Tagline: A Life Misunderestimated.
A Yale graduate, a transplanted son of Texas, a onetime drunk, a recent convert, George W. Bush was many things but, fundamentally, he was a baseball fan. He always appreciated the elegance of baseball and certainly respected the game’s doubleheaded elements of luck and skill. Had things gone differently, he would have parlayed his co-ownership of the Texas Rangers into the post of baseball commissioner. Alas, he had to settle for another job: President of the United States.
How did this improbable person transform himself from reprobate and well-known black sheep of his esteemed family to Leader of the Free World? “W.” is the story of George W. Bush; a man who struggled all his life with his personal demons, wrestling with them in his father’s long shadow. Essentially a failure until the age of 40, he found God and made an incredible turnaround. Ultimately, this led him to the White House, like his father before him. Yet even this did not win him the favor of George Sr.
Some will argue George W. Bush succeeded; some will maintain he squandered his opportunity. Contention is a part of his legacy. “W.” follows his journey from Yale frat house to Texas oil field to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and in the process, reveals the man who would become the 42nd President of the United States – his struggles, his achievements and consequences of both.
“W.” is not director Oliver Stone’s first presidential biopic – he previously explored the life and times of Richard M. Nixon. That film, “Nixon,” went on to earn four Academy Award nominations. To say that Oliver Stone did not share Nixon’s politics would be a flagrant understatement and yet he presented a balanced, empathic portrait of the man. Stone’s goal was the same with “W.” Going behind the photo ops and and policies, Stone attempts to reveal the man, with all of his foibles and strengths.
“Bush has had tremendous impact on the world. Under his Administration, the Presidency and its powers have never been so enhanced. Obviously, it’s a timely film and our version of his life some people will reject but some will understand. I think ours is definitely a take on Bush that we haven’t seen. Audiences will have a chance to look behind the curtain of an improbable President who we don’t really know because his images have been artificially managed by his team. But what is fascinating is that a father-son story grows at the heart of the movie. For many years I was under the impression that it was more a mother-son story but the more we researched, we found out that the father plays a much bigger role than we thought,” Stone explains.
He adds that this complicated relationship has an overarching effect on George W. Bush and, by extension, on the United States and the world. Something, he adds, the Bush family doesn’t like to examine too much. “A son in many ways competes with his father, rivals his father, some people call it the Oedipus complex. The Bushes don’t like to talk about it. They call it psychobabble. But, going back to the Greeks and the Elizabethans, this relationship is a great, rich, juicy source of drama. The father’s omissions are visited on the son in a sense, they become the son’s sins,” Stone says.
“The essence of the movie is to ask questions about the presidency, what happened, and who the man is? How he got to be President is an amazing story unto itself. At first, he squandered his privileged life. How he got it back, and then what he does with it when he’s President is a fascinating tale,” Stone says.
“W.” arose out of the ashes of another project Stone planned to direct called “Pinkville,” the story of the My Lai massacre. On the edge of Christmas 2007, the movie’s financing fell out. Throughout that year, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser, who had collaborated previously on the seminal film “Wall Street,” (1987) had been developing a movie about Bush, and the sudden demise of “Pinkville” focused Stone’s attention entirely on W’s script. “I felt if we didn’t do the Bush movie at that moment, it wouldn’t be made, not for a long time. Attention spans in this era, particularly as to history, seem to have the shelf life of a fruit fly – there was still a long-shot chance of getting it out before the election.”
He and Weiser researched their subject in depth and at the end, divided the story into three parts and anchored fiction in fact. “We never hid our motives – we always were faithful to the truth but also had to condense and dramatize. One act would be the seeds of the man, young, rebellious, a failure at all enterprises – until the age of 40 when he turned it around. The second act comes off his conversion to Evangelicalism, his turnaround in his personal habits, the imposition of a ferocious willpower. He becomes baseball team owner, and then a two-term Governor of Texas, and for a period of time, projected an image of bipartisanship. The third and conclusive act is his presidency – but we didn’t seek to cover the whole eight years, we concentrated on the beginnings focusing on that crucial era between October 2001 through March 2003, when he finally went to war with Iraq,” Stone says.
