The Whole World is Watching: Inside Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 | Netflix

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(dramatic music)
(gravel strikes)
- You know why you're on trial here?
- We wanna underscore again that we're coming
to Chicago peacefully,
but whether we're given permits or not,
we're coming.
- There's no place to be right now, but in it.
- They're not going to storm the convention
with tanks or mace.
- Cops is gonna be a half inch from losing their minds.
(dramatic music)
We're not concerned about it.
We're counting on it!
- These eight defendants had a plan,
and the plan was to incite a riot.
They succeeded.
(crowd yelling)
- We were gassed, beaten, arrested, and put on trial.
- [Tom] If blood is gonna flow,
let it flow all over the city.
- What was that?
An order to start a peaceful demonstration?
- [Crowd] The whole world is watching!
The whole world is watching!
- 1968 was a bad year in America.
Martin Luther King was shot and killed.
Eight weeks later, Bobby Kennedy is shot and killed.
And this is all happening against the backdrop
of the Vietnam War.
The Democratic Convention in Chicago was the place
that a number of leaders of the anti-war movement
had decided to bring demonstrators.
And so activists, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden
Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Wiener
and an eighth Bobby Seale,
the head of the Black Panthers,
came to Chicago for three days to lead
what we're supposed to be peaceful protests.
(crowd yelling)
That peaceful protest ended up being
an incredibly bloody clash with the police
and the national guard.
We've never really seen anything quite like it
in this country.
(crowd clashing)
- It was a big question of who caused the violence?
Did the protesters start the fight
or did the police start the fight?
And that was a hotly contested question.
Ultimately it kind of blew over and no criminal charges
were really leveled against anybody.
Then Richard Nixon won the election,
and decided we are going to press charges.
- And we watched for a decade
while these rebels without a job,
tell us how to prosecute a war.
- And so the legal question is whether or not
they conspired together to incite a riot
at the Democratic Convention in 1968?
- I'm not with these guys.
I never even met most of them until the indictment.
- We will have order.
- You have eight of us here.
- We will have order. - They have signs out there,
free the Chicago Seven.
I'm not with them.
- One of the wonderful things about this group
of eight people within this trial,
is they all had very different takes
on the same subject matter.
They were all bound by the idea that sending
these Americans off to fight a war,
at a place which they couldn't necessarily pin
on a map to a people that they had no engagement
or understanding of,
was madness.
- You can't just put these guys on trial,
'cause you don't like them.
(dramatic music)
But that's what they did.
- I call this portion of the trial,
With Friends Like These.
- [Man] Ready in five, a few minutes to go.
- One of the things I love about this film
is that every character has an arc
and every character has a moment.
And I think it's a testament to the depth of the script
and delicious quality of Aaron's writing.
He's attracted such a band of players.
- We were asking of these people,
all of whom can and frequently do carry their own movies
to be part of an ensemble, a large ensemble.
This story is so big that every single one
of these protestors should have a standalone film.
It is the finest group of actors, Eddie Redmayne
Sasha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Yahya Abdul-Mateen,
John Carroll Lynch, and Michael Keaton.
- It's really something to put that many actors in a room.
We're getting to observe all of our different processes
and different people on the different days
get to sort of have their moment.
- Eddie Redmayne plays Tom Hayden and is brilliant
in the movie.
- We are going to show that we as a generation
are serious people.
- Tom had a very specific voice,
and Aaron was very strong to liberate me early
in the script as I was working on my voice.
And he said, "I don't want this to be
a replica of Tom Hayden."
- Yes.
- [Eddie] I want you to play my version of him.
- Eddie is like ferociously intelligent person
and also very generous and has a lot of perspective.
- He has such a depth and such an authenticity.
and a nobility to his spirit that Tom had.
- I think Tom Hayden is a bad-ass of an American patriot
I was always interested in Abbie Hoffman.
He's this clown who is deeply passionate.
He's ready to risk his life.
He uses the media for political ends.
He's funny.
He's cool.
He's got amazing hair.
- Sasha Baron Cohen,
I just can't think of anyone else
who could play Abbie Hoffman.
