In March 1981, John Hinckley shot U.S. President Ronald Reagan in a failed assassination attempt driven by a dangerous obsession with the Martin Scorsese film “Taxi Driver” and actress Jodie Foster. The attack shocked the world and forever changed American history. Found not guilty by reason of insanity, John spent thirty-five years in a psychiatric hospital and now has freedom back. This provocative documentary examines the dark side of the American Dream, as Hinckley now seeks redemption through his art and music and grapples with his past in a nation deeply divided by politics and gripped by gun violence.
John Hinckley’s life story is the subject of director Neil McGregor’s (Growing Happiness) new documentary, Hinckley: I Shot The President, which includes never before seen footage and retellings of the horrific act John committed on that day, but also explores the reasons why, and the journey Hinckley has gone on to redeem himself.
As the documentary prepares for release on August 30, Nick L’Barrow sat down for an extensive chat with Neil McGregor to discuss the impact of a documentary like this, the experience of watching Hinckley go through his past once more, and whether art, or the interpretation of art, is dangerous.
Nick: Neil, it’s great to see you again!
Neil McGregor: Always a pleasure!
Nick: I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. Congratulations on Hinckley! I’m excited to talk about this documentary with you, which is one that is quite different to your last film, Growing Happiness!
Neil McGregor: Yes! It’s very much the Ridley Scott or Martin Scorsese sort of approach with the different vibes.
Nick: Well, both are such fascinating documentaries! And I was so captured again by the visual aesthetic you chose to tell John Hinckley’s story with. The choices to have John’s interviews take place in this dark room, or the scenes where you follow John around at nighttime match the darker themes of the film. I’m curious to know how much of your darker visual aesthetic was determined before you started filming?
Neil McGregor: I think the tone of the film always speaks volumes for how an audience interprets and experiences the film, be it in an obvious way or in a more subconscious way. The cinematographer, Simon Christidis, and I had a lot of, you know, conversations about how we should approach that.
The timing of us filming in Virginia in the wintertime was a little bit circumstantial, but that’s just the window that opened up for us and it worked really, really well. The winter spoke to some of the more dark and uncomfortable moments of John Hinckley’s life, you know? I think there are some really dark moments in this film, and that’s his life. So, it’s really important to set the tone that way.
And then the other element that you noted, Nick, was the interview. It was very easy for us to do the more true crime, traditional, streaming, sort of, beautiful, wide open, lights behind us shots and stuff like that. And we were certainly open to exploring that initially. But the reason we wanted to do it on the dark background was because John’s life has a lot of dark around it. It was important to envelop him in that darkness and that blackened space for that story.
Nick: I also noticed that the first time we see John outside of that interview room, and in the present day, real world, during the film takes place narratively after he was released from the mental health facility after 35 years…
Neil McGregor: Yeah, that is correct! So, he spent 35 years in a mental health facility because he was found not guilty. But, in 2022, he was free from court oversight. Originally, we approached the film to have more present day stuff, and we filmed most of that towards the end of our main filming block.
It’s just him going about his daily life, you know. He doesn’t have a lot of possessions, he’s just sort of going about trying to do his music, his art. And we just see him as an ordinary person you could pass down the street. That was, I think, important to really shot it in the truest sense of the way that he is.
Nick: The focus on who John Hinckley is now is very prevalent in your documentary. But there is a selection of scenes towards the end where John is doing various interviews with outlets for his music, and there is somewhat a hesitation he has when people want to focus on the assassination attempt. So, it made me curious to know how you approached John with this project initially, and how he became so on board with it?
Neil McGregor: His story is very complex. We built up a lot of rapport. I still chat with John Hinckley regularly. We chatted a lot about how we wanted to do the film, and for me, and I wanted to talk about music. I wanted to see him as he is now. What attracted me to this story is looking at what he’s done versus what he is now. How does someone transition from that? But also, additionally, how does someone like you or I separate who he is now from the violent acts that he did in 1981?