A truly independent production, Bill Block’s production, financing and sales company QED underwrote the film without a studio attached to distribute. “We went out there in the marketplace and said, `this is all we have in terms of budget. Would you join us in doing this?’ And so many actors and crew members responded,” Stone says.
Stone approached Josh Brolin to play the critical lead for several reasons. “Josh Brolin was a relatively unknown character actor, who came into a stellar year in 2007 with “No Country for Old Men,” “In the Valley of Elah,” and “American Gangster.” I’d know him several years, and there were intriguing parallels between him and the George W. Bush character. Josh, as the son of a Hollywood star, has had quite a volatile life, and shared no doubt many of the crises George W. Bush found himself up against. He was actually 40 years old when we shot the movie, right where Bush was at the time of his turnaround. Josh grew up with a strong father in the limelight, as did Bush, and coming from California ranch country, evoked for me the rural aspect of small-town America that Bush cultivated in Crawford, Texas.
At first, Brolin turned Stone down. “I felt like I knew everything I needed to know about W. and his Administration. That, and Oliver has a very controversial reputation, which I found out later is just superficial. So my perception about him – and, as it turned out, about the movie – was totally wrong. But, initially, I said no. I told him I would love to work with him but I just had no interest in going there. And the fact that Oliver was even seeing any kind of connection between me and Bush was slightly insulting! Oliver, instead of being put off by that, was intrigued. He said, “Just read it.” So, finally, I did. I was taken aback, moved by it — impassioned, really, because I was saddened by it. And above all, I identified with it. I asked my son if he would read it because I respect his opinion a lot. He did and his response was, `You cannot NOT do this,’” Brolin recalls.
After Brolin signed on, the rest of the cast came together quickly. In fact, Brolin suggested that James Cromwell play his father, George Herbert Walker Bush. “I was a big admirer of Jamie Cromwell – he’s so regal-looking and such an amazing actor. A theater guy, and, as it turned out, a very open guy. I had heard of him for a long time – I’d never met him but I thought he’d be perfect for the role and so did Oliver,” Brolin recalls.
Among other aspects of the film that appealed to Cromwell were the father/son relationship and the differences between the two men- both political and personal. “It is about the dynasty. At one point, I accuse my son of destroying that dynasty. You realize how assiduously and painstakingly this family created the dynasty. They have a great investment in it. It has a whole ethos, a code of behavior, with complex relationships and tentacles. That’s all really interesting to me. Oliver communicated the difference in tone and style between the two presidents. One elected to a single term, my character, the elder Bush who has it seems to me, an inferiority or insecurity that’s very deep-rooted. As opposed to the younger Bush, W., whose father was primarily absent. And whose mother is the parental figure after which he patterns his life. Which gives him that certain abruptness and brusqueness and incredible confidence. Once he got power this incredible confidence, which is really who he is, was reflected in how he ran the White House. The peril, of course, is about creating the imperial presidency, and how easy it, easily it has shifted from a man, my character, who seems to have taken a very cautious and circumspect approach to what occurred in the Middle East during the first Gulf War,” Cromwell says.
Although Cromwell says that he “100% disagrees” with Bush Sr.’s politics, Cromwell did try to find aspects of him to which he could relate. “In some ways, we are very similar. He grew up in Greenwich. I grew up in Westchester County. He went to private school; so did I, though mine was maybe not as prestigious. I didn’t go to Yale but I had lots of friends who did. I think what I really identified with was his love of family – I think he is very dear to the people who are close to him,” Cromwell says.
Stone concurs with Cromwell’s assessment of Bush Sr.’s strong sense of family and notes that while W. had a conflicted relationship with his father, the idea of family values has become a key part of his person and his politics. “We shot in the South and many of the people I met there were pro-Bush. When I asked them what it is about Bush that makes them vote for him, they cited three things: Faith, family, and friendship. The most important aspect was his relationship to his family, particularly his wife. They perceive him to be a good husband and that was very important to them,” Stone says, “particularly given the Clinton scandals of the late 90s.”
