Death of a President- Not what you might think

Winner of the International Critics' Prize at the Toronto Film Festival," "Death of a President" is conceived as a fictional TV documentary broadcast in 2008, reflecting on another monstrously despicable and cataclysmic event: the assassination of President George W. Bush on October 19th, 2007. The "documentary" combines archival footage and carefully composed interviews, presented in a respectful and dignified manner. Exciting and questioning, it refashions the event into a riveting story.

The film opens with the ferocious energy of a Tarantino or Oliver Stone movie, as frenetically edited archival footage thrusts us into a raging crowd of protesters, waiting for President Bush's procession. The President is portrayed as a sympathetic and likable man beloved by those close to him and charming to his followers. As the President gives a patriotic speech inside a hotel, the demonstrators' fury increases to the breaking point. The tension mounts until the horrible instant where the President is assassinated.

After the assassination, the film shifts into the style of a mystery, and follows the FBI's hunt for the assassin. All the suspects are interviewed except one Syrian man who is convicted and put on death row. There is much circumstantial evidence against him. But is he guilty of the crime? Or does his being Middle Eastern provide a convenient excuse to label the death of the President as an Act of Terror?

Director Gabriel Range previously used the device of a "retrospective documentary" in his celebrated 2003 film "The Day Britain Stopped," about a chain of events that led to a breakdown of the country's transport system and nearly a hundred fatalities. Both of these films have been acclaimed for the technical virtuosity with which they combine archival footage and filmed scenes to create disturbingly real visions of catastrophes.

"Death of a President" was honored by The International Critics Prize Jury (FIPRESCI) at Toronto for "the audacity with which it distorts reality, to reveal a larger truth."

Filmmakers:
Director- GABRIEL RANGE
Screenplay- GABRIEL RANGE & SIMON FINCH
Producers- GABRIEL RANGE, SIMON FINCH, ED GUINEY & ROBIN GUTCH
Line Producers- DONALL McCUSKER CHRISTINA VAROTISIS
Executive Producers LIZA MARSHALL & PETER CARLTON
Director of Photography- GRAHAM SMITH
Editor -BRAND THUMIM
Composer- RICHARD HARVEY
Production Designer- GARY BAUGH

Cast:
Zahra Abi Zikri- HEND AYOUB
Larry Stafford- BRIAN BOLAND
Eleanor Drake -BECKY ANN BAKER
Greg Turner- ROBERT MANGIARDI
Sam McCarthy- JAY PATTERSON
Frank Molini -JAY WHITTAKER
Robert H. Maguire- MICHAEL REILLY BURKE
Dr. James Pearn- JAMES URBANIAK
Casey Claybon- M. NEKO PARHAM
Samir Masri -SEENA JON
John Rucinski -CHRISTIAN STOLTE
Marianne Claybon -CHAVEZ RAVINE
Patricia Buckley- DAWN NEWTON
Adam Brock -PATRICK CLEAR
Jamal Abu Zikri- MALIK BADER
Al Claybon-TONY DALE

Director's Statement:
A time of national disaster is always a moment that stops us in our tracks. It's a time when we reflect on what really matters.

While the premise of "Death of a President" is certainly an incendiary one, as a metaphor for 9/11 it must by necessity be unspeakably horrific. And history teaches us that there is nothing that can have a more convulsive impact on America than the assassination of
a President.

I have always known that I would be condemned for the very idea of this film, but I believe that sometimes it is not only acceptable for art to be outrageous - it is necessary.

We live in a time of incredible fear. When people are afraid, they panic and often do things they later regret - for example, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The advance condemnation of this film by politicians and pundits who have not seen - and may never see - - this film reflects the landscape of fear in which we live today, and which my film attempts to address.

What disturbs me most about what is happening today is the complacency. Terrible things happen and there is a lack of remark. It is my belief that this complacency
is largely due to the way the media presents events. As a longtime TV journalist myself, I am very attuned to this.

I'm British, but I have spent a great deal of time in the United States, both as a resident and as a journalist. I have numerous friends here, many of whom have family members who have served or who are currently serving in Iraq. I feel I have a deep connection to this country. What I wanted to do with this film was offer another perspective on what's happened in the last five years, and look at how the war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq is changing America.

-Gabriel Range

The Making of "Death of a President":
In 1965, Peter Watkins' 1965 docudrama "The War Game" created such a shockingly realistic vision of a nuclear holocaust, that although it was fiction, it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Forty years later, "Death of a President" follows in the footsteps of that classic film, but in the context of a vastly changed world.

