Bobby - Emilio Estevez interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
EMILIO Estevez talks about writing, directing and starring in his ensemble piece Bobby, a look at the assassination of Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy as seen through the eyes of 22 people staying at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night it took place.
Q. Bobby seems extraordinarily timely given current world events (such as the war in Iraq). Is that a strange luck for the film?
Emilio Estevez: Well, it’s a strange luck and a sad luck. It’s unfortunate that we find ourselves in a place where there is so much chaos in the world and we are killing each other at an alarming rate. The movie is sadly more relevant now than when I started writing it in 2000. I finished the screenplay in 2001 and then 9/11 happened and we found ourselves at war, two wars, and you look at the picture now and it’s sadly relevant.
Q. The final speech you use from Kennedy at the end of the movie is incredibly powerful and moving. How well known is it?
Emilio Estevez: It’s just been included as one of the best speeches given by an American since the Gettysburg address, so it’s now up there. However, it was a speech that Bobby Kennedy gave the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated.
He gave two speeches and one is more famous – on the night of the shooting, he landed in Indianapolis and he was addressing a largely black audience and they hadn’t heard the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination. He told them and there was an enormous gasp from the crowd but he spoke to them in a very personal way and talked about his own brother’s assassination, saying that JFK had been killed by a white man. It was the first time he’d ever talked in public about it, but he didn’t talk down to the crowd and it was the only major city in the United States that didn’t experience rioting that night. Bobby is largely attributed as the reason for that.
Q. For those not familiar with Bobby Kennedy’s shooting, is there a danger that they might think your characters are real?
Emilio Estevez: Well that’s certainly an issue and something I meditated on. Initially, when I was given a tour of the hotel it was in 2000 and I was asked to participate in a photo shoot at The Ambassador Hotel. They actually have two tours – one that’s not the actual pantry but they’d tell people it was because the real one was off limits. So they put an X on the floor and they’d bring people through and would say this is where he fell. I said: “Really? It doesn’t look like any of the pictures that I’ve seen…” So, they then said: “Ok, we’ll show you where it really happened.”
It was behind a padlocked door and they ushered us back there and the room was smaller than the room we’re currently in. It was a bit longer but it was much more narrow and the gentleman that was leading the tour said that there were 77 people in the room at the time, which is unfathomable. Then he said that there were other people shot. He didn’t know the specifics of it but once he mentioned it my wheels started to turn and I began to imagine who these other people might be.
When you’re doing a bio-pic or historical drama, my belief is that you then want to get all of the story, so you if you’re going to follow all of these people you have to license their life rights and it can become overwhelming. It can become a legal nightmare. Also, I felt it would restrain me from being able to create characters out of my imagination and allow the characters to be emblematic of the time.
Q. Do you think Bobby would have made a difference if he’d stayed alive?
Emilio Estevez: I believe that Bobby Kennedy remains one of the great “what ifs”. I think he probably would have won the election in November. It’s all speculation but I think he would have won the popular vote and he would have won the sympathetic vote. Certainly, if you look at any of the footage of the 1964 convention, Johnson was smart enough to bring him up at the very end after he’d announced who his running mate would be and Bobby got a 20-minute standing ovation. He keeps asking people to sit down, so if there’s any doubt that he would have won in ’68 look at that footage.
Do I think the world would have been different? Absolutely. I think he would have tried to address the conflict in the Middle East, which was one of the reasons why he was killed, according to Suhan Suhan’s notes. I think we would have been out of the war in Vietnam a lot earlier. I think of all those lives that would have been saved. And we don’t know what great inventions would have come out of all of those young men’s lives [who worked with him as advisors] that could have contributed to our well-being.
Q. There’s another poignant speech in the film from Martin Sheen’s character, which states “we are worth more than the things we own”. Is that your own view?
Emilio Estevez: I do believe we are worth more than the things we own. We are a culture where we worship things and use people and I think we need to change that. I think we need to begin to worship people and regard them differently and get rid of the things that we overwhelm our lives with – the minutia and the soap opera that we get ourselves tangled up in. When you’re laying on the kitchen floor with a bullet in you, that’s the common denominator because a bullet doesn’t discriminate.
Q. The last 10 minutes of the film are particularly powerful. How long did they take to film?
Emilio Estevez: We were under an enormous amount of pressure to shoot the film very quickly. The Christmas season was looming and we had deadlines to which we had to finish. The Ambassador Hotel was coming down literally around us, it was a 37-day shoot, the initial budget was $5.5million and it blossomed from that but it was because of the scope of the picture. I would ask the cinematographer, “can we have this size frame?” [big hands] and I’d look at him and say “maybe this” [slightly smaller], so in an effort to make the film a bit bigger the budget increased.
But when we shot those sequences, the ballroom sequence and especially the pantry, I believe we shot the entire pantry scene in a day and a half. We were running and gunning and the style of the film leading up to the pantry scene was handheld and steady cam, predominantly, so by the time we get to the pantry the camerawork is very frenetic and my belief was that we had earned the right to be more frenetic. But using that style allowed us to shoot very quickly, which was what we had to do.
Q. Of all the characters you could have played in this film, why Tim?
Emilio Estevez: The first reason was technical. It was a role that stretched out over the picture. Because of the schedule, we were asking many of the actors to act for free and for that we would schedule them three days, or four days, or eight days, or whatever. This character stretched the 37-day shoot, so I figured: “I’m there anyway, so I might as well play it.” It was an opportunity to work with Demi [Moore] again, as she and I and haven’t worked together for 20 years. I wrote that role with her in mind.
And I wrote the role of the chef with Laurence Fishburne in mind. I’d approached them years ago about this, in the first incarnation [which was in 2002] but they were both busy. I think had we made the film in 2002 I don’t know if they would have said “yes” to it. I don’t know if it would have had the gravitas or the relevance that it has now and I think many of these actors saw the value in the piece at a time when we need to hear Bobby Kennedy’s voice more than ever.
Q. Anthony Hopkins serves as executive producer. Does that mean he put money in the picture or deferred more than the others?!
Emilio Estevez: I’m not sure what his deal points were [smiles] but he was the first one in and he was the first one they made a deal with. There are certain actors who are actor magnets, who are known for their credibility rather than their celebrity and Tony is certainly one of those people. When you tell another actor you’ve got an opportunity to be in a picture with Hopkins, and Bill Macy has said this, that’s the last name you need to hear.
Q. Can you talk a little about Demi Moore’s performance?
Emilio Estevez: I applaud her courage. What was interesting for me in my discussions with Demi regarding the film, she was torn between which role to play. She was terrified of the singing and getting up in front of the audience. One of the scenes that didn’t end up in the film was where she sings to me acapella. Any singer will tell you that’s dangerous, so she was torn between that and playing the Helen Hunt role. She really didn’t know which one would best serve her.
I think it’s a very courageous performance and she and Sharon [Stone], they kinda just let it go, they let their guard down and I think it’s fascinating to watch. That scene in the beauty parlour in particular, we didn’t know what to expect. It was like putting these two tigers into a cage and closing it and watching on the monitor 100 yards away.