handshake, and his handshake is worth more than most contracts in Hollywood. He was unwavering in his commitment to the film, regardless of how many times it fell apart financially. Don is one of the great actors. His performance in Hotel Rwanda is one in a string of great performances. He has a very different approach to acting than Sean. To start a film after writing it, then waiting four years after meeting Sean, and then starting shooting with Sean and Don Cheadle on the first day set the tone on what level we’d be working. It was a great thing for cast and crew alike.
WM
Was there a lot of experimentation and improvising on the set or did you stick to the script?
NM
We pretty much stuck to the script. That said, there are still improvisations but using the lines. In the TV work I’ve done and on this, I like to shoot a lot of film. I shot on three perf – which means you get 25% more film for the same reel. The only technical problem with it is if there’s a hair in the gate, you’ve got less room for failure. We did have a hair, but were able to digitally remove it. So I would shoot without calling cut at the end – this was not forgetting to call cut, but I wanted to get a series of takes going so the actors on the set or the location don’t lose the world they’re creating. So I’d be getting a lot of takes, and within those takes there’d be improvisations and going in different directions. The great thing with Sean is he’s so present and connected with what’s happening that there’s going to be variations on what’s coming to him. When he screams at the television set in the office furniture store, that happened on two takes. In another take he took off his pants and walked out. It was a moment of protest for Sam to remove his underwear. Jack Thompson’s character comes out and says “What the fuck”, and it’s a great take. The problem with that is that it makes the editing process extremely difficult because you look at Take 1 and it’s a damn good take, then you look at Take 3 and that’s an awfully good take: it gets difficult to make the choices. But then it starts dictating itself to you.
WM
Did you spend a lot of time work-shopping with the actors to prepare them or did you just send them the script and they showed up?
NM
Sean and I had four years to talk about it. We’d get together to talk about what’s happening with the financing and lamenting the fact that it’s falling apart again, then we’d talk about the film, the story and the character over drinks. So we did our work without it being about work. I couldn’t get the whole cast together before the film. Jack Thompson came a couple of weeks beforehand and we had a couple of weeks of rehearsal time with him. Naomi Watson came three days before we shot. Sean, Naomi and me would get together every night, and rehearse what’s coming up the next day. Also with Don. I sat with Don before we filmed – Sean didn’t have a lot of notes on the script which he told me was rare - and Don had a few really excellent notes, and we made some changes to the script to really elevate the scenes.
WM
Do you always use a writing partner or a co-writer?
NM
Not always, but I find it helpful. There’s something about that blank page.
WM
But do you work in the same room as people?
NM
No. We outlined it really specifically together. It was an odd process on this film – we’ve written other things since but we won’t return to the process we had on Nixon. We knew it was a lonely story, and that we couldn’t sit in the same room. You can sit in the same room with comedy and work off each other and have a fun day. But you can’t really trade lines of tragedy. We each went to our separate corners after we’d outlined the first 15 pages. We’d each be writing the same scenes. Then we’d trade and rip off each other, and Kevin at the end of the process said, you’re directing it, you combine all these things. That took me another year.
AUDIENCE
Can you talk about the choices you made with the music?
NM
Sam Bicke was a Leonard Bernstein fan, at least enough to send him tapes. I extrapolated from that that he might like his music. I listened to symphonies that Leonard had conducted and we put it against the picture to see what worked. The great thing about having a cut is that you don’t have to make all the decisions yourself. The film tells you whether it will accept that music or not. We ended up using as the repetitive a Bernstein selection – Beethoven’s Emperor (I think it’s the Piano Concerto No. 5). It’s interesting that it’s called Emperor as I think Sam has delusions of being some kind of Emperor. The composer is a guy called Stephen Sterne that I had known for some time. He really had a challenge to fit his music with the Beethoven that Sam was listening to. In terms of the music that was on the radio, we wanted some of the music to be from the seventies just to help set it, but also, as an organising principle in making this film, that I talked about with the production designer, costume designer and music supervisors was that it must be accurate to the period, but not overly draw attention to it. Some of these films that have been made post seventies, but set in the seventies become hyper seventies films where every piece of furniture is from the seventies, and every song on the radio.