"Death of a President" takes the form of a TV documentary made in 2008, looking back at an event that happened in December of 2007. "Retrospective documentaries are inevitably made in the aftermath of a major world event, and they follow a very particular style," says Range. "They carry a very particular kind of gravitas." It might seem that the intensity of an imagined catastrophe would be lessened by looking at it in hindsight. "I think it's actually more compelling that way," says Range. "We are a television generation. Whenever there is a catastrophic event, we experience that incident through the media. And until we've seen it on CNN, Fox, or whatever else, it's not quite real to us."

Range developed this method with his acclaimed 2003 TV film, "The Day Britain Stopped." This documentary also reflected on a fictional event that happened a year previously-in this case an escalating series of transportation disasters, including a train and a plane crash. The subjects of both films are jumping off points for Range to explore more far-ranging issues. "The Day Britain Stopped" isn't so much a hard-hitting expose of the British transport system, as it is a means for Range to explore British society in a way that is extremely involving. Likewise, Range utilized the admittedly sensational premise of "Death of a President" as an opportunity to arouse discussion about the impact of 9/11 on American life.

The film's screenplay, which Range co-wrote with producer Simon Finch, is a meditation on many things that have happened in America over the last five years. "The war in Iraq has definitely had an incredibly polarizing effect," says Range. "The film also touches on the marginalization of dissent, the nature of patriotism, and the balance between security and civil liberties. Some parts of the script reference specific incidents, like the Lackawanna Six, the alleged New York sleeper cell. The story that Zikri tells is very much like two of the guys from the Lackawanna Six tell-they went off to Afghanistan and they hadn't really appreciated that it was military training that they were destined for."

The script plays off the audience's awareness of what is going to happen. "The tension comes out of not knowing the exact point when the President is going to be shot," says Range. "You have this situation that is spinning out of control, and that fuels a feeling of crushing inevitability."

"I always knew that the controversy on the film would happen," Range continues, "but I genuinely believe that the premise is justified, and that anyone who sees the film will not think it is gratuitous. I took great pains to portray the assassination as a horrific act, and it's done as sparingly as possible."

As the viewers will bring a huge range of judgments and emotions about President Bush into the theatre, great care had to be taken with the way he is portrayed in the film. "It's important that Bush is shown as a human being, who is liked and respected by people close to him," says Range. "He can't just be a symbol."

"Clearly, the film has a political perspective," Range continues, "but it isn't a polemic in the style of a Michael Moore piece. I hope that people watching the film will feel that they are watching something that is relatively balanced, and not overly partisan."

Achieving the convincing blend of archival and staged footage presented enormous challenge for Range. First the director spent a year looking through news video and other material, trying to find footage from separate events that could be combined to tell the story. "It's a needle-in-a-haystack thing, really," says Range. "For any given sequence of President Bush or whoever, we were looking for very specific things, and it only takes the wrong suit, the wrong tie, for what would otherwise be a very promising piece of archival footage to be rendered useless. So it is a long and arduous road."

Once the material was assembled, the fictional pieces were storyboarded to match. Most of the work involved careful planning-the signs that the filmed protesters held had to match the filmed ones, etc. The assassination was staged at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago, where President Bush had earlier given his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. Special importance had to be given to where the special effects would be used. "There are some places where President Bush's clothing has been changed and his face has been inserted into the limousine at a lot of points," says Range. "We had to add some of our characters in some of the shots that featured the President. There are quite a lot of special effects, but they're very brief, which I hope makes them slip by in the subconscious."

"Death of a President" is composed of three different kinds of footage: the doctored archival film; the film staged to match that; and the film shot by the documentary filmmakers working in 2008. Range and his director of photography Graham Smith (who shot "The Day Britain Stopped") determined that the documentary-makers' images should be much more elegant and static than everything else. "I wanted it to feel very respectful. One has to imagine that a film a year on from an event like this would be quite funereal in tone. So all the interviews were locked off, shot in a relatively wide shot for a talking head interview. And the aerial and architectural shots were given very formal compositions."

