With its lurid title and premise, Interview with an Assassin might seem an attempt to exploit the still painful trauma of the assassination of John Kennedy. Especially since it’s opening in theaters on November 22, the 39th anniversary of that terrible event.

"I think is a bit provocative to do that," agrees the film’s writer and director, Neil Burger. "But that is way the dates worked out. We did want to open it somewhat around the date, just because there is a heightened awareness of the assassination at that time. I didn’t really want to open it on November 22, but it’s a little bit out of my hands at this point."

Burger, however, doesn’t feel that the film is so much about the assassination and its unanswered questions and conspiracy theories as about the nature of truth, delusion, and making one’s life meaningful. In it Ron (Dylan Haggerty), an unemployed TV cameraman, investigates claims made by Walter (Raymond J. Barry), a reclusive neighbor, that he shot JFK. Ron is motivated first by curiosity, then by ambition, and finally by obsession in this digitally shot mock documentary that’s a combination of Oliver Stone and The Blair Witch Project.

"To me it was not so much an examination of the Kennedy assassination but an examination of these two men who feel like they are nobodies and do something to make themselves special," Burger explains. "Walter at the end of his life, to make his life meaningful in some way, whether he is telling the truth or not, and Ron to somehow pull himself out of some hole that he’s in and make himself more significant. So it was a more personal movie in that I can identify with those people, a lot of people can identify with them, with being in a rut in your career or your marriage or whatever. Feeling the need to get some kind of break."

It was a personal movie also because Burger himself was similarly tempted several years ago.

"I was doing a TV documentary," he recalls. "I was an associate producer on it, and I was sent down to Texas to interview these World War II aces. I was alone, I was just out of college and I was in a bar eating a hamburger after work, and this old guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him, and then he said ‘I got a story that should be all over the place . . . ’

"But he didn’t really tell me, I had to draw it out of him, and I wasn’t really that interested in drawing it out of him, and finally he said that he knew somebody that was involved in the JFK assassination and then he wouldn’t talk too much about it, he was this very old strange guy, and he got up to go to the bathroom and never came back. Maybe he was telling the truth, so it stuck with me for years afterwards and I actually wrote a movie treatment based on it."

Years later Burger again faced a situation not unlike that of his protagonist. His career also seemed to have come to a dead end, and the old assassination story beckoned.

"I had a film that was supposed to happen that fell apart six weeks before we were supposed to start shooting. It was one of those Hollywood nightmares that you never think is going to happen to you. So I turned and wrote the script based on that treatment. I’d had the idea for a long time, it never left me, it stuck with me."

The subject has stuck for a long time in the national conscious as well. "It’s an open wound," Burger agrees. "It was the end of a kind of innocence and a real loss of faith in government. I think it influences where we are culturally. What we believe in and who we choose to trust, things like that. I think that people have been groping around since then for something to grab onto that is meaningful and significant, that creates order in their lives. Whether it’s a good or bad thing. A lot of people grab onto conspiracy theories to create order. There must be this kind of nefarious group behind it all, otherwise why would this be happening?

"There is a vacuum of truth, and because of that vacuum people rush to fill it in with other things. The movie moves from the narrative to thematic concerns to the technique itself, plays with those issues, tries to explore the issues of what’s real and what is true. Somebody did this thing, there is an objective truth, it’s just getting there is such a torturous journey. It’s so hard to figure out what is. How do you find the truth?"