yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Telling History: Behind the Scenes | Killing Reagan


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

What we strove to do, what any filmmaker should strive to do when they're doing a period piece, is to be authentic and to be absolutely real.

"Get out of here, Road's okay! Stage Coach rolling! The crow that stage Co are you hit!"

"Damn it, Jerry! I think you br my WR!"

We took great pains in being historically accurate. We had two different teams at National Geographic who were at my disposal, making sure that I got everything right. You know, there's a certain amount of artistic license that writers take. We came up with a story that is engaging and, at the same time, is flawless in terms of its research.

"Get his clothes off, please!"

So, a couple of months after the assassination attempt, all the doctors and all the nurses that were involved in saving Ronald Reagan's life put together their own little mini-documentary. They reenacted everything exactly as it happened, and so this became extraordinarily valuable to us.

"Mr. President, today we're all Republicans."

I think the thing that we've been blessed with on all of our killing Productions is, foremost, writers who are incredibly facile with the material and deeply familiar with it.

And so, they can again take something that we already have some basic walking knowledge of and transcend that. We're exposed to those things we recognize, and yet we get a different perspective on them.

I don't think we even realized when we cast Tim and Cynthia how truly lucky we were to have two people who were equally committed, deeply researched these roles, and who have such an alluring and sort of complex relationships that we were able to build on screening together.

Eric Simonson, both as a theatrical background as a writer and as a director, I think was able to bring to this sort of a dynamic that gave us an immediacy in terms of our experience of this period in history.

And then, with Rod Lurie, who is a director at the top of his forum, but one who thrives in this political forum, there was such a deep foundation of understanding and determination to tell the story as authentically, as fully, and as dramatically as possible.

And that, to me, is also what defines doing a piece like this for National Geographic.

More Articles

View All
How to Apologize Like an Influencer
The apology video is a rite of passage for almost every influencer with a decent following. For people like you and me, public cancellation is usually nothing but a short-lived spectacle. But for an influencer, it’s an occupational hazard with potentially…
Why The Middle Class Are Financially RUINED
What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here and unfortunately, I have some rather discouraging news. Some of this might come as a surprise to you, and some of it might not. But regardless, here’s what we’re dealing with right now in terms of the middle class he…
Creating scale drawings | Geometry | 7th grade | Khan Academy
Sue is a software engineer. She wants to create a large-scale drawing of a processor inside a cell phone. The processor is a square chip, nine millimeters on each side. Draw the processor such that one unit on the grid below represents one half of a milli…
LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's math content creator on learning strategies
I’m Jeff Dodds. I’m a math content creator here at Khan Academy. I had a fixed mindset for a really long time. I was convinced that I was a math person and I was smart and I was just good at math. So, I remember the first time I really struggled. I was t…
Making SOLID Nitrogen!
Boiling point is something that we normally think of as a stable property of a substance. But it really depends on what the pressure is around the substance. So, for example, water only boils at 100 degrees Celsius if the pressure is 1 atmosphere. So if …
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors | Cosmos: Possible Worlds
OK, just for argument’s sake, suppose we’re nothing more than the sum total of our genetic inheritance. It’s not as bad as it sounds. There are passages in our DNA that are every bit as heroic as anything ever written in any epic saga. [low growl] [gentl…