By Christina Radish
|
|
|
Emilio Estevez at the Hollywood Film Festival Movie Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on October 23, 2006. |
Combining fact, fiction and fate, the interwoven human stories of Bobby unfold on June 4, 1968, as the film re-creates the hours before Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. As party-goers, performers, hotel employees and campaigners all descend on the hotel in preparation for the big night, the accomplished ensemble of 22 actors, that are both A-listers and up-and-comers, forge an intimate mosaic of an America that was forever changed.
Just six years old when Kennedy died, writer/director Emilio Estevez was profoundly affected by that moment in history. Like many, he began to see Kennedy’s assassination as the shot that had stopped the idealism and optimism of an earlier generation of Americans, and ushered in today’s much harsher world of cynicism, apathy and disenfranchisement. So, while conducting a photo shoot in the Ambassador Hotel (where Kennedy was shot), Estevez’s memories allowed inspiration to strike, and he decided that he would start writing about that fateful night.
“I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was, in many ways, the death of decency in America,” Estevez tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry, and the death of a dream. By definition, I am unapologetically optimistic and earnest, and I believe we have come so far away from that. We have fallen away from those traits, and the movie is a reminder of who we were. In many ways, Bobby was the third strike, after John F. Kennedy in ‘63 and Martin Luther King in April of ‘68. Bobby was the last straw. After that, we went into a free-fall, and I don’t think we’ve completely put the pieces back together. I’m hoping that when people come out of this movie, they are reminded of a time when this country was looked at in a much different way.”
{quote_top}Even though he was six years old when Kennedy was assassinated, Estevez remembers breaking the news to his father, Martin Sheen (The West Wing) quite vividly. “My father spent a lot of time on the phone because his best friend lived in Los Angeles, and he was outside of Good Samaritan Hospital, along with the rest of the many people who were waiting for news of Bobby’s condition. I have specific memories of the next day and a half, of watching my father speaking long distance, which was somewhat of a luxury then, as it was very expensive. We were getting updates that were beyond what we were getting on the television, and he just wept uncontrollably for the next two days. When you’re a child, you look to your parents for guidance and reassurance and, at that moment in our history, my parents couldn’t offer that. I think that is my greatest memory of that period.”
In recreating the 1960s, Estevez had very specific ideas of how he wanted the film to look, but he had a very limited budget with which to create that look. “The world was completely upside down, so it was incumbent upon us to get it right. I leaned on my production designer, our costumer, and our Director of Photography, who are all brilliant individuals that brought the best of themselves to a very limited budget. We started with a budget of $5.5 million, which was an impossible task because I wanted the scope of the film to be very big. Oftentimes, I’d be standing with the cinematographer and I’d say, ‘I want this!,’ and look over at him, and he’d say, ‘Uh, uh.’ So, I would say, ‘I want this,’ and he’d say, ‘Uh, uh.’ Then, I would say, ‘I want this?,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s more like it.’ With a cast this big, a story this big, and a canvas this big to paint, it needed to be big. We had to substitute imagination for a lack of funds.”
|
|
|
Emilio Estevez and fiancee Sonja Magdevski at the Hollywood Film Festival Movie Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on October 23, 2006. |
When it came time to assemble the cast that would comprise the 22 characters in Bobby, Estevez cast his father as a depressed East Coast socialite with a younger wife (Helen Hunt), who are in California on a strained second honeymoon. “It’s the second time I’ve directed him, and I adore him. My father is such a professional. It was close to the last day of shooting and we were scheduled to do two fairly light scenes. Around 10 in the morning, my father got a call that John Spencer had died. John was one of his best friends, and a man he had just spent seven years with on The West Wing. He called him Brother John. That my father was able to stay with it and do the scenes was a testament, not only to his professionalism, but to his love for me. He didn’t fall apart. It was a very difficult morning because I knew what he was going through, but it was also December and we were losing the light, and it was an exterior scene.”
Rather than seeing it as an anti-war film, Estevez says Bobby is a pro-life and pro-people film. With the racial climate at such an explosive level in 1968, the 44-year-old New York native wanted audiences to see Kennedy as the visionary that he has always viewed him as. “He was the first politician who stood up with the guys in the kitchen. When people ask what Bobby Kennedy’s more admired qualities are, the first thing that comes to mind was that he was tough. Second, he told the truth. And, third, he stood up for the little guy. He was a voice to the people of color.”
Estevez will always be remembered for his portrayal of football jock Andrew Clark in the John Hughes classic The Breakfast Club, also starring Brat Packers Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Michael Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, but he also didn’t mind talking about the experience to his young Bobby co-stars.
{quote_bottom}“It’s their frame of reference. It’s a blessing if you get to be in what people consider a classic movie, once in your life. I’ve been in a couple that have withstood the test of time. Repo Man is a cult classic. And, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire are movies that people still remember and talk about. It’s a privilege to be able to be associated with that. Its nice to have a 15-year-old come up to me on the street and say, ‘Ah, man, I just saw The Breakfast Club,’ even though they weren’t alive when we made it. It’s pretty extraordinary that it speaks across generations.”
Having virtually disappeared from Hollywood about 10 years ago, Estevez is ready to get back into the Tinseltown game. “While I was writing Bobby and trying to get it done, I was writing other things as well. Hopefully, I’ll be able to blow some dust off of those and get them out there. We’ll see.”
