The South Bend Tribune - May 29, 2003

SOUTH BEND -- Until just a few years ago, film director Tim Richardson says, he had no real interest in the Civil War.

Now, he's made two films about the war between the states.

In 2001, Richardson and his screenwriting partner, Michael Kouroubetes, made "Second Sight," a 30-minute short film set at the Battle of Bull Run as a screen-test project for "Kill the Messenger," a feature-length film set at the Battle of Buffington Island, Ohio.

"Kill the Messenger" opens today at Indiana University South Bend, where Richardson works in the instructional media services department, for screenings this and next weekend. Richardson and Dan Wort, a producer on the film, will answer questions about the production following today's screening.

"I knew I was treading in an area that I knew very little about and where the details were important," Richardson says of setting the two films in the Civil War.

Civil War re-enactors from Indiana, Michigan and Illinois, however, lent their expertise, uniforms and, even, horses to the two productions. They also appear in the two films during battle sequences that were filmed in Hastings and Jackson, Mich.

"Even though I didn't know a lot about the re-enactors, somehow, when we thought about it, it clicked," Richardson says. "I knew that if we didn't have them encounter a lot of battles, we could do it."

Kevin McInerney, also a staff member in the instructional media services department at IUSB and a past participant in Richardson's films, provided research on the Battle of Buffington Island, the Copperhead Movement and John Wilkes Booth, who figures in the film's climax.

"Kill the Messenger" begins on July 19, 1863, at Buffington Island as the battle is winding down. Two Confederate brothers, Daniel (Bryce Cone) and Drake (Shayne Golden), disguise themselves as Union soldiers and attempt to deliver a secret message to a northern conspirator, Lt. Hatcher (Sean McCormick) of the Union Army. Hatcher intends to sell the message to Booth (John Finnegan), who did appear in a play in Cleveland at that time.

"It isn't as much about what the letter contains as it's about the effect it has on the lives of the characters who transport it," Richardson says.

If Booth's role in "Kill the Messenger" seems out of place, Richardson says, the history of the Civil War is a history of coincidences. Although he lived in the Northeast, Booth was a Confederate sympathizer.

"One problem we found with the Civil War is that sometimes the facts seem more unbelievable than fiction," Richardson says. "A lot of people think they know how it's supposed to be rather than what it is."

In a historical film, Richardson says, nothing should call attention to itself as being historical.

"After watching 'Gettysburg,' I think it's a mistake to arch the language," he says. "It says, 'I'm historical and boring.' We wanted them to be real people. So long as they don't use modern slang, let the characters be who they are."

Richardson and Kouroubetes have previously collaborated on several works, including the feature films "Bloodlines" and "a:\Kill." In 2001, Richardson created an online sitcom, "Nobody's Listening," that "is in transition."

For the first time in their career, Richardson and Kouroubetes have signed with a distributor, Chicago-based 1st American Media, which will distribute "Kill the Messenger" to foreign markets as a straight-to-video release and to some domestic markets. Richardson says they'd like to screen the movie at art houses and in historic settings and distribute it to vendors who work at re-enactments.

Richardson usually operates the camera on his movies, but for "Kill the Messenger," he hired Jeffrey P. Ackil, a cinematographer from Chicago who worked on the films "Backdraft" and "Uncle Buck" and who makes films for 1st American.

The battle scenes and the scenes with horses were easier to work with, Ackil says, than the challenges that lighting the movie presented.

"I told them repeatedly, this is a Civil War movie," he says. "There are no electric lights. This was a situation, I said, where I imagine all we have is daylight and fire. I had to light the cast so that it was believable."

Because they were shooting with a digital camera, Ackil says, lighting the movie was more complicated than if they had been using film because digital doesn't work as well in low-light conditions.

As for the battle scenes, Ackil says, those were "the fun stuff" for him.

"That's the kid in you who gets to play Army and make it seem interesting to the audience," he says. "There's a shot where a horse spins around with a rider on it. I planned that. These aren't Hollywood horses who are trained to do that, and I had to ask the owner if it could do that. This isn't the sort of thing that comes up when they're riding on a trail."

Jim Pickens, who mixed the movie's audio track, is also working on a behind-the-scenes feature for the movie's DVD release, which is scheduled for later in the summer.

Richardson and Kouroubetes' previous films have been super low-budget in cost -- but not talent -- and were set in the present day. For "Kill the Messenger," they raised a significant amount of money ahead of time and took on the challenges of working with horses, filming battle scenes and policing the set to make sure anachronisms don't appear in any scenes.

"With each production, you want to do something reasonable but have some parts be unreasonable," Richardson says. "When you're an independent filmmaker you want to know your limitations, but you want people to say, 'Wow, you did that?' "

Staff writer Andrew S. Hughes:

(574) 235-6377