AUDIENCE
I thought it worked brilliantly!
En route for disaster - Sean Penn in The Assassination of Richard Nixon AUDIENCE
How did Sean Penn first get involved with the film?
NM
I called Alexander Payne (a friend from film school), who had worked with the producer Carrie Woods, who did his first film, Citizen Ruth. I said ‘can I get this film to you’. Carrie Woods and his company bought it and they had financing in place at the time. I met with Carrie and my writing partner in New York, and he said I know you guys love Sean Penn so let’s send it to him. That was a hard actor to say no to. I left saying to Kevin that I hoped we wouldn’t waste more than five months waiting for a response from his manager who’s ultimately going to say, ‘who is this director I’ve never heard of him, and it’s a small film that’s not offering anything close to what he should be paid. So, no, he’s not going to have time to read it.’ That said, the script was sent on Wednesday from New York, he got it on Thursday and he called Friday saying that he’d love to meet the director. I spent the weekend feeling extremely nervous and anxious. I flew to San Francisco on that Monday and met with him and quickly felt connected with him. I liked what he had to say. He said he wanted to make the film in the first half hour of the first meeting. But the financing fell apart, and it took another four years to put it back together.
AUDIENCE
Was it someone that you had envisaged for the part in the first place?
NM
I didn’t think about him as I was writing it.
AUDIENCE
Was there anyone that you were thinking about?
NM
Not really. I highly recommend against doing that for writers. If you think of somebody, think of somebody that’s dead and you know you’re not going to use. To think that Sean would’ve done the film with someone that he’d never heard of was unbelievable luck, and if you write a film with Sean Penn in mind you’re potentially setting yourself up. I didn’t allow myself to think that he would do it. But I did hear some dead actors’ voices on occasion.
AUDIENCE
The moments alone, of rehearsal in the film are reminiscent to me of the Travis Bickle character. How much was that movie influential for you?
NM
I personally think that Taxi Driver is a great film and it’s often come up to nail my film. Some people have said that it’s too much like Taxi Driver. But I scratch my head at this. One, because Taxi Driver was made quite some time ago and you see Hollywood producing the same thing over and over again, and it’s accepted that that is what Hollywood does. Both films have as their antecedent Woyzeck [Georg Büchner], a play that was written in the 1830s. It’s about a lonely man that’s feeling that society is breaking down and he’s feeling oppressed and he lashes out. So I think it’s an apt comparison on that basis. Other people have mentioned Willy Lomen and Death of a Salesman, which resonates more with me because Travis Bickle is not an American Dreamer, and that’s a huge part of the story. Willy Lomen is an American Dreamer like Sam Bicke. But I do understand the comparison in that they go after a political figure, and the name thing is unavoidable. But I couldn’t avoid that because I wanted to use the name specifically because I wanted to use the actual news reports at the end. Sean Penn asked Paul Schrader who wrote Taxi Driver if he knew the story, but he didn’t know anything about it.
AUDIENCE
The parallel is humanising the loneliness of the character. By the end I felt really sorry for him. Is that what you wanted us to feel?
NM
I’ve seen Taxi Driver many times so I’m certain that it’s had some influence on me. The film that I looked at more and that I stole shots from was [Herzog’s] Woyzeck. The real name homage in this film was the wife’s name, Maria. I changed the names of the people around Sam for privacy reasons, and I took the name Marie from the play.
AUDIENCE
Do you think there’s something about the disillusionment with the American Dream per se, and also in the age of George W it helps to create these sociopathic figures with reference to Death of a Salesman and Taxi Driver. Do you think you might have helped reinvigorate a new sub-genre around the paranoid, seventies-type thriller?
NM
With George W 2 now happening, I hope there aren’t more of Sam Bickes cropping up. I think we’re lucky there aren’t more. There is the incident with the kid in Minnesota [school shooting] – I don’t know about it in depth, but I think the kids of Columbine are unfortunate cousins of Sam Bicke. Whether the problem is G.W. or another leader, if you have a democracy that doesn’t make you feel that you can participate effectively or fully, then the answer may lie there. If you get rid of the electoral college so that your vote starts to feel like it means something, it may be a start. Someone said that democracy only functions in small units – you must feel like you have a voice. When I was looking for financing, Francis Coppola said why do you think there are Sam Bickes in the world? And I think a big part of it is that television is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s a natural animal instinct to want control over your environment. Television, by virtue of being in the living room, expands our environment to a global level, and you have no control over it. It’s frustrating not to have any input particularly when you see things going so wrong.
