Based on an obscure true incident, “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” is one of the most impressive films to be released in 2004. A dark, intense examination of a deeply troubled man named Samuel Bycke (spelled Bicke in the film), writer/director Niels Mueller has crafted a powerful movie that places a fascinating and tragic figure at its core.

Played magnificently by Sean Penn, in the most unforgettable performance of the year, Samuel Bicke is, as Mueller describes, a character who embodies all the complexities of human beings. A firm supporter of society’s underdogs, Bicke is only able to deal with his disgust at a culture that has lost its moral foundation through the most extreme measures. His ultimate act of desperation disturbingly parallels a more recent dark spot in United States’ history.

THINKfilm released “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” which also stars Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson, Michael Wincott and Mykelti Williamson, in New York and Los Angeles on December 29, 2004, and it will expand to more cities in the coming weeks. I had the opportunity to speak to Niels Mueller via phone a few weeks prior to the film’s release.

EI: So you were writing this script prior to learning about the real Samuel Bycke?

NM: The seed for the script, without me realizing it was a seed for a script, was planted in my mind in the mid-80s. There was this horrendous shooting at this McDonalds in San Ysidro, outside of San Diego. I was horrified by it, and I think it was one of the earlier incidents of that kind that came to my attention as an adult. I just didn’t understand how a human being can lose all empathy and lash out in indiscriminate violence, and I wanted to explore a character like that. It was something that had stayed with me, and many years later I started exploring that kind of a character through a fictitious would be assassin. I was originally calling this script “The Assassination of LBJ” -- I specifically chose a president that nobody tried to assassinate because one element of the story that I wanted was an assassination attempt that essentially goes unnoticed. You often hear of these kinds of horrendous events happening, and there’s this grand design that society is going to be changed in some large way through this act of violence and nothing changes, of course.

I started writing this guy, had him separated from his wife and child, obsessing about the American Dream, talking into a tape recorder. I hadn’t figured out the justification for talking into a tape recorder yet, but it was something I wanted to do because I wanted to have thoughts that would act like voiceover without it being pure voiceover. And I had him working in sales -- this was important to this fictitious character. I spat out some lose pages, and then started researching. In this one book out of ten that I took out of the L.A. public library, there was this thin chapter on this guy I’d never heard of named Sam Bycke. He was separated from his wife and children, obsessed on the American Dream, it was extremely important to him to succeed in sales, and he spent the last couple of months of his life talking into a tape recorder. The justification for the tape recorder was provided by the real story, and he was leaving a record of the reasons for his actions on the day of the assassination attempt. On top of that, it’s an assassination attempt that essentially went unnoticed. It was reported as a hijacking attempt initially and was largely forgotten. It was very much this guy I was writing. I brought in all the true story elements to base the story on, and that’s when I got (co-writer) Kevin Kennedy involved. We started writing this together and then did more primary research, getting the newspaper articles on microfilm, a few magazine articles, the FBI file, and built the true story from there. The spirit of the character I was interested in exploring in the fictitious script was very much this character.

EI: How much of a challenge was it to try and understand what might have been going on in Sam Bycke’s head?

NM: That was really helped greatly by the audio tapes, which we had the transcripts of. You essentially have this first-person narrative by Sam Bycke that you’re using to understand the spirit of the man whose story you’re telling.

Let me give you an example of something that exists on this audio tape. You take something that he actually talks about happening, and then you build a fictitious scene. He says on a tape, which we have the transcripts of, “I was over at my friend’s last night. His son gave me a good night hug. A few more hugs like that and all of this probably wouldn’t be necessary.” From there, you build the scene at Bonnie’s where the son gives him a hug good night. The dialogue at the table is invented, but we’ve taken a line of something that was significant to him and built a scene around it. You understood from the tape that the hug was significant to him, and it becomes a significant moment in that scene and in the progression of this character’s isolation and loneliness. Also, more broadly, he talked at great lengths about his frustration with the system. How the system affects people on a personal level -- how he feels people are treated in their jobs to how he feels people are being led by leaders who will lose principle at the drop of a hat. You integrate those thoughts throughout the entire story. You pick up on a notion in both reading the transcripts of the tapes and doing some of the other research that there was a projection of blame on Sam’s part. He projected blame for his own failings onto people around him, and leadership. You also pick up a sense that this was a person who was depressed. In some of the research we did, it talked about him suffering from bipolar depression, which is something we didn’t spell out specifically in the script, but I think it’s portrayed.

