Interview (Written): Kelly Masterson
From Indiewire:
Playwright turned screenwriter Kelly Masterson has had three of his works make it to screen so far, and they’re an eclectic, impressive bunch. The first, 2007’s crime drama “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” became the acclaimed final film for Sidney Lumet, featuring some very fine performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei. The second, “Snowpiercer,” is an adaptation of a French graphic novel that’s serving as “The Host” director Bong Joon-ho’s English-language debut, and has become the center of an ongoing controversy as U.S. distributor The Weinstein Company has announced plans to snip 20 minutes for the film’s release here.
The third is headed not for the big screen but the small — “Killing Kennedy,” National Geographic Channel’s second foray into the assassination of a president following “Killing Lincoln” earlier this year (both films are produced by Ridley Scott and based on nonfiction books of the same name by Bill O’Reilly). Directed by Nelson McCormick, “Killing Kennedy” is anchored by Rob Lowe as John F. Kennedy, though it’s relative unknown Will Rothhaar who steals the show as Lee Harvey Oswald. The film, which premieres Sunday, November 10 at 8pm, follows the final years in the lives of both the President and his killer as they converge at Dealey Plaza, and is the highest profile of a slew of movies and specials set to air as we approach the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. After spending some time visiting the sites of Kennedy’s last day in Dallas and Fort Worth with Masterson on NatGeo’s press day, Indiewire caught up with the writer by phone to talk about picking the right moments from history to highlight, Oswald’s psychology and the amount of collaboration allowed to a screenwriter.
You’ve mentioned having always been a Kennedy buff, but the amount of historical material that’s out there about someone like JFK, whose life has been so intensely documented, has to provide a challenge for you as a screenwriter in terms of deciding which moments to take.
Yeah, a big challenge, and I will tell you the truth — I was so confident, I was so cocky when I got the job. I though “ah, this is my dream job.” I thought I knew the material backwards and forwards, I could just knock this out of the park. I sat down and started writing, started working on the outline to figure out what to include and what not to include, and I got frightened with the process because it’s really overwhelming — the amount of material that’s out there and the sheer breadth of what his presidency was.
Even the Bill O’Reilly book is pretty big in scope in terms of what it wants to achieve. I found that what was important to me was to move beyond just O’Reilly’s choices, because I wanted more personal choices. You might recall in the movie, there are several intimate moments in each of their lives, and those weren’t necessarily in the book, and that required a lot of research. So it was very challenging, but also very rewarding once I had turned in that script and they gave a green light to it, to face that challenge and get close to getting it right.
And on a platform like National Geographic, there’s a certain amount of expectation that you’re going to include those big, historical, moments. Was that something you sought to balance out with these personal moments?
We wanted to hit all of the important signposts along the way. There were some iconic things that we absolutely wanted to include, like John-John saluting — moments like that are really touchstones for memories of people. But at the same time there were things that I didn’t want to include over and over, like the Zapruder film. I certainly didn’t want to recreate the assassination because I knew we couldn’t do a good job of it, and I didn’t want to recreate JFK’s campaign cause I knew I couldn’t do a good job of that. It was a matter of finding some archival footage that would help us touch the stones but also go behind all of that and find something about JFK we didn’t know, and Lee, who is not as well known to American public.
For the rest of the interview, go here.
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