Telling History: Behind the Scenes | Killing Reagan

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.