by MARK SLUTSKY

If Gabriel Range had made his film Death of a President about the assassination of a fictional American Commander-in-Chief, he probably wouldn’t have faced the storm of controversy he did when the film premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But to hear him tell it, the idea never entered his mind. “The whole intent of the film, really, was to set about creating a world that felt absolutely as real and as authentic as possible,” says the British filmmaker. “I think if we’d used a fictional president, the film would have been very, very different. It would have been far easier just to dismiss it as a work of fiction. Of course, it is fiction, but it’s very much inspired by real-life events, and I hope it feels quite realistic.”

Death of a President is set two years from now—or, more specifically, one year after President Bush is murdered outside a Chicago hotel. The film tells the story through combining scripted, talking-head style interviews with characters close to the President or the murder investigation (a senior aide, an FBI forensics expert) with real footage of Bush and his circle, and it implies that an event of this nature would almost certainly be blamed on Al-Qaeda, even if the evidence pointed another way.

Range and his crew shot much of the actual Bush footage themselves, using their credentials from Britain’s Channel 4, which produced the film. “I filmed him in Chicago on a couple of occasions,” he says. “We went down the usual process of getting White House press accreditation, and we filmed President Bush giving speeches and arriving and so on... The film is basically pieced together around a backbone of archive, and when I say archive I include footage we shot ourselves.”

Bye Bye Bush

Despite a reasoned and almost clinical approach to assessing how and why an assassination attempt would actually go down, Range insists that he didn’t make the film as a speculative exercise. “The intent of the film wasn’t really ever to set about seriously trying to imagine what the world would be like in the aftermath of the assassination of President Bush,” he says. “It’s much less of a ‘what if’ and more about using the assassination of Bush as a very striking, arresting way of looking at some of the things that have happened in the last five years. It was much more about trying to use the lens of the future to have a look at some of the issues that have come out in the last few years—the prosecution of the war on terror and the progressively polarizing effect of the war in Iraq.

“I think it is a very provocative thing to do, but the provocation is justified,” he continues. “I completely accept that it is something which some people might find sensitive, but I think that it’s right for film to do provocative things from time to time and to be outrageous.”

Death of a President is notable for being one of very few fictional documentaries (or mockumentaries, if you will) not in the comedy mode, yet it still makes effective use of the form. “I think the audience reacts differently to a film told in the style of a documentary,” Range says. “I think just the fact that it’s told in the vocabulary of a documentary means that on a subconscious level you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief in a different way and enter into the world where this happened, in a way that perhaps you’re not when you see a normal, straightforward, conventional narrative drama. I don’t really know why that is; I guess it’s purely because we’re absolutely accustomed to seeing talking head interviews in real documentaries and not in works of fiction.”

The subject matter alone made controversy, especially in the U.S., pretty much inevitable. “The reactions initially were very strong,” Range says. “But they were at a time when I think people thought this was something else, you know? Some kind of crazy rant that would incite people to do this. At that time, that’s when there was this strong reaction, and that’s when people were sufficiently upset to send me charming messages saying they wanted to kill me and everything else. I think now that people realize it really is very different from that, it’s really not what they thought, the response from the press here in America has been very warm, actually.”

Death of a President opens this Friday, Oct. 27

>> Movie Listings