by Ray Richmond
photos courtesy of FX Networks

"To be honest, I think I was more nervous about it than they were," acknowledged Dornhelm. "I was convinced that I'd somehow screw this up. I said to myself, 'this is so out of my league. I've had so much luck, and now it's time for me to screw up a little bit.' But Bob was insistent."

"Bob" in this case was Bob Cooper, CEO of Artisan Pictures and Vice Chairman of Artisan Entertainment. He knew the kind of commodity he had in Dornhelm, who had been nominated for a 2001 Emmy for his work behind the camera on the ABC miniseries, Anne Frank, and exhibited his directing craftsmanship mere months before on another fact-based FX original project: Sins of the Father. Cooper had served as executive producer on Sins, as he would be for RFK.

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Indeed, CBS had telecast the four-hour Robert Kennedy and His Times in 1985 from director Marvin J. Chomsky, starring the late Brad Davis of Midnight Express fame.

"I could not see (that) whole movie... And I was very depressed," Dornhelm admitted, "even more so because it was a major, major production, with a huge budget."

Dornhelm had no intention of trying to remake the miniseries. As he told a group of TV critics gathered in Pasadena, Calif., in July, "Just to do the proper film that doesn't upset anybody was never my intention. There's no point repeating the same story you've seen many times before."

So how does a European-born craftsman who started out as a documentary filmmaker do Bobby Kennedy differently? The existing RFK script drafted by Hank Steinberg — who so memorably chronicled the 1961 home-run race between Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle for HBO's Billy Crystal–directed 61* — provided Dornhelm with some significant clues.

A draft of the teleplay was complete when Dornhelm signed on to RFK. It stood out from the CBS mini of some 17 years before by concentrating on the final nearly five years in Kennedy's life — opening with his brother, President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 and closing with RFK's own murder at the hands of an assassin in June 1968, as he campaigned for president in Los Angeles.

"I was trying to talk the network into never showing (John Kennedy), into just seeing a shadow or a reflection or a hand with a voice," Dornhelm said. "And they felt that would be a cheat, wouldn't be quite enough. I also discovered that we could go much further if we introduced him."

The ghost device was ultimately a way for Dornhelm to "put my own handwriting" on the screenplay. "It allowed us a fresher approach into the subject. Because if you're going to go into somebody's head, you have got to do more than just reproduce the facts. The story of the Kennedys is already so rich with Greek tragedy mixed with Shakespearean. You have the old man who wants his three guys to run the Free World. The first one crashes in a plane, the second and third ones get killed.

"But truly, my first desire on this film was to make a play out of it. And I wanted to make it a straightforward ghost story. We had a version of the script that started out with, 'I killed you, Jack.' And Jack says, 'Oh c'mon, Bobby, don't be so melodramatic.' It all gets back to the killing of the king. And the brother feels responsible for it. Using the device of the ghost, Jack helps us get inside Bobby's skin a little bit. Whether it's the perfect solution for getting in his head ... well, probably not."

Under Dornhelm's supervision, the RFK script would change fairly significantly in the rewrites from Steinberg's original. The earlier draft was rich with the politics that defined RFK. What Dornhelm added to the soup was personalization designed to elevate the film from the ranks of biopic. The realities of a swift five-week shoot (through May and June 2002 in Toronto) also necessitated alterations.

"What changed in the script are the intimate moments, streamlining them with more simplification," Dornhelm said. "We used more archetypes to tell the story. We represent his three advisers as a cynic, an idealist and a pragmatist. I don't think you can deal in 90 minutes with many more characters than that."

But to Dornhelm, the linchpin for the entire project was casting the right actor to play Bobby. For a romantic figure like Robert Kennedy, whom a significant chunk of the audience believes they already know inside and out, the importance of the man chosen for the role couldn't be overstated.

"I knew that if I could not nail the Bobby character, I had nothing," Dornhelm said. "Like when I did Anne Frank. If I don't have the right Anne, I would not have a movie; with her, I could build on it."

Dornhelm went looking for his Bobby in an unusual place: England. He knew there was only one guy he would consider: British actor Linus Roache, with whom he had worked in the 1999 feature he had directed entitled The Venice Project. "I didn't even want anybody else to read," he recalled. "I made it a condition of my doing the movie. I wanted Linus. Of course, casting somebody from England to play Bobby Kennedy seemed like hiring somebody from Transylvania."

