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The latest British director to turn his hand to a big American movie, Pete Travis weighed up his options in Vantage Point and managed to pull off a rare, intelligent thriller. He tells FOCUS how he did it.
A film dealing in modern issues, Vantage Point utilises a classic filmmaking technique to make its point.
The fulcrum event in the suspenseful plot is the apparent assassination of an American President on a diplomatic visit to a foreign ally. The film then replays events from multiple points of view in swift succession, so that the audience has experience layered over experience filtered through someone else's prejudice and perspective. It's a device that worked brilliantly in Rashomon or - if you prefer - Reservoir Dogs - or, effectively again in an old Guardian commercial from the 1980s.
"It is like the old Guardian commercial," nods Travis. "I remember that standing out in my mind, the idea of seeing that skinhead chase the guy in the suit and realising in the very last shot that he was trying to save him.
"The problem is that kind of reference doesn't really work in Hollywood. When they ask you how you want to make it, you can't say 'I've seen this old Guardian advert, I really want to do it like that,', they'd all look at you slightly aghast."
It was Travis's own work that most recently included the powerful drama Omagh which earned the Briton his first big budget American production. And it’s no coincidence that the complexity Travis solicits for his drama is also reflected in the troubling notion that issues we face are drawn in infinite shades of grey.
"There is no black and white in this film," he adds, "you're forced to confront different sides of different people's characters wherever they come from in the world. Not all the good guys are good, and not all the bad guys are totally bad. That's certainly one of the things that interested me about the film. And in a funny kind of way that’s what makes it a peculiarly European take on an American story. It has a sophistication to it that I think is important."
So it is that this American produced film can daringly come out with a theory that the truth is more complicated than we dare think, and that the real enemy might not always be those we are quickest to accuse.
"I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the studio picked a European director to make this movie," Travis nods. "I think they wanted a different kind of approach to it. I think it would have been a very different film if it had been directed by an American.
"There is no one world view in this film. You don’t solve the mystery about what happens to the President by only following the American characters, you have to follow the European characters, and you have to get under the skin of the bad guys as well as the good guys.
"And that’s a very bold thing for a big American movie to be doing. Normally in a movie like this the Dennis Quaid's character would save the day all by himself and it would all be about him. What was attractive to me was the fact that it wasn't that, it was a kind of subtle, very European movie about a big event seen through different peoples' eyes."
And yet for all the fact that he is British Travis cites classic American movies as touchstones for his film.
"I fell in love with movies like Three Days Of The Condor and The Parallax View, those were the movies I wanted to make, from a time when American cinema was about huge, successful movies, big stars but very, very smart movies. Action movies at a time when action movies and intelligence went together. That's not always the case now, and that was what was attractive to me about this film, that it felt like it came from another era.
ANWAR BRETT
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