In The Line of Fire

You have to think that director Niels Mueller is doing something right. With his first feature film The Assassination Of Richard Nixon hitting theatres in America, he’s found himself under fire from political camps both red and blue. “I’ve heard it all,” he sighs. “Right now, in America, you literally cannot say anything remotely political without causing offence. The battle-lines are drawn. I had one girl come up to me after a screening and she was really upset; she was in tears and shouting at me and saying I made the Left look like maniacs. Then, the Republicans feel the film is an attack on George Bush’s America. So I can’t complain.”

Though Mueller admits that his account of a would-be presidential assassin has taken on a whole new resonance under the current neo-Nixonian administration, the acclaimed screenwriter of Tadpole actually penned Assassination back in 1999, before Bush the Younger’s ascension to the throne. In fact, the project had been germinating even longer. A self-avowed news junkie born during the Kennedy years, Mueller had long been fascinated by the ‘decade of shock’ between JFK’s assassination and Watergate, and resolved to write a screenplay dealing with these disillusionment years through the eyes of a downtrodden Joe driven to an attempt on Lyndon Johnson’s life.
While researching presidential assassins, Mueller happened across the story of Sam Byck, who in 1974 attempted to hijack an aeroplane with the intention of crashing kamikaze-style into The White House, thus permanently removing Richard M. Nixon from the Oval Office. Byck obviously never got far enough to garner even Hinckley level notoriety, but his existence did give Mueller quite a start – “It was eerie. Here I was, working on a screenplay about a man in a sales job, who loses his wife and child and all capacity for empathy, becomes completely alienated, records his lonely thoughts on tape recorder, and ultimately lashes out at L.B.J. Then I stumble on Sam’s story – I had heard his name in the score to Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins but I had known nothing about him – and he’s a failed salesman trying to win back his wife and family who spends the last months of his life talking into a tape-recorder, then sends the tapes off to various prominent people, including Leonard Bernstein, before attempting to kill Nixon.”
Mueller immediately decided to adopt Byck as his film’s protagonist and set about obtaining the transcripts of the Byck tapes sent to Leonard Bernstein and columnist Jack Anderson, before contacting Byck’s surviving family – “It was important that I absolutely respected their wishes. I changed the spelling of the name to ‘Bicke’ and I didn’t shoot the movie near the actual places involved. His ex-wife is dead now, but I have shown the film to several family members. They’re okay with it.”
The downbeat political tone and grainy period setting of Assassination recall such post-classical classics as The Conversation and The Parallax View – hardly popular generic currency in contemporary Hollywood – and inevitably, despite Sean Penn’s commitment to star as many as six years ago, Mueller faced an uphill struggle getting the film made independently. Happily, the movie eventually found support from an impressive contingent of producers and executive producers, including fellow mid-westerner and former film-school classmate, Alexander Payne, Harry Potter 3 (that’s HPATPOA for the cyber-literate among you) director, Alfonso Cuaron, and little Leonardo Di Caprio.
Mueller is understandably thrilled at having made his film beyond the potentially interfering tentacles of the studio system, and as someone, who, like Michael Moore, sees cinema’s potential to fill the void once occupied by the Fourth Estate, he’s concerned at the rise of studio backed ‘independent’ films.
“It’s ridiculous to assume that the independent wing of a studio isn’t accountable to the studio. I had one of the studio independent wings ask me if I could give Sam a happy ending. They’re not interested in anything political or social at a time when film should be engaging with the prescient issues of the day. In 1984 you have Big Brother monitoring everything and in Brave New World you have a society bombarded with so much trivia, the truth gets lost. That’s what we have and that’s why a truly independent cinema existing outside group-think is so important. It’s such a powerful medium; it should be used to peel at the scabs that need to be peeled. I always liked films like that, that had substance and great performances. There’s a place for movies, but there’s got to be a place for film too.” He suddenly breaks off laughing.
“I sound like such a pretentious fuck, don’t I? I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”

The Assassination Of Richard Nixon opened April 8th