Abbie Hoffman still has a kind of iconic mannerism,
that iconic Boston accent,
and is just a wild guy.
- He is a provocateur playing a provocateur.
He creates a character that has to be so lifelike
that people don't even know he's acting.
- In Shakespearean times,
the fool was the guy who came and appeared to be the comic,
but actually was somehow sort of busy exposing people
to themselves?
And I feel like what Sasha has done
with a lot of his career,
is he's made people fall on their own source.
- Sasha, as we all know is a brilliant clown.
He went to clowning school,
and Abbie was a clown who was also the most serious guy
in the room.
It's, Sasha is too.
- In a way, there are two Abbie's.
There's the public persona of Abbie where he's trying
to inspire people,
and there's the private Abbie.
So there's the balance between the clown and the intellect.
- [Reporter] How much is it worth to you?
What's your price?
- To call off the revolution?
My life.
- [Man] Beautiful, that's great guys.
Jeremy Strong is just brilliant as Jerry Rubin.
Jerry in this story really is the militant in a sense.
Put down your guns, fight like men.
Laying down in front of the troop train,
stopping the troop trains going to Oakland.
- He embodies Jerry Rubin's sense of confrontation
and provocation both in the scenes and outside the scenes.
- He's always in character.
He's always believable.
He's a great guy to have by your side.
You just look to him.
(dramatic music)
- An actor you're gonna be hearing a lot more about
named Yahya Abdul-Mateen, plays Bobby Seale.
- When I play a character who is living,
one of my first instincts is to understand
what they were after.
And I wanna understand their soul.
I wanna understand their concerns.
And my performance is my interpretation
of their needs, their wants, their voice, their desires.
I'm sitting here saying that I would like to cross examine
the witness. - I'm tired of hearing that.
- Couldn't care less what you're tired of.
- Yahya is doing such a fantastic job
of bringing that real sincere emotion to his performance.
- Obviously, it was a figure that I knew of
from growing up.
And in the script,
I think Aaron wrote a character
that is extremely passionate, smart, witty,
stands up for himself.
- The way Yahya does it is just,
it's powerful and it's direct and it's authentic.
And it's a really good representation of Bobby, honestly.
- My trial has begun without my lawyer.
- Court assumes that you are being represented
by the Black Panther sitting behind you.
- Throughout the course of the trial,
there was one person who was in support
of Bobby Seale and that person is Fred Hampton.
Fred Hampton was the Chicago leader
of the Black Panther Party.
- And he was a close advisor to Bobby.
And certainly during the trial,
and he sat, sits behind Bobby during the entire trial.
- Extremely smart, intelligent, passionate.
- Four hours!
- [Frank] Mr. Hampton.
- That's how long Bobby Seale was in Chicago.
(audience claps) - Quiet!
- That's four hours.
- He's not to be defeated.
- Aaron Sorkin has done a really smart and interesting thing
in creating a character on the antagonistic side,
on the prosecutor's side, that isn't just a bad guy.
- Richard Schultz,
who is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is conflicted.
We know from the beginning of the movie
he doesn't think they should be prosecuting these guys,
but the Attorney General himself has said,
You better do this.
You gotta win.
- You pay me for my opinion.
- I pay you to win.
- I'm not sure we can get a good indictment
on conspiracy, sir.
- My parents were peace activists in the '60s and '70s,
so I grew up knowing who Abbie Hoffman was,
knowing who the Yippies were.
These were fairly common ideas and characters
in just my family conversation,
and my parents were excited to say the least when they heard
that I was doing this.
And then intrigued, if not dismayed,
to hear that I would be playing the prosecution.
On top of everything else,
we're giving them exactly what they want,
a stage and an audience.
I admire that he's asking these questions
based on principles rather than
whether or not he personally likes the people involved.
- Now, Dave Dellinger was a Boy Scout troop leader.
He was an eighth grade science teacher.
He was also a conscientious objector,
and believed fervently in nonviolence.
- [Boy] What if the police start hitting you?
- [David] Why would the police start hitting me?