Fortunately for Dornhelm, "FX was generous enough and believed in my choice. I admire Linus' acting skills. There was a great physical resemblance (to Robert Kennedy). He's a chameleon. And he's great with accents. People told me it's easier for English people to do a Boston accent."

Dornhelm trusted his leading man enough to allow him to improvise at several points in the script where his character is giving speeches. It's actually scripted as a montage with music, but he wanted Roache to take a crack with verbiage he manufactured on the spot.

For the record, aside from Roache, Dornhelm had a casting process for every other actor in his film, which in RFK includes James Cromwell as Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Donovan as the ghost of John F. Kennedy, Marnie McPhail as Robert's devoted wife, Ethel Kennedy, David Paymer as adviser Dick Goodwin and Ving Rhames in the composite Martin Luther King-like role of Judge Jones.

None of the actors had to make a particularly long commitment. As was the case in Dornhelm's previous film for FX (Sins of the Father), the shoot itself required little more than a month to complete. He began pre-production in February. Production went through May and into June. It was cut in June, completed in July. And the director doesn't mourn the short schedule.

"I don't need to celebrate my art," he explained. "I like to tell stories. Give me the tools, and let's just do it. (Television) is a short-lived media, anyway. We are not doing classic literature. My approach to filmmaking and storytelling is that we all have to serve what's best for telling the story."

"It's not because I know so exactly what I'm doing, because often I don't. We do read-throughs, talk about the part, talk about the character. And before we even block, I think it's important for the actors to simply occupy the space where we'll be filming to determine the physicality of the space. It helps with their comfort level. As for storyboards, I only find them useful if you have an action sequence or a complicated one that you need to communicate with different departments, or if you don't have your own fantasy about how you're going to break down the sequence.

"But all in all, I think you need to trust the creator. Part of the beauty of film is that you don't know what you're getting. It's the surprise of it."

"This film was a lot more impressionistic, with a lot of handheld, and I wanted to be sure I had a DP who got it," Dornhelm said. "(Derick) accepts that we want to tell a story rather than prove what a great cinematographer he is, that every single image is a painting or a piece of art. If it doesn't serve the story, those incredible images bore me. To me, film is not watching beautiful images. It's using images to tell a story."

Dornhelm claims to have "zero" ego. But Dornhelm said that he means it only in the sense that he's happy to implement the suggestions of others on the set as long as they make sense to him.

So calm is Dornhelm, in fact, that he laid down the law on the first day of shooting on RFK: "I said, 'The first person who screams on this set has signed his own death certificate, because I'm going to fire you.' Nobody screams on my set. Occasionally, if there's a lot of people and my 1st AD needs to scream to be heard or use a megaphone, that's the exception. But I always come in on time and budget despite the fact the set is harmonious."

The film's most difficult scene to shoot for Dornhelm was the last: RFK's assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. "It was the only scene where we went into overtime in the whole movie. And it wasn't because we really needed to. But nobody wanted to have him killed. I actually never showed him being shot. I didn't really even want us to hear the gunshots. But I wound up putting those in post.

"In the old days, when we had such an appetite to show violence — you know, the bullets flying, the super slow-motion, the bullet hitting the brain, the blood flying all over the place — we could have done it like that. But Bobby didn't believe in violence on television and exploiting it."

Despite his initial trepidation, Dornhelm would wind up feeling that he did his job and did it well on RFK despite having had no recollection of Robert Kennedy's death at the time it occurred. "Compared to what I expected, it was the biggest, the nicest surprise, in every regard," he said.

This, despite the fact that death literally permeated the film's set — far beyond the subject matter itself. Both of Dornhelm's parents died within four days of each other during pre-production. Marnie McPhail, who portrayed Ethel, lost her father to suicide three days before the filming of the scene where Bobby is murdered. During production, a producer's mother died, as did the mother of one of the cameramen.

In the grand scheme, of course, directing a movie is well down the list of the truly important things in life.

"Bob Altman says it's the most overrated profession there is because what are we really doing?" Dornhelm asks. "You're basically allowing things to happen. The secret is in gently moving. A captain who changes course all the time because the wind blows from here or there is ultimately making a zigzag and will take longer to cross the ocean. If you just calmly try to ride the waves and move forward, I think you cross the sea faster."

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