Breach
Interview: Eric O'Neill on Breach
“The movie [Breach]
is my fault,” said O’Neill. “I came up with it with my
brother David so it’s not like I got approached and they said, ‘Hey,
we want to make a movie of your life.’ Nobody knew about me. So, I,
with my brother, went out and worked with two other guys Adam Mazer and
Bill Rotko and we formed a sort of partnership and came up with the movie
idea which was really David’s more than mine. I was telling him the
story, brother to brother, after the case broke and he said, ‘We’ve
got to make a Hollywood movie’ and I said, ‘You’re nuts.
There’s no way. I’m in the FBI, buddy. We can’t just go
makin’ movies about stuff.’ He’s like, ‘No, no.
It’s a great movie.’ And shortly thereafter I left the FBI and
then he was like, ‘Okay, now can we make the movie?’ And so
that’s how that all started.”
Of course, there were many story points that affected other agents, so O’Neill
could not just put them into his biopic. “Yes, there was plenty of
stuff that was classified. The way I approached that was I worked very closely
with Billy [Ray] on the screenplay. He would ask me stuff. With the classified
information, I couldn’t tell them a lot of stuff and what I’d
do is once Billy started talking to the FBI I said, ‘Okay, go talk
to the FBI and then call me’ and I’d debrief him. ‘Okay,
tell me everything they said and walk through. You missed something. There’s
something you’re missing. What was it?’ ‘Oh, there was
a camera in the room.’ ‘Good. I can talk about it now’.
Because Billy put it all in the public. Once it’s in the public, I’m
allowed to talk about it. It’s no longer classified. The FBI de-classified
things for the movie.”
The film created some especially dramatic moments as well. “The way
that I went into this, when you find out the Hollywood is going to make
a movie about you, okay, when I found out because I don’t think this
happens to a lot of people, you have to really think hard and conceptualize
how you’re going to deal with it. For some reason, I always get the
question, ‘Did you ever fun on set and say ‘cut, cut, cut! You’re
doing it wrong?’ Like I’m some kind of tyrant. I had to come
to sort of an intellectual decision about how I was going to approach the
fact that they are making a movie about my life. And, that was to step back
and say, ‘This is going to be an incredible process and it will be
a lot of fun and we’ll just see what happens’ and not worry
about that. That scene in the woods never happened and it’s always
tough when I get the question, ‘What about that scene, did that happen?’
‘No’. But there were tensions like that and so many of the tensions
I went through while I was in that case and while I was in my personal life
with that case and the battles I was having with my wife who is hiding in
this room right now, it’s hard to portray in a movie like that. It’s
very personal and you don’t need to have Ryan being Eric narrating
to the audience ‘oh, by the way, this is really hard to show’.
That gun scene is an explosive element that certainly could have happened
but didn’t.”
Scenes of 2001 computer technology were painfully accurate though. “The
pivotal scene with that palm pilot, by the way, is a play-by-play of what
really happened. I watch that scene and I see Ryan sitting at the desk at
the end; dealing with it and sitting at the desk with Hanssen going in and
checking and it brings me right back there. I remember sitting at that desk
and thinking to myself, ‘He’s run into his office. He’s
slammed the door. I can hear his bag unzipping and I know he’s looking
for that palm pilot. He made the pivotal mistake of not having it in his
pocket for once in that whole case. We were trying to get that damn thing
the whole time. And I know that, if it’s wrong, I had to make a decision.
Get up and leave and blow the case or sit there and take what’s coming
to me because I made a stupid mistake. And I just had to figure, maybe I
had like a ten percent chance of getting it right but it’s my fault.
If I’m right and I’m still here, we win but, if I’m wrong
and I’m still here, he’ll probably shoot me.”
Breach is out in theatres now.
For more movie info, go to the Breach
Movie Page.
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