- [Boy] What if they do?
- [John] I'll duck.
- David, he watches the news.
- I'm fortunate in comparison to other people in this film,
because Dellinger was so assiduously private.
You just have to get it from the material.
You're a thug.
- Did one of the defendants speak?
- I did.
I said, you're a thug, because you are.
Anytime that violence is used
was a failure for Dave Dellinger,
he completely fails,
both in Chicago as well as in the trial.
- Alex Sharp is Rennie Davis
- Tom Hayden's like right-hand man in Aaron's story.
He's an interesting guy.
By the book, more of an academic.
- Rennie has been put in the kind of suit
and tied good boy party,
as contrast to Abbie and Jerry.
We need to not go to jail in order that we
can continue doing our work.
- For Jerry and Abbie,
this was about the theater of politics.
In between, actually the riots and the real trial,
Rennie went to Vietnam to help with the release
of three POW's that Dave Dellinger
had negotiated out of capture.
- I'm keeping a list everyday,
of Americans who had been killed since
the day we were arrested.
- Why?
- With the trial starting,
it might get easy to forget who this is about.
He's ferociously dedicated and passionate about his cause.
He's legit.
- [Woman] Follow the names.
- Thank you.
- The fact that there's a lawyer near Mr. Seale is,
does not satisfy the requirements of due process.
- I have a right.
- A motion was made for postponement.
- Mark Rylance who plays Bill Kunstler is an actor
I have always admired.
And to have a chance to work with him,
I sort of see up close, why I had always admired him,
he's brilliant.
I've never seen him do the same thing twice.
Every time I see him in something,
he is completely different than he was before.
- Mark Rylance is an actor's actor.
I hate that phrase, but if anybody qualifies,
he's one.
- Mark Rylance who plays Bill Kunstler.
He's just one of my heroes.
He's one of the greatest actors alive.
(book pounding)
It's like the earth moved sometimes when he does his work.
- You'll have lawyers to speak for you.
- No, he doesn't.
- Julius Hoffman was handing down rulings
from the bench that were so crazy.
The things that he was overruling, sustaining,
the people he was finding in contempt of court site.
- Cite Mr. Kunstler with his second count of contempt.
- I think the biggest challenge is just not making him
a one note villain.
Everybody's human.
Whenever it's a real person, I research as much as I can.
He had simply no interest in being fair.
None.
- Frank did tell me that if it's all right with me,
he doesn't want to see the defendants
until he walks onto the courtroom set.
That's the only relationship he wants to have with them.
- I would never go into the makeup trailer.
I would never eat with them.
I would stay away from them and let them hate me.
Really hate me. - [Aaron] And I said, sure.
And I told the other actors.
Frank was brought in at a different door.
- And I worked one full day off camera watching them.
And they were so incredibly good that when it was over,
I came off the bench and I walked up to Sasha.
I said, "I can't avoid you for two and a half weeks.
You're too much fun."
- And by the end of the first day,
he called me over,
he said, "I, can I just meet everybody.
It just seems like they're having a lot of fun over there."
(Aaron laughing)
So it's (Aaron laughing) one day.
- Everyone is so committed to telling this story.
You know the story is bigger than any of us.
- I think all of the actors really gravitated
toward the words on the page.
And I think they gravitated toward the opportunity
to come in to do something that felt relevant.
- I mean it's such a formidable group.
Oh it's just been a joy to watch this team
of heavyweights slug it out.
- They came to play.
They came to work hard,
and it was thrilling working with them.
Find a couple of moments where in coverage,
one of you looks over at the other.
- [Man] Yeah.
- But just be aware,
you're audience is right there facing you down.
- [Man] Right.
- Quite often, as an actor, your asked,
What's your bucket list?
Who do you dream of working with?
There was only one person on that bucket list
and that was Aaron Sorkin.
- Let me check on that.
- He's probably the greatest living screenwriter.
He's written so many brilliant movies,
and TV shows, and plays.
- Just to be able to get into the room
with a writer who has a very strong political perspective
within a very smart voice in how he crafts his words.