It was important to show the story as it is, look at his journey, and share it from his particular perspective and viewpoint. Really put the audience in his mind, in his shoes. And you can’t talk about his present without going through his past. He’s stuck in this purgatory where it’s very difficult for him to move one from his past because of those events, but he’s also not. And I really wanted to see that. It’s a very interesting entanglement for him, and you see that especially in the present day stuff in the documentary, where he does wrestle with that. It’s very challenging to be able to separate those elements.
Nick: I think delving into those aspects of his past really paint a full picture of who John is now, even the aspects of his life before the 1981 shooting. How do you determine, as a filmmaker, how much information you’re going to give to the audience to pain that picture without the story feeling to overfilled?
Neil McGregor: Yeah, that was one of the challenging parts. There’s all this archival research and finding things, and digitising stuff that hadn’t been seen before, which is phenomenal in itself.
You really got to set up the character and their journey. You got to connect the audience with who they were. The music story needed to be set up early on with his fascination with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, which does tie back later with his present day life.
I did know that this is obviously a form of entertainment, you know? It’s a feature documentary. So, it was always important to make sure that the audience is swept up on that journey. It’s also difficult to make sure you don’t gloss over key details.
Jodie Foster was a victim. Reagan, but also Tim Brady and the two police officers outside the Hilton were victims too. As well as their families. There’s a lot of traumatic things that happen to fit into 90 minutes. We had to look at his upbringing in Dallas, to stalking Jodie Foster, to seeing Taxi Driver, to pen pals with Ted Bundy, and his music career. There’s a lot to jam pack in there.
We had a fantastic post-production team working with the editors to really craft and find those stories, making sure that the character is someone that we understand their journey. I did know that getting Taxi Driver early in the edit was quite key. It was very difficult to get this moment in there, but we needed to also set up his early upbringing. You know, really set him up as someone who had a very normal upbringing, a very ordinary life.
I think it was very important, and a very challenging post-production process to be able to really pick and choose, and make sure that you give it the depth that it has. And keep that in the overall bigger picture of the story for the audience.
Nick: You mentioned Taxi Driver, and the influence that had on John. I’m curious to know if you ever found out how his relationship with Taxi Driver has changed of the years. Did he ever talk about that with you?
Neil McGregor: He did. He hasn’t watched it since, as you might understand. You know, he was fascinated by the music, and the aesthetic, and the character. And I think someone in their early 20s, battling mental health at the time, in a similar way that Mark David Chapman did with The Catcher in The Rye, that similar alienation, isolation, lost. Kind of, disconnected from society and family. When someone is going through those things, it’s just easy to fixate on something that kind of connects. I think that speaks volumes to how great Taxi Driver is as a film, you know? The power of cinema is able to change people’s lives.
So, for him, now, he hasn’t watched the film since then. He watched it 15 times in the late 70s and little beyond that. But that’s about it since the early 80s. He hasn’t seen it since, and I totally understand why.
Nick: The idea of cinema and art being influential and able to change people’s lives has always been such a fascinating discussion, but often leads to the debate of whether art itself is dangerous or is the interpretation dangerous. I’m curious to know what your thoughts on that were like before going into this documentary, and whether they changed over the process as you learnt more about John’s life?
Neil McGregor: Yeah, it’s something with John that… I mean, separating the art from the artist is something in itself, and I think that’s very much defined with his music story. I think that’s the great thing about art, you know? Be it a book, a poem, a piece of film – it sparks conversations for different people.
But what’s great about art itself, in whatever for it takes, is that it becomes something that connects and resonates with people of different levels. It can come along at a time of say love or grief, where it’s that piece of music or that bit of poetry that you can just connect to. That is the power that art has. It connects people during those emotional moments that they find themselves in.