Elizabeth Banks plays Laura Bush, his steadfast wife. In researching the role, Banks realized that for a public figure, Laura Bush has managed to remain a very private person. “She’s hard to get to know – it seems that her friends and biographers even say that about her. I tried to find those really rare personal moments, in her public appearances or interviews. One of the closest was an interview she did with Charlie Rose. You could tell they were friendly and they were talking about her daughter Jenna’s recent wedding. She let her guard down with him every once in a while and that was tremendously interesting and useful, to see her make jokes here and there. At some point, Charlie Rose asks her to sum up the Administration’s accomplishments and failures and she said, `Can I just sum up the accomplishments?’ Those moments, when she speaks off-handedly and spontaneously helped me find out who this person is,” Banks says.
The crux of Laura, Banks points out, is her marriage to George. “We decided early on, based on the research we had done, that the Bushes are very much in love. Our approach to them is that they are very sweet with each other, very supportive and it informed many of the decisions we made, in terms of how we interacted in our scenes. When I see them together and when I hear them talk about each other and when I consider how long they have been together, it leads me to believe not that she is a very loving, supportive wife but that he is also very appreciative of that,” Banks says.
Banks, of course, read several books and watched as many of her public appearances as possible. But, it was Laura’s inflection, personal style and physical looks that influenced Banks the most. “She was on my iPod and I listened to her in my car a lot. She has a very strong West Texas accent. And generationally, we are very different in terms of our body language and how we hold ourselves. Sometimes actors work from the inside-out of the character but for me this was a very outside-in job. Once I got the wig and the clothes and the hips and the voice, all that exterior stuff, it sparked something inside to help me play her. That was my hope, anyway,” Banks says.
All three actors, as well as Stone, emphasize that they did not want to caricature or demean the Bush family. Having said that, Stone also points out that George Jr. has very specific, well-known idiosyncrasies – something Stone saw up close. “Josh got the walk down for the young Bush, some of the mannerisms but we’re not doing impersonation only. We’re trying to find the spirit of the man. So very few mannerisms go a long way. And of course his malapropisms are famous. Generally I’d say George Bush is a John Wayne-style president, the way he walks and talks – like a cowboy. And in many ways he’s funny, awkward, goofy, and personable, regardless of his politics. He walks in a room and when he focuses on you, you can be charmed by the man, very much so. On that level, he’s an excellent politician, body-reader. Better then his father. He knows how to handle a crowd. Ironically, he’s impatient. He isn’t Clinton, an extremely patient man, who gives you the impression he likes all people, a good ol’ Southern boy. Bush has never been a Southern boy in that sense of patience. He’s been generally irritable in his Washington phase. He doesn’t have the ability for improvisational, spontaneous conversations. There’s a bunch of YouTube stuff that’s hilarious, especially when he gets accosted in public by somebody he’s not ready for,” Stone notes. “On the other hand, many of his fans have told me they like him precisely for that reason – that he’s not fake, slick, overly serious, smiles for camera, etc. He cuts back again to the cowboy image of `tell it straight’.”
The trick, Brolin says, was to explore the evolution and motivation of Bush’s famous quirks and to strike a balance. “We played with the idea of, well, what was he like in Midland? Did he do all that stuff as a young man? Was all the stuttering and breathiness caused by tension? Did it increase in office? How much is too much? This is our version of George W. Bush and his life. It’s worth doing, especially considering the impact he has had on the world.”
While the father-son relationship is a main theme throughout, much of George W.’s inner strength, assuredness, and even stubbornness comes from the influence of his mother, Barbara Bush, played by Ellen Burstyn. As important as the Bush immediate family was, his extended family, his trusted advisors, were equally crucial. Toby Jones plays Karl Rove, W.’s longtime advisor; Thandie Newton portrays Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Advisor; Scott Glen stars as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Rob Corddry as Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, Jeffrey Wright in the role of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Richard Dreyfuss as Vice President Dick Cheney, Bruce McGill as George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, and Dennis Boutsikaris as Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Rove is a polarizing figure, demonized by the left and lauded by the right, but Jones was intrigued by his “inscrutable” personality. “Rove is definitely an enigmatic character. I suppose the challenge of playing him is that he is often defined by the fact that no one can detect where he’s been or what he has been involved in and how deeply. He is manages to be both there and not there at the same time – in literature you read about him, people will claim him to be behind this and that – and the way they know is because he wasn’t there. So there is an elusive quality I find very interesting. Oliver and I discussed his humor too – no matter how much people hammer away at him in an interview, there’s a confidence in him and nobody can touch him and he seems to be slightly amused by this,” Jones says.
