Director says use of Bush ‘absolutely justified’ in film

WHEN I spoke Monday with Gabriel Range, the 32-year-old British filmmaker behind the explosive new drama “Death of a President” looked a bit shellshocked -- his phone buzzed so often that he finally turned it off. As is often the case, his film (billed here simply as “DOAP”) has been denounced by all sorts of people who haven’t seen it. If they met Range, they would be in for quite a surprise. He is studious and carefully spoken, pretty much the polar opposite of a Michael Moore-style bomb thrower. Having given up medical school for journalism, the filmmaker has spent a considerable amount of time in America, including a stint in Los Angeles in 1998 doing TV news pieces about the juvenile justice system.

The film, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday night, has been the subject of breathless media speculation for several weeks. Although most of the film -- shot in the style of a fictional documentary -- deals with the aftermath of the shooting and the search for the presidential assassin, it has caused an uproar because it portrays President Bush as the victim of the assassination.

Those of us who saw the film Sunday night at the Paramount Theatre had to wade past a thicket of TV news cameras. After the screening, news teams were still there, cajoling moviegoers to offer opinions about the film, whose U.S. rights were acquired late Monday by Newmarket Films, an independent distributor best known for “The Passion of the Christ” and “Memento.”

Range is known in England as the filmmaker behind two similar speculative documentaries, most notably “The Day Britain Stopped,” a TV film about the collapse of the British transportation system. But this subject has hit a raw nerve. When I spoke to filmgoers after the screening, even some liberals who had little love for Bush seemed unsettled by the whole idea of showing a real president murdered.

“I can understand how some people will find the premise offensive,” he told me in one of only three interviews he’s given so far. “But I think it’s absolutely justified. The whole point is for the film to be about America today. And it couldn’t be about America today -- not the real America -- if it didn’t involve the real president. You just react differently to this as an audience than you would if it were, say, the president on ’24.’ ”

Range pointed out that “The Sentinel,” a Hollywood thriller released this spring by 20th Century Fox, features archival footage of the assassination attempt on President Reagan. “I can’t see any justification for that at all, to use real assassination footage purely for entertainment. It completely trivializes a serious event. I don’t believe that our portrayal of an assassination will incite anyone to do it. In our film, there’s a real sense of horror to the event -- it’s not trivialized at all.”

For Range, the real subject of the film is not the assassination, which happens in the blink of an eye. The clear point of the film is that America’s war on terrorism has undermined the country’s liberties by giving the government increased secret powers. As the wife of an alleged Muslim assassin in the film who is imprisoned without charges says at one point, “We came here for freedom and this is the freedom you give us?”

“While I think that the intent of a lot of the responses to 9/11 was clearly good, the execution of it has had a really corrosive effect in America,” says Range. “The NSA wiretapping is very alarming for a lot of regular people, not just ACLU types.”

Apparently this scrutiny doesn’t extend to filmmakers. I was astounded to discover that Range and his crew received official White House press credentials to film Bush simply by proving they were affiliated with a legitimate foreign media organization, in their case Britain’s Channel 4, which will air the film later this fall.

When Bush gave a speech before the Economic Club of Chicago earlier this year, his visit was recorded by dozens of news media outlets. But what the White House didn’t realize was that his arrival on the tarmac and subsequent speech in downtown Chicago were being filmed by Range.

The director also spent six months in the city, where he filmed antiwar rallies and staged rallies of his own without attracting any press attention. The footage is stitched together in the film using everything from Super 16 to digital video, with some scenes even filmed on cellphone cameras.

He staged a 14-car presidential motorcade sequence with hundreds of extras posing as protesters, shouting antiwar slogans as the motorcade swept by. I couldn’t help but ask: Didn’t anyone ever know what you were doing?

“We called the film ‘DOAP,’ and very few people ever asked us what it stood for,” he replied. “To those who did ask, we said it stood for ‘Death of a President’ and it was a fictional film, the small distinction being that the president wasn’t exactly fictional.”

Range said he chose Chicago in part because it was the site of protest clashes at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Some of the film’s footage is reminiscent of Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool,” which was shot at that convention, blending real and fictional footage. “We do much the same thing with our film, putting our characters into real demonstrations. Chicago has had a lot of huge antiwar protests, so it gave us a lot to work with.”

“The Big Picture” is in Toronto this week, covering the Toronto Film Festival. To see more coverage, go to latimes.com/toronto.