Q&A: 'Commander In Chief' Director Rod Lurie on the 2008 Election

You gotta love the zeitgeist. I don't just mean everything that's going on around us, but the actual word zeitgeist. Only the Germans have words of such delicate specificity.

But in the political sense, the political zeitgeist bleeds far outside the borders of elections and legislation and nightly news round-ups. It includes pop culture, film, TV, YouTube memes. Life imitates art, art imitates life: Grand Theft Auto sparks youth crime, and We Are the World changes it.

So, from the moment Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president, from that cushy couch in that luxurious living room, the first thing that popped into my mind was this question: Was Rod Lurie as important as Susan B. Anthony in paving the way for it?

Writer/director Lurie is responsible for two of the most important contributions to the canon of fictional female politicians: the film The Contender (2000), in which a female senator is appointed vice president, and Commander and Chief (2005), a television show about a female U.S. vice president who is promoted to president after the male president keels over. Both are available on DVD in case once Hillary drops out you wonder what it might've been like or, if she stays in the race, what it might be like in 2012 or 2016.

Lurie took a few minutes to talk in-depth to us about the presidential election on the morning of the fateful North Carolina and Indiana primaries.

DM: It's a crazy day in politics, isn't it?

RL: Everybody's saying by this time tomorrow, the race may have changed, the race may have stayed the same, but really I think that everything right now is simply academic. The question is not whether or not Obama is going to get the nomination. The question is, is he going to limp into the nomination? That really is the question. She's had a nice surge. It doesn't compare to his incredible surge over the past several months.

DM: As a guy who has dealt with politics in film and TV, do you have a lean in the race, do you have any sort of lean in the race, any sort of bias?

RL: I'm very much in the Obama camp.

DM: REALLY?

RL: Yes. Well? Look. I often get that "really" with the caps, the capital letters, because I created Commander Chief and I made The Contender. It's a rather complicated answer, but I certainly would love to see a woman become president of the United States. I don't want any woman. I don't think that every woman is qualified. There are some female politicians who I think, like male politicians, should be excluded from being able to win. I don't really have that much of an animus towards Hillary Clinton, but I don't think that she is necessarily who should be leading the feminist flag. The governor [of] Kansas, for example, is somebody who I have a lot of respect for.

DM: That's Kathleen Sebelius, isn't it?

RL: Yes ... If Hillary Clinton is the nominee of the Democratic Party, I'll be waving a flag for her like I'm in the cast of Les Miserables.

DM: In both The Contender and the Commander in Chief, the female candidate rises to power not through election, but through tragedy or accident. Why was that? Why not through election?

That's a very interesting and complicated question. Those are things that we had to ask ourselves. First of all, in The Contender, a lot of people said that movie was influenced [by] the Monica Lewinsky affair. Really, what I was looking for was the Clarence Thomas hearings. That interested me far more. I ask myself the "what if" questions. What if Clarence Thomas was a woman? And what if that woman had some sort of sexual indiscretion? Clarence Thomas was confirmed. Would a woman be confirmed in a circumstance like that? Can the country stomach looking at their female leaders as sexual beings? I wanted to find an opportunity to put a woman into that scenario, in front of a confirmation hearing.

I was also very interested in exploring the possibility of expanding the role of female leadership in the country, mostly influenced by the birth of my daughter. The only way I could figure to combine the two is to have this woman be somebody that needed to be confirmed into the job. You don't become confirmed as president, but you do need to be confirmed as vice president if you're filling a slot, as Gerald Ford had to be and as Nelson Rockefeller had to be.

As for Commander in Chief, that's the actual presidency. We had to make a decision whether or not she rises into the job or she's elected into the job. If she was elected, the election of a woman is not something an audience would take for granted. They would want to see how that came to pass. What that would require is that we would have to show the entire election process and to see what she went through. The history of television and the history of movies now says that campaign films and campaigns on television shows for some reason don't connect with the audience. Maybe it's because we are so fed up with them in real life. So, we just wanted to get a scenario where we didn't have to have the audience endure an election. We wanted her to be president right away.

DM: If you had dealt with an election, would it be similar to how things played out?

RL: Listen! Let me tell you something. There is no credible screenwriter who would have the balls to write such an insane campaign as the one that we've been going through.

I have a screenplay right now that was very close to being made. It's a screenplay that actually deals with a campaign. I don't want to say what it is, just out of respect for the producers involved, but it's a remake of a fairly well-known film that deals with a campaign. And I wrote it a year and a half ago. It's about a maverick who's running for office, sort of in the world of romantic comedies, so we get away with a campaign in that situation, but it's supposed to be this insane campaign. The screenplay right now looks positively tepid to compared to what's actually going on and requires a significant rewrite.

You look at Obama and Clinton and the way that I look at is, who is the better movie character? Who's the hero if this were a movie? I just think that the Obama story is so unbelievably interesting. What you've got here is this guy ... whose father is an immigrant, he's the product of a mixed marriage, he grows up and gets an education through scholarship, and is a state senator for a little bit, becomes a senator for even a shorter time, [and] all of sudden has galvanized the nation with his enthusiasm and with his brains. On the other hand, you've got a person that was a first lady and that's very interesting. But clearly there's some level of royalty, of passing the crown along, which makes that person less sympathetic to what an audience might be.

I'm looking at Obama like this great character. To me, there's no doubt, there's a movie to be made on this campaign, and made even objectively, Hillary would be the villain and Obama would be the hero.

Recommend (0) |

Comments (0) |

Email  |

Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us