Marcia Gay Harden and Peter Landesman on the set of Parkland. Photo: Claire Folger

In a new movie about the Kennedy Assassination opening Friday, the slain president actually plays only a minor role. Instead, Parkland focuses on the doctors, government officials and everyday citizens whose lives were forever changed. Peter Landesman wrote and directed the movie, and he recently stopped by KERA to talk about the ideas he explored:

• KERA Radio Interview:

• Interview highlights:

Landesman on telling a well-known story…

“It’s a story actually people don’t really know at all. What people have been obsessed with and distracted by for so long is the murder mystery – the conspiracy element of it. But the idea that this was an event that happened to us on the ground is really foreign. … I wanted to take the audience and put them in the shoes of those who were there and have the audience experience the assassination not as a piece of history but as a thing that was happening in front of them.”

On filming in Dealey Plaza …

“I shot Paul Giamatti and Billy Bob Thornton there, and we all had this very strange, sort of mystical experience. It wasn’t a re-creation, but it was taking those characters and those men and giving them the experience of what happened there. I couldn’t have shot that anywhere else. I had to shoot that here.

On why we’re still fascinated with the story 50 years later …

“I think two reasons. One is I think this and 9-11 are the two most seminal moments in modern American history. They changed America overnight. It was one thing and then it was another thing. But the other thing is, because we’ve been focusing on the conspiracy element, which is a dialogue and a debate that has no end, there’s no resolution. There’s no closure. There never will be, because it’s all wrong. It’s all lies or half lies – it’s just theory. Parkland, actually, if you look at it right, it could be thought of as the last word. Because it doesn’t seek to answer the unanswerable, it seeks to answer with the truth. It almost put a big period at the end of the sentence instead of a comma.”