WM
The character doesn’t interact with Nixon, he just sees him on television. And that’s a big difference with Travis Bickle.
NM
One thing I was pleased with in the film was not to create an interaction that’s false. I also wanted Sam’s relationship with his target to be the relationship that we all have unless we’re in that tiny percentage of the population that dines with presidents. It’s our relationship – a television relationship.
AUDIENCE
What sort of distribution have you got in the States for this film?
NM
When I went to Canada, I had many foreign journalists, mainly from Europe, asking, are you going to have trouble finding distribution in the US with this content. I started with saying no. But it was really difficult to find distribution for this film. People shied away from this material, and some people just didn’t like the film. We ended up with a company called ThinkFilm – a smaller distributor. It was released in about a hundred cities, which is close to what the release is going to be here. Metrodome, who I really like, and is doing the best campaign, is releasing it in a comparable number of screens and this is a smaller country. So it’s a pretty small release.
AUDIENCE
What brief did you give Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer?
NM
Emmanuel Lubezki is one of the more sought after cinematographers right now. He did Y Tu Mama Tambien, Meet Joe Black, Sleepy Hollow and he just did Terence Mallick’s new film and Lemony Snicket. So he does big and small. I met with a number of prominent cinematographers, and having Sean Penn is hugely significant in casting and crewing up a film. People want to work with Sean Penn for good reason. So I met with Chivo (his nickname), and he’s also from Mexico. He was the first person to start talking about the film the same way that I saw the film. I said, it going to be difficult and oppressive, but you have to keep with Sam the whole time to present a singular point of view. One thing that we decided was to be largely over Sam’s shoulder. You don’t see yourself when you’re looking at somebody, but somehow it seems more connected, at least in cinema language. We saved most of the eye penetrating close-ups mostly for Sam. He’s the one that you’re staying with and hopefully getting more inside of his mind. That was one organising and most important principle – to stay from Sam’s point of view entirely. His lighting is second to none right now. We used a steady hand-held, which I was concerned about at the beginning, but he told me he’d shoot it fairly steadily. Because I wanted to shoot it fairly classically. It was a lot faster, but also it allowed Chivo to react to Sean and really be a cameraman as actor on the set. There were moves that he would do that we hadn’t discussed ahead of time, but I trusted him with working off of Sean. Sean said to me that the cinematographer is the first person to see the movie, and an actor can feel it when a cinematographer is seeing it and feeling it. He liked what he was feeling from Chivo. Some people that read the script said it was so claustophobic – let’s put him in an apartment that overlooks the bay so that we can open it up visually a little. But Chivo said no, let’s keep it claustrophobic and right with Sam. He’d be looking through the lens watching Sean do some amazing work, and he look at me and go “fuck!” and go back to shooting. That’s what’s great about a cinematographer that’s so into the performance, because some don’t feel the performance as it’s happening. He’s one of the greats.
AUDIENCE
You achieved the cross-over from sanity to insanity. Did you get to hear the tapes, or was that something you made up?
NM
I had the transcripts of all the tapes from an FBI file. It was a voice from the grave that allowed us to tap into the spirit. What you hear him saying is minimally inspired by the tapes, but sometimes it’s verbatim Sam talking. But often there were two pages of transcripts and we’d have to distil it down and synthesise it into our own words, but working off of his notions. I didn’t hear the tapes apart from one bit that was broadcast on CBS news a week later after the tapes had come in. So I haven’t heard a lot of the tapes.
AUDIENCE
Did Bernstein receive them, or did the FBI intercept them?