Rove, who many consider the architect of the Bush presidency, is often referred to as Bush’s “brain,” but Jones points out that their connection is as personal as it is professional and political “I saw an interview Rove gave about his first meeting with George Bush, Jr. and Rove still gets excited about it. I think that the Bush family and George W. Bush in particular represented a glamour to Rove, an attraction that Rove didn’t feel about himself – he describes himself as a professional nerd. So I think Rove saw in Bush not just a potential leader but a sort of complementary personality. They operate as if they are on a seesaw, often. One fills in what the other doesn’t have, and that was fun to explore,” Jones says.
Jones, who is British, brought a bit of an outsider’s perspective to the very American Karl Rove, as did his countrywoman Thandie Newton, who plays Condoleezza Rice. Newton used her “foreign” status to good effect when preparing for the role. “After I met with Oliver and he asked me to do the part, I went back to London, where I live and endured a healthy dose of terror. Because, honestly, I can’t think of any person I’ve played who is more different than me. But at the same time, that was a great gift because it meant I truly had to step into someone else’s shoes. Shooting began before they needed me, so the isolation of being in a country far away gave me time to concentrate on everything about her. When I thought about how I would approach the role, I thought of Margaret Thatcher in England, who was such an iconic figure when I was growing up – she has mannerisms that are unique to her and so curious. She employed certain affectations to make herself more likeable, more accessible and I found similarities in Condoleezza Rice. There is a manufactured quality to her and I tried to discover the manufacturer. So I started reading a bunch of biographies, focusing on the years between 2001 and 2004 in the Bush Administration. And it was an unusual process because I think what I try and do normally is feel something about a part, try to empathize when I approach a role and that leads me to the character. But that was more of a struggle with this character, because it’s so much about how she produces herself, her image, which every politician these days does. I watched her a lot. I watched the way she moves. I watched her when she was nervous. Then I watched her so much that I was able to identify certain foibles, the things that happen to her when she’s relaxed and has had time to prepare vs. when she’s put on the spot in a press conference. And, little by little, I learnt her. For instance, I learned she was a figure skater. I suppose it was like learning the steps to a dance – I learned the key steps to her physical persona, and then how to improvise,” Newton says.
Newton turned to an unusual model to ready herself for the role. “I thought of the artist Cindy Sherman and how she transforms herself with make-up and posture. So, like Cindy Sherman, I spent time in front of a mirror with Miss Rice close by on a screen on a DVD player. I wasn’t sure whether my preparation would be correct or not. But when you work with someone like Oliver Stone, one of the greatest things he does is he gives you total responsibility for your character. So, of course, you work harder than you’ve ever worked before because you want to give him your best work,” Newton says.
Scott Glenn, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, portrays a man who has been in public life for over 30 years and is the only person ever to hold that top Pentagon post twice. While he is a formidable character, it is not the first time Glenn has played such an iconic figure. “It’s the second time I’ve actually played someone who is well-known and still living – I played Admiral Shepard in `The Right Stuff.’ In that film, it was probably more critical that I get every nuance down because there were really two people playing Alan Shepard – the real Alan Shepard and me because (director) Phil Kaufman would cut back and forth between newsreel footage and the performed stuff. In this case, it wasn’t that wickedly crucial but having said that, I really tried to approximate him as best I could. The inside may be me but, you know, he has a Midwestern accent, he doesn’t use his bottom lip much. He doesn’t sit still. His hands are never idle. He was a wrestling champion in high school and varsity captain at Princeton. I was a varsity wrestler on a state championship team and a captain of my wrestling club in college. And so there are things about him that, given that sport, I can understand and sort of hang my hat on,” Glenn says.