- His strength is really the draw in this project.
- I would get into reading the script.
I looked down and I can't believe how far I am into it.
It just takes you away.
It sweeps you into the story.
- Sorkin writes overwhelmingly human intelligent
gripping dialogue.
- We don't just have a conductor.
We also have our composer here.
- And he can hear instinctively when the thing is jazzing.
When it's riffing.
- He knows every single note of this piece.
- When I write something,
my goal is no more lofty than to entertain you
for as long as I've asked for your attention.
That may sound like a modest goal, but it's not easy to do.
And when I'm able to do that, I feel very good about it.
Cut!
I directed for the first time with "Molly's Game."
I'm a writer who directs.
I write things that are meant to be performed
not things that are meant to be read.
And honestly,
I just see director as finishing it.
- And as a director, he surprised me.
He's very open to the actor's instinct.
- And his sense of cinema,
and his understanding of character, and of people,
genders and creates an environment
where we can all bring what we bring to it as actors.
The best directors that I've worked with
have always had a very strong vision,
very clear idea of what they wanna execute.
And as a director
Aaron brings the intelligence of what his vision is.
- It's beautiful, literate, funny, wicked, and prescient.
And Aaron has caught the terror of that time,
and the humor of that time by juxtaposing the trial scene
with events going back and forth.
- [Woman] Our streets!
- [Crowd] Our streets!
- He tells the story twice in a very compelling way.
- [Crowd] Our streets!
- We gotta march down to the police station,
overcome the cops, and the Illinois National Guard,
and free Tom Hayden.
(audience clapping)
- It was a gift from the gods that these guys,
during the trial on weekends,
and especially Abbie would go to colleges
and perform sold out shows,
basically talking about the trial.
And Abbie was a funny guy.
Essentially he now writes the story through these gigs
and they're actually completely wild.
- It has a great chorus effect.
It turns out it's on the eve of his own testimony.
So every time we come back to it,
he already seems to know what happened the scene
we were just at.
- Well I love working with writer/directors,
because their vision is so pure and intact.
And Aaron literally hears it in his head when he writes it.
- I had a plan.
I was a triumph of collaboration
with Alan Baumgarten, Editor.
That was exactly what I wanted.
- So Hayden's in a holding cell,
and suddenly every freaking Chicago is mobilized.
(metal clicking)
- [Crowd] Free Tom Hayden!
- The crowd was looking for a fight.
- [Man] You're pigs.
- Someone from the crowd shouts.
- A guy somewhere in the crowd shouts.
- Someone in the crowd shouted.
- Take the hill!
- Hey, hey, no, stop running, everybody!
- When I first read Aaron's script
for "The Trial of Chicago 7,"
I was really impressed with the complex narrative structure
that he embedded into the script.
The prologue was meant to show a country
coming off the rails.
- We're going to Chicago peacefully,
but if we're met there with violence,
you better believe that we're gonna meet that violence with.
- Non violence, always non-violence,
and that's without exception.
- Just launched an audience right out of the gate
into the sequence that gave you a lot of information.
But the challenge was also to introduce our characters
and when he's shooting it,
he's paying attention to the dialogue,
and the rhythm and the cadence,
which gives me a great freedom putting it together
as I see the best way to serve the dialogue.
- Alan Baumgarten is a really good editor,
and really good editors,
they're coauthors of the movie.
- But it's an high energy sequence
that puts the events out there for us,
so that we can understand what these characters
are dealing with and how they will proceed
through the story.
- You make me sound like one funky cat.
Thank you, sir.
- Last warning, Mr. Seale.
- Even though a of the film does take place
in the courtroom,
I never saw it as being confined,
because we inter cut so much.
And it gives it a lot of energy,
and a very dynamic way to show a narrative structure
in the a film.
- And then the most emotional story is about Tom Hayden
and Abbie Hoffman who are very much opposites,
and cannot stand each other.
We go to the conference room and all of the defendants
enter the room. There are a couple of wide shots,
and we find out quickly that Tom has some issues.