NM
He received the tapes. I know that because we did a screening at the National Board of Review and Kevin and I went to a Q&A, and somebody asked whether mailing the tapes to Bernstein was based on fact. A woman up front answered the question for us. She said it was true as she was a friend of the Bernsteins and she was there the day the tapes arrived. She said that that day wasn’t pleasant. I’m sure they called the FBI fairly quickly, and I’m sure the FBI were putting things together and had gone to his apartment the same day and found more notes etc (he also wrote things). His motives may never be known, but this was lost to the American public because the news was different. It was only on once for half an hour in the evening, and I’m not sure it was reported, but the story got lost because of the Watergate scandal. There was no imminent threat to the president as he didn’t even get close, so the story was essentially lost.
AUDIENCE
Was the apartment your imagination or did you actually see it?
NM
I looked at a lot of apartments. We set it in Pittsburgh for privacy reasons and at the family’s request. I looked at apartments in Philadelphia. I grew up in the Mid-West. That apartment, if it were in New York or London would be a pretty nice apartment – but I grew up in a house in the burbs so it would not be an expensive apartment. I saw an apartment in my head when I wrote it. I didn’t want Sam to be your loner, crazed assassin living in a tiny cinder-black walled apartment. I wanted the apartment to be a home if he chose to make it a home. If he unpacked the boxes that were sitting in the dining room – but Sam doesn’t want to move in any real furniture, and he doesn’t want to unpack the boxes.
AUDIENCE
What’s your blocking process?
NM
Sometimes what’s written dictates what the blocking is going to be: Sam gets up from his desk, turns up the volume on the television set, walks back. Other times, in the house, I talked with Sean and Naomi about the blocking. They end up upstairs sitting on the bed and I’d talk about it with the actors ahead of time to see what they thought – sometimes they have notions. Some of it is dictated by the space. I tried to work the camera to what the actors were doing rather than the other way around. It’s some thing that I talked about with Chivo. I storyboarded the plane sequence. But a lot of it is where you get to the set and see where Sean and Don are moving and working through the character. Sometimes you make adjustments for technical reasons or maybe I have an idea. But quite often they were so inside these characters, it made really good sense. A lot of it was determined by the action.
AUDIENCE
Your producers are a roll call of talents in their own right. What creative influence, if any, do your producers have on the film?
NM
Alexander Payne is somebody that I get to look at drafts of the script and cuts of the film. I’ve done the same for his films. Alfonso is a producer that I hadn’t known before. I had loaded an earlier cut of the film on the Harry Potter 3 editing system in London, and I got my produce-orial notes that way. He was hugely helpful. With a problem I had with the sequence to build up to a scene, he said something that was so obvious, that I couldn’t believe we hadn’t found it. We had script notes before we shot that were very good. But he didn’t tell Chivo that he was producing the film, which was a hugely cool move as a producer because it let us have our own relationship. I couldn’t have felt more supported by a producer. Then Leonardo DeCaprio came up with gap financing at a place where we really needed it.
AUDIENCE
What was the film’s budget?
NM
Film budget was ten million [dollars]. I don’t know exactly where it came in. Somewhere below ten.
AUDIENCE
Why were there references to Norman Vincent Peel?
NM
I grew up with an office furniture salesman father and his partner. His partner read self help books. So as part of my consciousness of salesmen, and I knew other salesmen along the way who listened to it, and self help books are potentially part of the everyman experience, and I found it somewhat funny as well
AUDIENCE
Do you see yourself as a political filmmaker, and do you think your films can reach an audience with a different ideology?
NM
I wouldn’t say that I was a political filmmaker. But I’d say that this film has political and social relevance. I’ve always been interested in politics, so I might do another film like that, and someone will put me into that category if I did. You’re asking can you preach not just to the converted. But I like to think the film asks questions it leaves other people to answer without me trying to bang a point over people’s heads. In the States I had a critic write that the film isn’t about anything. But that’s because I didn’t tell you clearly what it was about, so you’ve got to do some of the work. It depends on the age of when people see the film: if they’re fifteen it’ll make a different impact than if you’re set in your ideas.
AUDIENCE
There was a lot of sensibility in the character. How much was written or did Sean Pean develop it?
NM
With Sean, you sometimes get far more than you can imagine. He’ll cut out three lines of dialogue because the involuntary pinching of pain of his forehead will say more than the next three lines of dialogue that you thought were the central bits of the scene. You can’t overstate how much he brings to the part, but in terms of the script, we pretty much shot the script.
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