Christian Slater in Bobby
Interview: Christian Slater On Bobby
“Wasn't there a guy named Sirhan Sirhan?”
he asked the press. “Why am I the villain? I don't get it. I mean
that's the bad guy. I mean, I'm the evil bastard. Demi Moore's a vicious
drunk. Bill Macy's a womanizing cheating bastard, and I'm the villain.”
The scenes in the kitchen deal with the race issues of the 1968 as part
of the microcosm of the world Robert F. Kennedy’s politics represented.
To embody that conflict, Slater could not just be the generic racist.
“It's certainly helpful getting to know myself more so I'm able to
differentiate who I am and what the character is that I'm playing. That
helps. And the exciting thing about getting to be an actor is that you get
to put on somebody else's clothes and get into somebody else's mentality.
I think the richness of the script, really, and the looseness of Emilio's
direction, that really helped to make things feel very relaxed and human
and not stifled. I come on the set and everything's very intense and very
heavy and everyone's excited doing this movie about Bobby Kennedy, and Sharon
Stone is very intense, and they're all whoop de do, la di da, and my character
was certainly much more… I was a human guy a product of that time,
and someone who had a job to do. I wanted every available person to be there.”
Born in the year after Kennedy’s assassination, Slater turned to family
and colleagues for perspective. “I did miss this particular moment
in our history, but I relied on things my parents told me about the Kennedys
and things I'd heard in school and other filmmakers, Oliver Stone, Spike
Lee, who represented this time period rather well. The Kennedys to me have
always represented a certain amount of American royalty, Camelot, and certainly
survived a great deal of tragedy. I love the Kennedys. I love their faith
and belief in people and in America and in the direction we really could
go. Somehow they just seemed to represent a really good quality and aspect
of what's in each and every one of us.”
Among about 20 names listed on the poster for Bobby, Slater
got his role finished in just over a week. “For me it probably took
about 10 days coming in there. It was the type of movie where everybody's
schedule was really, really crazy, and there were so many people and so
many different story lines to put together and film. So there were days
when I would show up and not work, and sit around, but the key for me was
just to be ready. Whenever they did need me I wasn't going to hold anything
up. I just wanted to make sure I was as available to Emilio as I possibly
could be.”
The only time most of the characters are together is during the climactic
assassination. This scene also included people who lived through the actual
incident. “There were extras on the set that could point to themselves
in the actual footage. ‘Yeah, there I am, there I am.’ So that
certainly added to the power and intensity. You could really feel the horror
of it, from when they would say Action to Cut, people were definitely shaking
by the end of that scene.”
Bobby is out in theatres now.
For the poster, trailer, more interviews, synopsis and more movie info,
go to the Bobby Movie
Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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