And he goes after Abbie in particular,
and in their one-on-one,
we start to go closer and closer,
and it builds to a strong moment of conflict.
- It took you two less than five minutes
to make us look exactly like what Schultz is trying
to make us look like.
You go to one of the closest shots
in the entire film on Abbie reacting to Tom.
- Why did you come here?
- I got an invitation from a grand jury.
- No, last summer.
Why don't you come to the convention?
- To end the war.
- So while everyone else will be pantomiming,
you guys still do your thing.
Shot in Chicago for two weeks where the thing took place.
- This was a touchstone in Chicago's history.
It was really important for the city that the film come here
and to try and make it work here.
- You're all right, I got you.
- You feel the energy and you know the topography.
You can see it, and feel it,
and why it unfolded the way it did.
It's absolutely vital to the truth of the film.
Grant Park looks exactly like Grant Park,
as you'd imagine it.
We sort of took Lincoln Park and Grant Park together.
We're started calling it like a Chicago Park,
so we could have events unfold in one location.
- And everybody was so passionate
about what they were doing.
So that was really palpable.
- Safety, number one thing.
- After doing extensive research,
we did a ton of work making all the protest signs
and assorted graphics.
A lot of flyers.
We made Chicago Police Department patrol cars.
Did the graphics for them,
changed out the lights for the Chicago blue beacon light.
- Embracing the accurate locations,
the statues, the police, the riot gear, the tear gas,
So we could get pretty stylized
and still kind of keep it realistic.
- It was quite powerful being in the actual place
where the protests had happened.
- [Man] Running, slow down.
- All rise.
(gallery rising)
Hear ye, hear ye, Judge Julius Hoffman, presiding.
- This is our courtroom for "The Trial of the Chicago 7."
So this is basically where almost three quarters
of the film takes place.
What you're seeing is a church that we have converted
into a courtroom.
We have been able to have like a 360 world
for fade and our DP, and also for Aaron.
Aaron wanted to move it in a direction
more into classicism architecture.
- I want a big imposing federal courtroom like that.
I mean it's the whole weight of the government
is coming down.
- We have these three windows and then
on the right we've plugged five windows in order
to actually control the lighting.
We have these sconces at every point
that when you're looking over at the defendants,
even though they're against these wood paneling
there's still stuff happening above them
and a little bit below them.
And then, when we're looking back towards the gallery
is was really important for Aaron to feel like
this was spectacle.
- You walk into it and look forward,
left, right, back, up, down,
everywhere you look,
we're still inside of this designed space.
They made it really, really easy for us to step
into this world,
and they allowed the actors to be the finishing piece
of the setting.
(rock music)
- We have a, quite an array,
of extras that we have to prepare for this movie.
We need everything we need summer.
We need winter.
We need men, women. and children.
- I think you can underestimate how complicated
and large the palette of this movie is.
The costume design creates are kind of gravitas
for the film.
- Abbie Hoffman was very calculated in everything he wore.
Even though it's supposed to appear as if he
so unassumingly got out of bed and put on this shirt
that has a snake embroidered all the way up,
he understood that he would be photographed.
I'm sure of it.
- Most of them are already inside.
- [Man] Love you Abbie!
- See.
- So his followers tended to have slightly longer hair,
more bands around their head, wearing a peace sign,
wearing a Yippie badge.
They had much more of the look of an activist
as we think of it in the '60s.
- I don't have a problem with what we look like.
Jerry likes what we look like.
- SDS, Students for Democratic Society,
the followers of Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis
were college students.
They were maybe not quite Ivy league,
but they were educated and they were short sleeves and ties.
They were just more conservative.
They were just straighter kids with an awakening.
- No, they dressed just fine.
- It's all right.
- And take you're very scary hats off.
- The Black Panthers have their uniform.
And that of course is the black beret
and black leather jackets or an Afro-centric element.
They didn't have to wear the black beret.
That tended to be as something for making
a big public appearance of some sort in
at strength in number.
- The thing I noticed the other day
was how marvelous costumed it is.
Everybody looks real.
Everything looks very authentic.