As a character, Glenn notes that Rumsfeld is fascinating and, although one of the Administration’s more controversial members, nonetheless, he was singularly impressive. “There’s a purity about him, a lack of apology that is appealing. Also something rock hard and true about him. I love that he lived in such a high-pressure, critically important, potentially lethal world. And yet his language was right out of “Ozzie and Harriet.” “Gosh, gee-whiz, jeepers.” “Golly. Goodness gracious.” I have trouble playing someone I don’t like on some level, so I said to everyone I met who knew him, `Tell me the best things about Don Rumsfeld.’ I found out he has a great sense of humor and deep sense of honor – one person put it this way, which I thought was the best example: When 9/11 happened, George Bush got the news in a school room in Florida. And you can interpret what was going through him at the time, but he did sit there in that schoolroom for a while. Dick Cheney was huddled in a bunker underneath the White House with the Secret Service agents all around him. Don Rumsfeld was running in and out of the Pentagon as it was on fire helping to carry out wounded.”
Rob Corrdry, who, through his work on “The Daily Show,” has experience with political satire and the Bush Administration, plays Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. In fact, Corrdry tried to contact Fleischer in advance of playing him. “I spoke to Ari Fleischer, though mostly about how he didn’t want to speak to me. It is my first time playing someone who’s actually living – at first I thought it would be easier – I would just have to Wikipedia the guy. That’s not how it turned out. I did end up studying him – there’s a lot of footage, of course, because he was always in front of the press – and the thing that fascinated me about Ari Fleischer is how unflappable he was. He was always on the front lines, the messenger of the Administration but never lost his cool. He was very, very good at his job – I hope I’m half as good playing him as he was at his job,” Corrdry says.
Corrdry adds that working with Oliver Stone was a thrill and a learning experience. “For me, the best thing about Oliver is that he is so direct – there is never a question about how he feels about your work or a certain scene. It’s a relief. He’ll just tell you when you’re not doing well. It’s so refreshing to have a director say, `That was terrible. Do that again this way.’ And when you get it, he will say `That was great!’ And you know it really was. Whereas many directors I’ve worked with will say things like, `So, uh, how did you feel about that scene?’ I’m thinking, just tell me what to do! You’re the director! Oliver has no problem with that – it takes a lot of the pressure off,” Corrdry says.
Rounding out the cast is Jeffrey Wright, as Secretary of State Colin Powell, who perhaps is the closest character to a Cassandra of the Bush Administration. “I loved the balance between the moral and tactical decisions that Powell made. I love that he had a sense of practicality about him and that he questioned the Administration and was, in come ways, isolated from it. But, ultimately, he was complicit in it all. I thought the script made a fair judgment of Powell. Overall, I thought there was a completeness to W.’s journey from Yale to the present and a great deal of entertainment in his personal history. I thought there was an even-handedness in the presentation. I had seen Oliver’s `World Trade Center’ film which had a similar type of balance and sophisticated tone. So, I was drawn to the script for all those reasons,” Wright says.
Of course, Powell delivered the career-ending speech to the UN that detailed intelligence reports about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability and ultimately led to the US invasion of the country – “facts” that later were discredited. “Obviously, we know the significance of the role he played in arguing for the course of war and how it worked to the detriment of his credibility and career. But I was pleased to discover other aspects about the man I hadn’t known. I read his autobiography and researched all his achievements. He was only the second, black four-star general. He had an impeccable military record. He went on to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was an example of a devoted citizen serving his country through his work, an incredible, great man. It gave me much more context in terms of his journey within the Administration and was very illuminating. He was a tragic hero, a great soldier sacrificed in the course of this war,” Wright says.
In playing him, Wright changed physically – he gained some weight in an effort to capture the fundamental nature of Powell, this commanding presence. “He had gravitas but also a boyishness and lightness about him, in spite of the levels of responsibility he experienced. He had a wonderful ease, and it was a challenge to find the grace and comfort with these enormous responsibilities he had. At the same time, he has an exceptional fluidity in the way he moves. He talks about, in his book, that part of his strength as a soldier and a leader of men comes from his ability to communicate,” Wright says.
