by Annette Basile
“Good stories,” says Neil McGregor, “find you in the most unexpected ways.”
The Brisbane-based director was searching online for music for his earlier project, Growing Happiness – a doco about a sunflower festival – when he stumbled across a YouTube video by a certain John Hinckley Jr.
“I recognised the name, but couldn’t put my finger on,” he tells FilmInk via Zoom. McGregor typed the name into Google and married the name to the history – “I was like, ‘That guy obsessed with Taxi Driver, who stalked Jodie Foster and shot the president of the United States. And he’s now trying to be a musician’.”
McGregor’s documentary, Hinckley – I Shot the President, is simply fascinating. Hinckley entered history books in 1981 as the would-be assassin of newly inaugurated US president, Ronald Reagan. His bullet pierced Reagan’s chest, lodging near the Republican’s heart. Three others were injured during the shooting. All survived.
Hinckley was not motivated by politics but by obsession. He had repeatedly watched Taxi Driver – the Martin Scorsese classic that features Robert De Niro as returned Vietnam vet Travis Bickle, who attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate. A young Jodie Foster plays the child prostitute, Iris, in the 1976 film. Hinckley, suffering from severe mental illness, became obsessed with Foster and believed that if he assassinated a president, he would impress her and get her attention.
McGregor [left] reached out to Hinckley, who is now a free man after being confined for 41 years in a psychiatric hospital. Hinckley receives numerous interview requests, most of which he rejects. But he said yes to McGregor. He “gravitated” towards how the director wanted to present his story. “I said to him, ‘Look, I’d love to make a documentary, talk about your music, talk about your past’. And we just got chatting and next thing you know, we’re in his living room filming.”
Being an Australian “telling a very American story” also appealed to Hinckley, who says from the outset that he is full of remorse for his actions. In McGregor’s documentary, we learn that Hinckley was diagnosed with narcissism, major depression and schizoid personality disorder. “He has battled with a very severe state of mental health,” says McGregor, “and he’s overcome a lot of that stuff. In terms of the narcissistic tendencies that are part of his diagnosis, a lot of that is all in remission.”
McGregor says Hinckley is no longer obsessed with Jodie Foster. “If anything, he feels perhaps a sense of shame and remorse that he dragged her into an incident that she had nothing to do with – she was an indirect victim of his unwell state of mind at the time.” McGregor adds that he found Hinckley to be “a very switched-on” and “very talented and creative person”.
Hinckley – who has seen the documentary and liked it – does indeed come across as insightful; you can, however, tell that he’s medicated. His music features in the documentary, as do his artworks. McGregor believes that today, Hinckley’s desire for attention is no different from any other musician trying to build up a social media presence – in Hinckley’s case, on YouTube.
McGregor peppers this absorbing, brilliantly edited documentary with a slew of fascinating details, like Hinckley’s interest in Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, and – incredibly – his snail mail correspondence with notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.
McGregor’s aim throughout was to maintain objectivity and he says that despite Hinckley’s mental state at the time of the shooting, his actions cannot be excused. “It was important for us as filmmakers to not create empathy for him … it was important to make sure that we didn’t lean one way or another.” Instead, McGregor wanted “to put the audience into the mind and the shoes of this person’s journey”.
While the story is very much in Hinckley’s own words via revealing interviews, McGregor gives the narrative context with archival news footage. “We worked with Getty Images Australia, who were very supportive from the very start of the project.” Getty uncovered footage that had never been seen, or had been “sitting in a basement for 40 years”. The footage includes interviews with Hinckley’s shocked parents, who didn’t abandon their troubled son.
The documentary arrives not long after the July assassination attempt on Donald Trump by Thomas Matthew Crooks. McGregor was editing the Hinckley film when the event occurred. It was, he says, “a reoccurrence of history.
“I think it really just reminds us of the timeliness of this film,” he comments. “No matter where you stand on the political divide, it is a terrible event. The film, he adds, “perhaps provides some insight into these sorts of things that plague a certain element of American politics”.
McGregor spoke to Hinckley on the evening of the Trump incident, reflecting that Crooks died and that Hinckley could have met the same fate. “It dug up some very uncomfortable truths for him of a sliding doors moment.”
Hinckley – I Shot the President premieres on 30 August, with early access from 27 August 2024. Available now for PRE-PURCHASE
