Paul Giamatti talks about Parkland…
Director Peter Landesman credits Paul Giamatti’s involvement in Parkland as one of the key reasons that Abraham Zapruder’s family – consistently silent until now – agreed to collaborate with his film.
Landesman had reached out persistently to the relatives of Zapruder, the man who had witnessed the shooting of JFK through the lens of his little 8mm camera, but was turned away on numerous occasions.
“I’d go back to them and say, ‘no, really we want to tell his inner story.’ And there’d be silence. So I’d go back again because I just didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer,” says the director.
“I was starting to think that it would never happen, but then, when Paul Giamatti agreed to play Abraham Zapruder, we were able to present them with one of the finest actors of our generation – or of any generation for that matter.
“We were also able to give them reassurances that, with their help, we would portray their relative with clarity and fairness, perhaps for the first time. And I think they realized that this might be their last and best shot at telling Abraham’s story for themselves.”
It’s a story that also captured the imagination of Giamatti, the actor tasked with playing the man. On November 22, 1963, the fateful day that President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Abraham Zapruder, owner of a successful garment business and keen amateur photographer, was the only person to capture on film what was to be one of the most defining moments of 20th century history.
Zapruder, whose offices were directly in front of the now legendary Dealey Plaza, the backdrop to the fateful shooting, had not intended to bring his camera, a cutting-edge 8mm, Howell Zoomatic to work to film the motorcade as it did a celebratory lap of Dallas.
But, at the insistence of his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman (played in the movie by Bitsie Tulloch) he retrieved it from home.
Zapruder waited atop a concrete pedestal with Sitzman steadying him from behind and began filming as the President’s limousine approached along Elm Street. The next historic 26.6 seconds were captured on 486 frames of Kodachrome II safety film.
To help prepare for the role, Giamatti repeatedly watched footage of an interview that Zapruder gave with Dallas TV station WFAA where his film was initially taken to be developed on that day.
“They just sort of shoved him on camera and the reporter, Jay Watson, was half ignoring him because the bigger news story was still playing out elsewhere and they still didn’t know, of course, exactly what the hell was on that film,” Giamatti says.
“That fact, for me, is one of the most interesting things about the story because, now, of course, in the digital age, thousands of people would have got the moment on their phones or digital cameras and they’d have known what they’d captured instantly.
“But, those times were kind of more suspenseful and interesting because they just didn’t know what they’d find on Abraham Zapruder’s camera. And it took a whole day to develop the film and to find out.
“As it turned out, WFAA couldn’t actually develop it, and so it had to go to the specialist Eastman Kodak processing plant instead. Can you imagine the feeling of responsibility involved for the person who finally managed to develop that film? Can you imagine if they had screwed it up?”
Since Zapruder himself died just seven years after Kennedy’s assassination, Giamatti relied heavily on the archive footage of the WFAA interview to give him a handle on both his character and his physicality.
At the age of 46, Giamatti himself is some 12 years younger than Zapruder would have been in 1963. “But it was amazing how much it helped just to have my hairline moved backwards and flecked with grey. The years piled on as the hair come off,” he smiles.
Through his research he learned that Russian-born, Zapruder, had come to the US at the age of five after his Jewish parents fled the Russian Civil War, settling in Brooklyn, where he was raised.
“Then when I saw the interview footage, I was struck immediately by his heavy New York, Jewish accent and that really meant a lot to me because I thought, ‘This is a man who lived in Dallas, but who was essentially an outsider.’
“Peter Landesman, who also wrote the script for Parkland sensed this very keenly too and he put those thoughts into words. He wrote a great speech for Zapruder where he talks about the trauma of coming to the US as an immigrant and of making a life in the US and his feelings of gratitude to a country and to a president that he obviously revered to an enormous extent.”
Tellingly, Giamatti, says, following Zapruder’s unwitting documenting of the assassination, his family changed their name to escape the notoriety that came with it, while Zapruder himself never owned or used a camera again.
“It is maybe not rational but I think this poor man lived with a huge amount of guilt about the film he’d taken. His feeling was, ‘why did I do this? Why the hell am I responsible for this horrible thing that people have to look at now?’ It pained him enormously that, thanks to him, children were now going to have to watch the president having his head blown off for all time.”
Among his other upcoming roles, Giamatti will be seen as a wealthy slave trader in Steve McQueen’s harrowing movie, 12 Years a Slave; star alongside Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in the soon to be released Saving Mr. Banks; and will play The Rhino in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. He also will appear alongside Shirley MacLaine playing her maverick playboy brother, Harold Levinson in the Christmas special episode of the UK series Downton Abbey.
And here’s a video interview with Giamatti dicussing Parkland…
Parkland is released in the UK on March 31st.