- Once they went through hair and makeup,
the transformation would be complete,
and it was incredibly satisfying.
♪ Hear my voice ♪
♪ Hear my dreams ♪
- I'm very excited to have a conversation
with Daniel Pemberton who co-wrote the song,
"Hear My Voice" with Celeste.
As I was writing, I said I wasn't gonna use
any source music except at the end,
because I wanna have somebody do a cover
of "Here Comes the Sun," the Beatles song.
And it just flat out didn't work.
And that's when I had to score everything in that scene.
And then having that cue blossom,
immediately into "Hear My Voice."
Celeste, how do you become involved?
- I received a message originally
from my manager saying that Daniel had been in contact.
Some sort of like beginnings of an idea
and would you like to work on it with him?
And at that moment in time,
it was actually in the beginning of like
quite a strict lockdown here in the UK.
So a lot of the initial process was me recording vocals
in my room at home and sending them back and forth
to Daniel until we eventually got to be
in a studio together.
- She's like for me,
like the voice of hope in the film,
like I feel that beginning is the kind of hope and optimism
which is behind the protesters,
and why they're protesting,
because they wanna change things.
And the end is like giving it back to the audience.
So I feel the fact that she opens and ends the film
is like a really strong like cyclic part
of the whole journey of the story
- From this song,
I would just like people to feel hope.
Like people to feel how I feel within it,
which is a sense of empowerment.
Everybody has the power within them,
so I'd like that to set really on people
walk away from hearing it.
- One guy's opinion, it ended up being a home run.
- That's the way it's like a really great ambition
is waiting you can create something that is for the film,
of the film, about the film,
but can still standby on its own.
- I consider you saving the day?
You and Celeste.
I've been asked if I changed the script,
or changed the film at all to mirror events in the world.
I didn't, you didn't, Celeste didn't.
It's just that events in the world changed to mirror
what was going on in the script.
We thought the whole thing was plenty relevant last winter
when we were making it,
we didn't need it to get more relevant,
but of course it did.
♪ Hear my voice ♪
- So and action.
- Aaron's written something
that feels extraordinarily contemporary.
Aaron describes the film as being a painting,
not a photograph.
And I think that's a very beautiful way of describing it.
"The Trial of the Chicago 7,"
it's not a documentary,
and it's not intended as journalism.
- This movie is totally about today.
It's a movie that set in 1968,
but it's like a transponder that goes back into history,
touches on a certain moment,
and sends that signal back into today.
- [Crowd] Our streets!
- Our streets!
- [Crowd] Our streets.
- Was it the powerful versus the powerless?
I think it should encourage people to get out
and to speak up and to really look at
the state of our world,
the state of our country.
And to say that if we have a problem with something
that we should speak up,
and we should speak out loudly.
- We're innocent.
They are responsible for the bloodshed
that flowed in the streets in Chicago.
- I suppose the role of film is to some way,
well to entertain, and to thrill,
but also to reflect what's going on in our world,
and at a time in which I feel like all of us are having
to repeat as a mantra,
remember our history, learn from our history.
The idea of continuing conversations seems vital to me.
- Lincoln said in his inaugural address,
"When the people should grow weary
of the constitutional right to amend their government,
they shall exert their revolutionary right dismember
and overthrow that government.
- That's part of the beauty of the United States of America
is that the citizens are supposed to be skeptical,
and not just blindly defer to the government.
So how do you overthrow or dismembers, you say,
your government peacefully?
- In this country,
we do it every four years.
- I hope people start saying,
gee, we seem to have gone backwards.
How did we end up back in 1968?
We didn't want to do that again.
The nature of protest and the fact that when
you protest your government,
it doesn't mean you're anti-American.
Quite the opposite,
If it becomes something that sparks a conversation,
Well, now we're talking.
That's really the good stuff.
- When we were walking in this morning,
they were chanting that the whole world is watching.
If we leave here without saying anything about why
we came in the first place,
it'll be heartbreaking.
- [Crowd] The whole world is watching!
- [Tom] We have to find some courage now.
- [Crowd] The whole world is watching.
(dramatic music)