On the other hand, the simulated archival material was anything but formal. It was largely shot on jittery handheld cameras, and on a huge variety of formats, including DV, Hi-Definition, and even cel phones. "With every single shot," says Range, "we were thinking, 'Who am I holding the camera? Am I a protester? Am I a news journalist? Am I a member of the Chicago Police Force?' We always had to be thinking about how that person would operate the camera and really make sure that the camera moved in a way that feels right." This approach even extended to the filming of press conferences. "In my experience, working in television news, is that the cameras are packed so closely that inevitably somebody elbows you and knocks the camera tripod. So we deliberately put some camera shake into the press conference shots."

A lot of the film was shot on High Definition video and the filmmakers had to degrade the images by copying it. "We even used old U-Matic 3/4" machines," says Range. "It's one way of emulating what happens when news footage is sent through satellite link to a network center somewhere else and then copied down to another tape. It was a multi-faceted process to try to achieve this alternative reality."

Likewise, the significance of very ordinary pieces of stock footage were elevated simply by the addition of the music by Richard Harvey. "His music has a very dark, brooding sound and the scale of his pieces are really epic," says Range. "Archival footage on its own just isn't strong enough to do that, but his music provides the scale and the scope.

Range spent a lot of time preparing the actors to play documentary-style interviewees. "It's a very unforgiving form," says Range. "We're looking at these people, knowing they're actors, knowing they're not who they say they are. The suspension of disbelief is different from when you watch a fiction film." Range began by giving the actors an extensive packet of background information on the characters they play. He videotaped brief interviews and watched them together with the actors, discussing what was and wasn't working. Shortly before the actual filming, they were given scripts. "I asked that they learn their lines but not quite learn them," says Range. "I didn't want it to feel performed." Finally he sat them down for eight hour marathon interviews. "The scope of each interview is much broader than what is in the film," says Range. "I could do many cuts of the film where the same characters comment on different sections of the story. It would be a different film. It's one of the intriguing things about the power a documentary-maker has in terms of how a particular reality is presented."

Long before "Death of a President" premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2006, it became a lightning rod for international indignation. Some have even suggested that if the President is assassinated, this film will have been responsible in some way. "In my mind, there's no way that watching the film would incite anyone to kill the President," says Range. "And it's facile to say that this film will put the idea in people's minds. Were somebody to assassinate the President, it would be a truly horrific event, and I think the film portrays it as that. And I also hope that the film portrays Bush as a human being as well, rather than purely as a symbol."

About the Filmmakers:
GABRIEL RANGE (Director, Co-Writer & Producer) was born in Chester, England and studied Medicine at Bristol University and did postgraduate work in journalism at Cardiff University. He has directed drama-documentaries for British television, including "The Great Dome Robbery" (2002), "The Menendez Murders" (2002), "The Day Britain Stopped" (2003, nominated for a BAFTA) and "The Man Who Broke Britain" (2004).

SIMON FINCH (Co-Writer & Producer) was born in Leicester, England and studied political science at Cambridge University. He has directed several documentaries for British television. He wrote (with Gabriel) and produced the two critically acclaimed BBC dramas "The Day Britain Stopped" (2003) and "The Man Who Broke Britain" (2004). Finch and Range set up Borough Films in 2005 and were recently featured in Screen International's "Class of 2006 Stars of Tomorrow" edition, labeled as "the creators of a number of innovative and convincing drama-documentaries on pressing topical issues, which have been acclaimed for their plausibility, naturalism and integrity."

ED GUINEY (Producer), based in Dublin, runs Element Films with partner Andrew Lowe. Recent Element productions include "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" (Ken Loach, 2006) which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes 2006 and also screened at Toronto; "OMAGH" (Pete Travis, 2004), which won the Discovery Award at Toronto in 2004 and the BAFTA for Best Single Drama 2004; and "The Magdalene Sisters" (Peter Mullan), which won the Golden Lion at Venice and the Discovery Award at oronto. Guiney is currently in production with "Garage," the sequel to the cult hit "Adam and Paul."

ROBIN GUTCH (Executive Producer) is Joint Managing Director of Warp X, a start-up digital "studio" that makes low budget feature films with funding from UK Film Council, FilmFour, EM Media and Screen Yorkshire. Between 2003 and 2005 he was Head of Film and Drama for Blast Films.
Previously Robin was the founding Head of FilmFour Lab which was established as FilmFour's main focus for new talent in film in 1999. Before joining Film Four, Robin was Commissioning Editor for Independent Film and Video at Channel 4. He had joined Channel 4 in 1994 as a Deputy Commissioning Editor, having worked at the BBC as a Producer and Director for the previous ten years.

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