EI: Is there any specific reaction -- possibly sympathy -- you’re hoping to elicit from the audience in terms of their reaction to Sam?

NM: I didn’t ever think out loud, or talk about with Sean or any of the other actors, “Let’s try to create a character who’s sympathetic.” I did try to create a truthful depiction of the character based on what I had read and researched, and also what I imagined. I did want to portray the humanness of the character. But these days, human has just a positive connotation, and it shouldn’t. It should have a more neutral connotation because we all, unless we’re completely young and naive, know by now the capacity of the human being to do both great and horrendous things. I wanted the humanity in all its complexity, beauty, and horror in this character.

That said, I think we did create a character on screen that is empathetic. I think if you go with the character, he faces problems that we all face. He’s more sensitive than some people and reacts more strongly to things than many of us might, but he’s dealing with a marriage that’s having serious issues, he’s hanging onto a job, he has financial concerns -- I was dealing with all kinds of financial issues when I started writing the character. If the film succeeds, the audience takes this journey with Sam. I think many people will find him empathetic, but at a certain point he betrays you. In trying to portray the character truthfully, I felt it was very likely that many people would empathize with the character, which is why it was important to me to have the violence at the end be true, graphic, and random.

EI: Did Sam, who had such a pure and ultimately unattainable vision of what the world should be, have any option but to go to a violent extreme?

NM: I think he has many options, and my hope is that people, if they develop empathy with this character, they’ll be saying to themselves, “C’mon, Sam, get on another track. You could succeed in something other than sales. You don’t have to have all of your self-esteem wrapped up in being a successful businessman, or having your own business. Try teaching, try whatever it is. If your marriage falls apart, okay, you’ve got three beautiful kids.” What’s really sad, I think, about this story is how much he has to lose. And that’s by design, also, and what attracted me to telling this character’s story. You find him at the beginning of the film, he’s not a loner, crazed assassin living in a cinder block wall apartment. I specifically chose a place and had Lester Cohen, my production designer, design it this way -- it’s a home. If he chose to unpack all of the boxes stacked up in the dining room and furnish the place, he could make a home, but he kept waiting for the call from Marie. It’s bleak in how he descends, but there are so many options along the way.

EI: But if he did go into teaching, don’t you think he would’ve just found the same hypocrisy in that, or any other, profession?

NM: I think you’re right, and I take the point, but I think it’s the combination of feeling this hypocrisy in society combined with the personal failings he’s experiencing. He feels not only is the system corrupt and failing the honest man, but he can’t provide for his family and his life is falling apart. That’s a position he’s helped put himself in by being so singular in his goal of achieving success in business.

I wanted to make this as singular a point of view film as you’ll see. Sean’s in every frame of the film, just about. If you watch this film in a divorced way from where Sam is taking you and just judge what his decisions are along the way, you see there are choices that he can make, and you hope that most of us do make as you find yourself spiraling downward. There’s a mixing of both the personal and the broad societal, and when that mix becomes completely fused in a downward spiral that’s when it really becomes combustible. If he were able to step out and find something else on a personal level to reverse that spiral then the societal spiral doesn’t necessarily lead one to that kind of action.

EI: Given the parallels between Sam’s actions and the events of 9/11, are you concerned that the film might be too overwhelming for some people?

NM: After 9/11, I went to the Middle East section of the bookstore and it was sold out. I was impressed by how Americans wanted to read and look at things of relevance. The Koran was sold out at my local bookstore. I’d like to think that people want to go at issues of relevance, and if this film has some relevance to that incident that was unintended when Kevin and I wrote it, since we finished the script in 1999, then I think that’s a good thing. I would’ve been more concerned -- probably freaked out -- if I’d made this film when I finished writing it, before 9/11. After 9/11, I had to make a decision -- do I still make this film? And because something that you’ve written has become more relevant, does that mean that you stick it in a dark corner somewhere? My answer was no. The fact that something based on truth -- and that’s really the key part of the decision making process -- has become more relevant shouldn’t mean that you stick it in a closet. The responsible thing to do is to make it.

EI: Can you speak about your collaboration process with Sean Penn?

