E-Mail This Article to a Friend Character Assassination (continued)
	Related stories Penn pall: The Assassination of Richard Nixon aims high. By Peter Keough

An e-mail Penn sent to Stone and Parker chiding them for their politics and inviting them to join him on his next trip to Baghdad was widely distributed. I told Penn that the two had reacted to the note with derisive dismissal when the subject came up at a junket promoting their movie.

"That had nothing to do with that movie, that had to do with a moronic statement by a young guy who’s experiencing male-pattern baldness. He’d decided that he’d influence kids not to vote in Rolling Stone magazine. And then they made it public because they were willing to sell anything. But that was ahead of the movie. It was written as a personal letter, and they went and released it. They didn’t get back to me on my invitation; in fact, I saw them on a talk show, The Man Show, where they made a point that they would not want to hang out with me there. They should get in touch with me, ’cause I’ll bring them. I’ve got a good travel agent who knows the flights, and we can go."

What does he think they would find there?

"I think they would die," Penn said matter-of-factly. "It’s just that dangerous right now. But let’s not over-invest in a conversation of some guys who are like the knitting club of cinema."

So we turn our attention to The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a film whose title alone isn’t going to win many points with Fox News (though it might with Parker and Stone). Written by first-time director Niels Mueller in 1999, it has, if anything, gained relevance in light of the events of the past five years.

"I heard about it in ’99," Penn recalled. "Niels Mueller had gone to film school with Alexander Payne [director of About Schmidt and Sideways]. Alexander had established himself already, and I knew some of his work. I liked his work, and I heard that Alexander was producing it. They had a different financier than [the one who] ultimately did it, at that time. So they sent a script, I read it, and I was interested right away. I flew up to San Francisco, and we sat down, and I agreed to do it if they could make it happen. But like anything that breaks the three-thoughts law — if you have more than three thoughts in a movie — it was hard to finance."

September 11 probably didn’t help matters.

"You know, it certainly had a ‘wow, what does this mean to us?’ effect. And we found that everything we were reacting to, that we felt would be reflected on, had already been reflected on in the script prior to that. So then following that, we wondered if that would make it more difficult to finance. Because it had been difficult, we had gone through a few financiers. This was not one of the easy ones to get done, by any means. Because it happened fairly early in that process that Jorge Vergara got involved, the producer, we never really found out if we would face heightened difficulties because of that or not. Then there were questions that come up in conversation about what was it going to mean in terms of how would people respond to the picture, would they be willing to see it, because of the parallels. That made less options in terms of distributors. But things have gone along at a reasonable pace. Five, six years isn’t a long time from the time you read an intriguing script until the time that it comes out."

Given the nature of audiences’ — or at least film critics’ — memories, the more likely comparisons won’t be made between Bicke’s attempted crime and Al Qaeda’s actual one, but between his character and that of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. Was that a concern at all?

"I think that it’s an easy way out for someone writing about film," Penn said. "We didn’t take that easy way out, and so if they do, then they’re not reflecting on what we did. I’ll be clear on that. They’re separate entities.

Did the Assassination filmmakers ever think about changing the character’s name?

"No, because that [Travis Bickle] was a fictional name, and this is a real one. No, it wasn’t a concern. We weren’t going to take the time to disguise something based on prejudices that we weren’t invested in. You see, I have a thing about people who write about cinema. I think they are generally not responsible to it. I know that it [Taxi Driver] was in no way an influence on us. I remember when I did The Pledge, there was a writer for the New York Times who said, ‘This movie was influenced by such and such,’ a movie I had never heard of! I later got a copy of it, which I still haven’t seen, which I hear is a wonderful film, Humanité. So there’s the New York Times telling me about influences that I had never seen!"

On the other hand, I noted, Assassination can’t help but benefit from comparisons between the president of the title and the one who was, at the time of the interview, up for re-election. Comparisons between the early ’70s and the present day.

"I think that it would be naive to think that cycles don’t return. Immediately, I’m more concerned with the way in which they’re trying to disable the comparison with Vietnam. Of course they’re comparable! Of course we’re returning to the same mistakes. In terms of the potential of another blacklist and how it might affect me personally, there were a few incidents at the height of people’s patriotic exultation after 9/11. But I’m a pretty optimistic person, and I think that there’s a lot to be hopeful about as we sit here right this second. Iraq is happening, blacklist isn’t happening. Some incidents have happened, [but they’re] not happening right now. The war is happening, and it’s getting worse every day. So I’m hopeful that there’ll be some change starting, but I think that you’ll have to write off a lot of lies that are going to go for a lot of years.

"One of the greatest parallels I see between this movie and the current situation is not the parallel between Nixon and Bush, but in fact the parallel between Sam Bicke and Bush. Where one has no power, he deals with his insecurity the way he deals with it in the film. And the other has complete power, and he deals with it the way he deals with it. They are both deeply insecure characters.

"Nixon was insecure, but he had a professional capability in his statesmanship. There was something to function on that had a kind of practical and sober approach, although maybe misguided, in fact certainly misguided. In Bush’s case, though, there are no skills. So all you’re left with is the transparent dysfunction. Well, he’s determined to be the last president. He has an apocalyptic ego in place of an actual ego. He’s a man of deep, deep insecurity. He supplants that with certainty."

Speaking of certainty, any predictions for the future?

"I think that it can go close either way, or that it could go landslide Kerry. Can’t go landslide Bush. My prediction is constitutional crisis, it’s going to go on for months. But whether we follow either the movements of President Kerry or the impeachment of George Bush, I think what’s going to happen is an increased activism in the country."

Actually, I was thinking more about the outcome of the World Series.

"I think the Sox are going to win," said Penn, confidently. "Just because we need it. We need the undoable to happen."

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com