A Chat With Emilio Estevez…

Emilio Estevez writes, directs and stars in BOBBY, a film about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, he was rewarded with a seven-minute standing ovation. He talks to FilmExposed’s Chris Power about putting his creative slant on political history…

On meeting Emilio Estevez it becomes apparent very quickly that there isn’t a shred of cynicism in his body. This might be what makes Bobby, his star-strewn, multi-narrative picture that takes place on the day and in the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was shot, such an earnest piece of work. Surely he’s asking for a drubbing by wearing his heart so plainly on his sleeve in these cynical, post-ironic times? “I am unaplogetically optimistic,” Estevez asserts. “I am unapologetically idealistic. And in this world of cynicism and pessimism, and people being resigned, I think there’s no other way to be. I believe we’re better than the bar we’ve set for ourselves, so I think movies need to be a reflection of that. We need to get out of this cesspool that we’re all drinking from.”

If that makes Estevez sounds more like a bible thumping Puritan than a typical California liberal, it seems that America’s recent political past has toughened up the Left. “Unfortunately ‘liberal’ has been turned into a four-letter word in the United States. I think that [the Bush administration] have used it as a way to divide people. I don’t believe in this red state, blue state idea. I think that we are red, white and blue.” Even through one might cringe at such statements, Estevez’s sincerity is apparent, although this doesn’t quite overwhelm one’s misgivings regarding certain parts of Bobby. As for whether it’s a liberal picture, he thinks not. “It’s less about Bobby Kennedy, it’s less about politics. When you look at a scene like the one where Laurence Fishburne is trying to school the Latinos about how to navigate the white man’s world, that’s perhaps the most political scene in the movie, and yet politics is never mentioned. I always felt that the best way to tell a political story was that the politics should come out of the characters in a subtle way, rather than a ham-fisted one.”

Politics aside, though, what were the cinematic inspirations Estevez drew on when planning how to make Bobby work? “I thought that the template for this movie was really more Grand Hotel (1932) than anything else. The idea was to have the hotel serve as a microcosm for everything that was going on in the country at the time, and for these characters to be emblematic of the time. If you think of a snowglobe, Bobby’s tantamount to shaking it up and then throwing it against the wall.”

Given the size of its cast – 22 leads, from Sharon Stone and Demi Moore to Anthony Hopkins and Christian Slater - getting the film made at all was something of a logistical feat. However, as Slater notes, “This was the type of movie where you show up and you just wanna be there, because it was the type of atmosphere where whether you were working or not you were gonna learn something from any one of the great people who were involved.” On that note, given the calibre of the actors - and, it should be said, the calibre of some of the performances Estevez gets from them (achieved simply by “getting out of the way”, as he humbly describes his directing style) – Bobby presumably stands as testament to the worth of a bulging contacts book? Apparently not. “There were a few numbers I had, but for the most part it was all done professionally. I had lunch with Tony Hopkins on a Sunday, and the next day we made the offer through his agent. And then I got a very irate Hopkins calling me moments later saying ‘Wait a minute, you were at my house Sunday, you didn’t mention a word of it, now you’re offering me this film. Why didn’t you talk about it at all yesterday?’ I said because if you don’t like it, it’s not personal. I want this to be professional.” The anecdote displays a typically likable attitude from this most self-effacing of film makers, who concludes that aside from the politics and it’s historical resonances, “you could really have called this movie Ordinary People if the title wasn’t already taken, because it’s less about Bobby Kennedy, it’s less about politics. This movie is, in many ways, a disaster movie; it’s a disaster movie of the heart.”

Chris Power