I think for John, in his early 20s, unfortunately he found Taxi Driver in that sort of, “dark side” of the American dream, which this film also, in the subtext, explores. That is the power of art, and that’s a beautiful thing. But there is a danger element to it because the art that we’re up to people with how they interpret it. What they do with that is an unknown entity, and that’s what makes it so powerful.
Nick: Those conversations also, I feel, stem to people who may watch this documentary and believe that a platform shouldn’t be given to someone like John because of the violent acts he committed. Do you find you also have to prepare yourself for conversations and backlash like that?
Neil McGregor: I guess, you can only be prepared for what you can, right? And with something like this, certainly people will perhaps wonder why I’m giving John Hinckley a platform. He already has one. He has his YouTube channel. Everyone has social media nowadays. They have access to share their thoughts and feelings on these things.
I think John Hinckley holds a mirror up to America. He has done a horrible, violent act. Damaged people’s lives and gone through some severe battles with mental health. He’s overcome that. He’s come out the other side. So, in some ways, he’s not actually a model person to look at for the redemption side of things, but there’s certainly learnings from his life that people can take away.
I don’t think you can change everyone’s minds for everything, and that’s not my job as a filmmaker to do so. But it is a documentary that puts these questions forward for the audience to ask. And if they’re asking me those questions, or someone else in their workplace, or someone down the street, that just shows the documentary has done it’s job. It’s sparked the right conversations, and I think that’s the most important thing.
Nick: I think another powerful aspect of art is finding catharsis in it. And it got me thinking while watching the film is how John felt about re-reading some of the letters he sent, or listening back to the phone calls to Jodie Foster that he taped, and what his reaction was to those all these years later? What was the experience like of being in the room where he had to relive those things from his darker past?
Neil McGregor: For me, as a filmmaker, I was nervous to perhaps ask him to read some of those dramatic things. Lucy [Becker, producer] has a Master of Criminology and Criminal Justice, so we set up barriers and safeguards around dealing with mental health and making sure this was all done in the right, respectful, approachable way for John, so he was comfortable to do it.
It was certainly quite a profound experience to have him read out those letters. One of those is a letter to Jodie Foster before he went to assassinate President Reagan. The night before. He certainly read it find. Obviously, he doesn’t feel connected to the words that he wrote. It’s just like anyone who has moved on from the past of their early 20s. There’s a disconnect of who he was then, versus who he is now.
He’s dealt with a lot of those mental health issues, and those uncomfortable truths of his past. He was able to read them very matter of fact, which allowed him to go through and talk about some of those uncomfortable things. In this case, reread the letter that he wrote to Jodie Foster on the night before he shot the president.
Nick: Obviously, a large part of John’s story, and this documentary, is his music career and YouTube channel. I loved the second to last scene where he is performing a song for the first time to you, and it’s a song where the lyrics and tone being to really summarise the entire feeling of the film. When did John approach you with this song? And when did you realise that was how you wanted to close out the documentary?
Neil McGregor: That song was on the very last day of filming. I think we had already packed our suitcases, ready to go to the airport. And I said to John, “Look, we’re gonna drive to the airport. I’ve got a couple of hours. We’ll just drop in and film whatever”. And it is actually as you see it in the film. We went for a bit of a drive and had a bit of a chat. And when we came back, he told us he had a song he was going to do for YouTube. And I asked him to sing it, and that is as it is.
I think he does have genuine talent as a singer-songwriter. With different circumstances, different time, it might have been a different path for him in his early 20s there. But I thought that song was just very profound. It was just very much, as you said, Nick, sums up his journey, his life. I think that ties into what we were talking about earlier, about art.
The music is a part of that element, where it can say things and emote things that we just can’t always contextualise into words. And I think John’s lyrics on that particular song, which might just be another song for him, but there’s a lot of richness and depth in those words. He’s saying how he’s grown and evolved as a person but can’t move on from the past either.
Thank you so much to Neil for his time, and to M4M Agency for organising the interview. Hinckley: I Shot The President will be available to rent exclusively at www.hinckley.movie from August 30.