In the course of the film, W. has a pivotal and illuminating meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, played by Ioan Gruffud. Although Grufford’s work on the movie was brief, he enthuses the cast and crew made him feel like “part of the family.” Much of that esprit de corps he attributes to Oliver Stone’s rigorous rehearsals.
“What’s lovely about the way Oliver works is that we rehearse several times (prior to principal photography) and so we got to know each other as actors beforehand. And if you have any sort of relationship off-camera, it always informs the relationships on camera. I was also lucky in that I know Josh socially and have known Thandie and Elizabeth for many, years. And, of course, with rehearsals you get to know each other even more and how one is going to go about playing the scene. It helps you get over any nerves you might have. The discussions were already done beforehand. So when we came to shoot it, we were just shooting it. We already were the characters. And what’s lovely is, you delight in seeing somebody transform into the other character. The first time I heard Josh speak was extraordinary, my goodness, the transformation! And the same with Thandie and Elizabeth. Their work gave me a lot confidence to trust my interpretation of Tony Blair,” Gruffud says.
Stone is well known for his inimitable directing style – part coach, part drill sergeant, part psychologist, part scholar, all artist. All these aspects coalesced on “W.” “The older you get, the quicker you realize when you’re truly `bored’ with the obligatory, the conventional, the pap answers, the hagiographies, the usual suspects. So I guess moving around the set, if a scene is boring me, I want to make it deeper. Or ask another question. Or provoke something in the actors as well as the audience, and myself too, because it’s just tedious if I’m just shooting a movie where everything’s predecided. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Why am I wasting everybody’s time and money? So the essence of the movie all during production was to ask questions about the presidency, to probe deeper into what happened, and who the man is. How he got to be the improbable president – an amazing story unto itself,” Stone sums up.
This constant inquiry and honing was an exhilarating and unique experience for Josh Brolin. “Oliver creates his own world on a movie set and we got along brilliantly, personally and creatively. It was a fascinating process – without pushing this too much, the atmosphere that was created on the movie was not preordained – it was a collaborative evolution. So to be with somebody who’s that open and bold enough to allow the chemistry to take its course is phenomenal. Oliver is like a little kid in a candy store on a movie set, man – a very knowledgeable, educated little kid. He opens himself completely up and he plays. He’s very tough in that he wants it to be truthful. He wants the behavior to be truthful, even if it’s satire, even if it’s dark humor, even if it’s a little more colorized than mere naturalism, he wants it to be based in some kind of reality. So if he doesn’t believe it, he won’t move on and say, `Okay, we don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough money.’ He demands that you get to the core of the scene, the character, and takes you to deeper levels to do it, which I think is great,” Brolin says.
“W.” was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana for nine weeks in the spring of 2008, taking advantage of the state’s tax breaks, as well as its ample variety of locations and stages. Production designer Derek Hill was responsible for transforming Shreveport locales into settings as disparate as Yale, the White House and the Bush family compound in Crawford, Texas, in a tight ten-week pre-production window.
Despite its anomalous Louisiana setting, Hill strove to design the film as authentically as possible. “Working with Oliver, we always try to go as real as possible because the events we are depicting are documented. I checked every detail in the script and if I found the remotest possible deviation, I brought it up to Oliver. The main goal was for the sets to be as accurate as possible so that Oliver’s story could develop within them. Whatever the subject is, working on an Oliver Stone film always makes you a lot smarter. When you’re done, you always know a lot more than you did when you started,” Hill says.
Hill and his team scoured web sites, books, documentaries, photographs from Getty Images and Corbis; they even took their own aerial shots, but for the Texas-specific scenes, Hill also relied on his upbringing. “When Oliver approached me about doing the film, he teased me and said something like, `Well, you know, we’re right in your backyard. I’ve known you for 20 years, so you’ll know exactly what to do on this film.’ And even with growing up there, you still want to be as accurate as possible, and even though I’ve driven through Midland, I’ve never stopped and studied exactly the subject of our film. So I went there to make sure our houses were right, the landscape was right, all the textures were right. And then Austin, I know Austin very well and the Texas Governor’s office is very distinct. We didn’t have the big backdrop of Commerce Street (the main artery) that runs down in Austin, but we got a very good look for what we were needed for the show and replicated it,” Hill notes.
