By Fred Topel | Images property of Columbia Pictures.
Vantage Point tells the 23 minute story of a presidential assassination attempt from eight different points of view. That meant shooting the same sequence eight different ways. Matthew Fox plays Secret Service agent Kent Taylor, doing the same actions whether we're right on him or seeing him in the background of another scene.
Matthew Fox on Vantage Point
"Just on a technical basis, film can be a very tedious process, but when you get into a situation where you're going to tell the same events through eight different perspectives, it becomes like eight times as tedious," said Fox. "You're doing these sequences over and over and over again."
Fox could take some inspiration from his colleagues though, who showed what it meant to be troopers. "I just remember watching William get shot on that podium and I was so impressed by, it didn't matter what perspective we were in and how far away that action was happening from what the perspective that [director] Pete Travis was focusing on, William Hurt every single take was so there. He was so there. That's a professionalism that I respect a great deal. So it was challenging in that respect."
Each performance had to be identical, because even though there are twists, it would be cheating to hint at them in different takes. "You do want to do that but you have to be careful. That was the real fun thing for Pete Travis and I to do together. I loved working with him and he's a real actor's director in that he gets right in there with you. He's thinking about the character from the point of view of the character. We really tried to orchestrate and massage those little opportunities that we had that in the rewind, in the sort of review, either visually or in your mind, to go, 'Oh, I should have seen that the first time.' But you can push that too far."
Vantage Point
Playing a Secret Service agent in a compromising situation was not ideal from the agency's perspective. While they did not let Fox in on their top secret procedures, the filmmakers did their best to achieve realism.
"Well, it was always very important to Pete that we pull off the logistics of what we were doing as Secret Service agents and as that whole team, that the real physical elements of it, where guns are carried, how voice things are used, the structure of getting in and out of cars, that that was accurate. We did have consultants. The Secret Service is a fairly secretive organization. We had consultants that were affiliated with them enough to give us advice that was accurate, so I hope that any Secret Service agents that see the movie would feel like we didn’t make any glaringly bad mistakes."
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