NM: It’s hard to verbalize, because it took place over the course of four years. I met Sean in 1999, and he said at the time, “You’ve done a lot of my work for me.” It was a huge compliment and still means a hell of a lot to me. He thought the script was really beautifully written and he saw a lot of the character on the page. Right after we met, the financing fell through the first time and it kept almost coming together and falling through for four years. That was sort of a benefit to him and me on one level, because it gave us a chance to know each other and build a level of trust that only comes with time. We’d get together every now and then to talk about where things were with the film financially and have a drink. Ultimately, we’d end up talking about the story and the character, and we’d end up doing a lot of the work without it being about the work. We were just talking about Sam and the story. I’d talk about why I wrote it, and we’d just talk about different things.

By the time we were ready to roll, we were very much in sync on the character and had this level of trust. With Sean Penn, you minimally get what you dream of in your head, and more often than not, you get far, far more than you can imagine. He’s such a great actor and he inhabits the roles he plays. Lines of dialogue that I thought were really important to tell the story of where Sam is at would fall away because Sean would have an involuntary pinch in his forehead that conveyed more emotionally and told you everything about the relationship between him and Marie…Sean works through every cell and muscle in his body. He works through everything he has; he’s just a huge talent.

EI: A lot of interesting names are involved in the film in a producing capacity. Alfonso Cuaron produced the movie, and Alexander Payne and Leonardo DiCaprio are executive producers. How did you get these people involved?

NM: People want to work with Niels Mueller -- it’s all about me! (laughs) People want to work with Sean for good reason. That said, people also need to respond to a script. Don Cheadle and Naomi Watts aren’t going to sign on unless they also respond and feel there’s something in the script. I had Sean to build a cast around, and that’s a big person to be able to build a cast around.

On the producer front, Alexander Payne’s one of my good buddies from film school. I asked him to make a couple of calls for me, and then the producer who originally had the project before his company lost its financing asked him to come aboard as an executive producer. Alexander asked me if I wanted that, and I said yes. I thought it could help us, and he was very helpful. He’s part of my UCLA braintrust -- him, Brad Silberling, Tyler Bensinger. Just a bunch of good friends that I can call up and ask to look at a cut. Alexander was helpful on that front, so he earned his executive producer stripes in a couple of ways.

I directed Tobey Maguire in a short-lived TV show on Fox called “Great Scott!” When our financing was looking iffy again, I called Tobey and asked him if he’d get Leo to read the script, because I knew Leo was putting together a company to finance and produce films. Leo read and loved the script, and said he would help with the financing. He was putting together the financing, but we ultimately didn’t need the money that Leo’s company was going to provide. Jorge Vergara and Alfonso Cuaron didn’t need the extra financing, but they felt Leo had stepped up and wanted him to stay involved. Alfonso Cuaron, who’s one of the great filmmakers around these days, and Jorge Vergara, who’s this sort of visionary producer who wants to do films of relevance, saw Sean talking about his trip to Baghdad on “Larry King Live,” and respected Sean and felt that Sean was a person he’d like to work with. Alfonso is a great filmmaker, who I’ve admired for a long time, and this is my hands-on producer. At one point, I flew over to London and loaded an early cut on the ”Harry Potter” editing system, and I got my notes that way from Alfonso.

EI: What’s one important lesson you leaned making this film that you’ll bring to future projects?

NM: Well…it’s sort of a confirmation of something that I used in film school to calm myself down when I was feeling daunted or overwhelmed, and I was happy to see it applied to filmmaking on this level with this kind of talent. Essentially, film is a simple thing -- it’s a camera and the people you put in front of it. There’s no point in starting the camera up unless you have material that’s worth filming. But like my first day at the airport where I knew there were reasons that we might be shut down because nobody had shot at an airport since 9/11, I had 200 extras, which was a lot for me. I had my A.D. tap me on the shoulder as I heard a jet engine roaring behind me, saying, “Oh, Niels, there’s your jet.” Those are all overwhelming things. What ultimately calmed me down was seeing Sean walk onto the set. I said, “Oh yeah. This is about the character Sean’s inhabiting. I point the camera there, all the rest is background.” It’s a confirmation of this simple notion -- it doesn’t matter if it’s a Super 8 camera, a video camera, a 35mm Panavision camera; it’s a camera pointing at the performer, and that’s it.

EI: What are you working on next?

NM: Since I had four years of financing falling through, I started another script that, for lack of a better title, I’ve been calling my Milwaukee story. It’s an ensemble drama with, I think, a nice undercurrent of humor to it, which is set in my hometown of Milwaukee, WI. I just read it a few weeks ago. It’s not bad, so maybe I’ll finish that one.

EI: Is this something you plan to direct?

NM: If I finish it, I’ll direct it!

Warren Curry