By Fred Topel | Images property of Columbia Pictures.
Vantage Point may have eight different points of view, but none of them helped William Hurt play his character. He is the president in an assassination attempt seen from all sides, but not one side actually describes who the president is. They don’t even name his first name.
Hurt Presidential in Vantage Point
"That was part of the thing with playing President Ashton," said Hurt. "Am I just another WASP president having to deal with people of color? Am I in that position because of my racial inheritance of Anglic imperializing of the world? Or is there a real human being here who actually has as part of his legacy some of the freedom mindedness of some of his progenitors. And willing to challenge notions of slavery, of suppression of other people's fear of own personal gain. So this is an international film and hopefully maybe its only central statement but a perfectly valid one is that everybody sees the same event from a different point of view, your Vantage Point. Okay, it's a simple thing to say and everybody knows it, but nice to have it confirmed and at speed, because everything's happening fast."
Signs from the crowd include incendiary accusations of territory, suggesting some of the current worldviews facing our country in real life. "That's one of the good things about the movie. It's kind of saying that we know that that's there. Also, to some extent, it's always worrisome when you're doing White House series or playing presidents or whatever. Are you demeaning the office by playing it or are you making people know that there are still human beings in there? How do we elect leaders, expect so much of them and then expect them not to be human? It's the classic problem."
Still, the film was not about Ashton's agenda. He just had to be there eight times in a row. "What I was trying to do was allow thoughts like these to happen to me when I acted the role. So that when you look, you don't see the WASP, arrogant, arbitrary, grandiose, egocentric, imperial. You see someone who's wondering about solutions if there are, because I was. I was wondering. I did the best I could but as I said, no one even told me his first name. No one ever told me what state he was from."
Vantage Point
For an immersive actor like Hurt, Vantage Point was more about the concept than the character. "This was not an acting exercise, not very challenging exercise I have to say that just in terms of skills. But it was challenging in terms of filmmaking infrastructure. That’s another skill. But I would take a map and I would find the street you come from. I would find out the second you were born. And I would start pulling everything. My job is not to show you who I am. My job is to imagine being that."
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