One of the key sets where several critical scenes occur was the Situation Room, the White House variation of the Star Chamber. “Several important scenes take place in the Situation Room, so we tried to design it as accurately as possible but also we had to make it as shootable as possible so that Oliver could get everything he needed. So it’s a little bigger than the real thing to accommodate cameras, crew, lights, equipment – we didn’t want to have to always pull and restore walls, so we worked around the angles Oliver wanted to film and designed the scale around that. We designed the table that the Bush team sits around during their meetings so that it could be pulled apart and Oliver was able to shoot scenes in sections that way,” Hill says.
A pivotal Situation Room moment involves an electronic map that certain members of the Bush Administration use to promote their New World Order. Hill and chief lighting technician David Lee built a circular oval light over the table in the Situation Room. “We controlled it with a dimmer board so the lights came up and down during the scene – the map itself was done via front and rear projection.”
Because the film spans so many years – from George W. Bush’s college days to his presidency – and features so many characters, the costume, hair and make-up departments, in particular, had a particularly challenging job. Costume designer Michael Dennison notes that like the other departments, he rigorously researched the real subjects prior to the film, but its application was always in service of the story Stone was trying to tell.
“In the course of the movie, some characters have seven or eight costume changes, which is a comfortable amount of clothes. Some have 18-21 changes. The Bush family has the majority. Most of Bush’s cabinet members have a look that is specific to the White House but we also had a little fun with that; we weren’t duplicating history. Our costumes are representational, but correctly so. They are interpretations.
The same mantra applied to the make-up – as Stone puts it, the actors were not meant to be `look-alikes’ but “feel-alikes” in terms of the people they played. This meant a specific use of wigs and make-up enhancements – Brolin, in particular, wore several prosthetics – but, not to the point of impersonation, as make-up department head Trevor Proud explains: “Our responsibility was to make the characters believable, as opposed to laughable. The approach we had with Josh was, basically, for the audience to realize that there is something different about him and his appearance has been changed slightly as opposed to extremely. But in a character like Josh’s who is, of course so, well known and in every single scene, the changes have to be so subtle and so delicate that only after a while will the audience actually realize that there is something different about him but will also accept him as George W. Bush, as opposed to Josh Brolin playing him,” Proud says.
Ultimately, Stone hopes that audiences will be as intrigued with the tale of how the Bush family prodigal son overcame the missteps of his youth to become one of the most powerful, and, for better or worse, influential Presidents of the United States – and how his early life informed his presidency. Stone insists this isn’t an indictment or validation of Bush – drama, he points out, is not judgmental.
“We were not out to demean or hurt the man. This is not the right motivation for me to direct. Too much time is involved. Who needs a negative mindset? We let the man speak it in his own words. We set out to show his reasoning for the Iraq war as a function of who he is, his personal history. The hope is when you walk out of the movie, you say, `I understand that guy. I may not agree or like the result, but I understand.’ And that’s drama. I can’t say I liked Oedipus when I walked out of `Oedipus,’ I can’t say I liked Agamemnon, I can’t say I like many of the Greek heroes. Some of them are outright assholes. But you watch them, you follow their story. That’s drama. It may be easier or more palatable to have a character with whom you sympathize – studio executives love that word. But it’s tricky – if we sympathize with everyone, we create a manufactured values system. It’s much more interesting and real if you try to empathize and understand, if not always approve,” Stone says.
Production notes provided by Lionsgate Films.
W.
Starring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Scott Glenn, Ioan Gruffudd, Richard Dreyfus, Jesse Bradford
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Screenplay by: Stanley Weiser
Release Date: October 17, 2008
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language including sexual references, some alcohol abuse, smoking and brief disturbing war images.
Studio: Lionsgate Films
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $25,534,493 (86.8%)
Foreign: $3,881,278 (13.2%)
Total: $29,415,771 (Worldwide)