Saturday Night Special - If I had been John W. Hinckley Jr.

Thomas Björk, Kill Your Darlings. Saga Basement, Copenhagen 1995.

- I’ve never taken any interest in Robert De Nero… him… I don’t give a damn about him… he played the role of Travis Bickle… Bickle I liked. But what similarities is he supposed to have with De Nero… I’ve never had any ambition to become an actor. We always had a lot of money when I was growing up. If I’d wanted a career I guess I would have got one. My father was an oil millionaire… why would I need a career, we always had a lot of money.

    Reagan was an actor, he was some kind of soldier just like Bickle… in any case he made some films… instructional films for the Air Force. I’d rather become a soldier than an actor.

- They found Jodie Foster’s on… her address on me… after I’d fired the shots. That was how she found out he’d been shot I think… I suppose it was the FBI who called and told her that someone who had her address had shot the president. That was me.

    I’ve read… she wrote about ‘how she took it’ in a magazine. I don’t know what to say… she complains about not being allowed to be an ordinary girl at university… but what does she want instead… to be somebody else? I don’t think so. She put herself on the Yale school stage as soon as she got there all the same… she got the main role… she wanted it. I was there and saw her several shows in a row. She has admitted that she noticed me in the audience… at that time she didn’t know I was John Hinckley. But she knew the name, I had written letters to her.

- It wasn’t just a coincidence that we met either… in the way that some people say they know someone just because they crashed into someone else’s car or ran someone over. We met because I wanted to meet her… not by coincidence, you can’t say that there’s anything personal about it if you meet by coincidence.

    I can’t go around saying I know Reagan just because I shot him. He was just a staircase for me… I used it and it held. I never had any intention to hit off with him… well, I hit him with a bullet of course… but I don’t claim that I know him because of that. It’s a while since it happened, it was 1981. He’s starting to get old… I think he’s got cancer.

- My mother gave evidence in court… I was a character without aim or backbone… that was the lawyer’s plan… they wanted me to be… mentally ill… to avoid being punished. I hadn’t been able to pull myself together to do anything… sat at home and stared into thin air. They sought help from Dr Hopper who was to make a plan for me… I was restless, needed to think. I discovered her in 1975 before Taxi Driver, that came out in 1976… it hasn’t got anything to do with child prostitution… I had seen her before. It wasn’t the character… I wanted to meet her, I just needed to figure out how… that was the important thing… not my career.

- "by the time the show is over, Jodie Foster will be dead” — I put the note up on the noticeboard in the theatre. I had never considered shooting her, she was too hot to be shot… why would I… I was in love with her. The note was just a message for her… in the same way that she left a message for me in Taxi Driver… no, she didn’t know about me then.

- Things become what you make of them… if you don’t make anything of them then nothing comes of them… the president never got shot in the film… that was the message I received: love me or I’ll shoot the president. I wrote letters to her… she didn’t answer, so I shot the president, not her. Like religious folks who shoot people… if you believe in something you have to live up to your belief… I’m not Travis Bickle but Robert De Niro isn’t either…

- "Pulling a trigger is as easy as changing the TV channel with a remote control," she wrote in the article. Maybe it’s like that in the movies, but it isn’t true…. neither firing nor hitting the mark… the first shot took years to fire… later on it got easier. They were the ones who got in the way, the press secretary, the police and the guy from the Secret Service… it was strange to see them fall, not at all like on TV. They have sued me… they read out my letters to her in court… saw something in them, I suppose. I had to give up my “intellectual property” to them, my letters to Jodie Foster, the songs I had written, notes which they called “my deepest thoughts and feelings” about her… it’s not me who’s created a world in which a man who’s shot the president gets 2.9 million dollars to write his life story. How much are they going to offer Jodie?

- We met in court. She seemed surprised… I managed better… our eyes met, she looked away. She has spoken about me in interviews… that I’ve been manipulated… that that’s what they’re good at, actors, manipulating… if they get really good at it they get little dolls, Oscars… she’s received some.

    She says that she manipulates millions of people… that all men who’ve seen her know her, think that she represents herself on screen.

- She said straight up that that’s how I knew her, as an idol… "so of course Hinckley 'knows' me" … she knows it can’t be so, I’m not one among a million, if I were she’d have to sit in court all the time… I’ve shown her… I’ve gone further than those among the millions have in showing how serious they are.

- People have started to get us mixed up… I probably like that… not that they think it was her who fired the shot… when they ask if it was her who shot Reagan… I’m part of her career now, I gave her loads of publicity. I don’t even know if I love her any more, still, we’ve become inseparable… like an old married couple.

- I loved her… I had to cross that divide… the one between her on screen and me here. I was forced to speak to her in the same way she spoke to me from there… it was simply necessary to show her how it worked, show her that I spoke to her in that way now too… like she to me. I simply had to show her that I took what she said to me there seriously… the note was just a way of showing that I… we had started to speak in that way… she should grow a little afraid for a moment during the performance… but she was alive once it was over.

- It wasn’t something that happened by chance… I knew all along what I wanted to do. There’s a document… it was nothing personal, I don’t give a damn about Reagan… it should have been Carter… they arrested me for unlawful possession of firearms at the airport in Nashville, it was 1980. Carter was in town… I hit Reagan in 1981… March… I had bought a gun several months earlier… a “Saturday Night Special”. I could have bought a different gun, a better one, bigger… that’s what made it go so badly in Nashville…

- The gun needs to have a name that fits its purpose… be a stairway to its goal, an amulet that guarantees success. Like “Saturday Night Special”… almost like “Saturday Night Live”… the name has in a way already crossed the divide…

- She has said that my greatest crime is that I’ve mistaken love for fascination… that she will never forgive me for having trivialised love in that way. If she had answered my letters she would have found out… I would have found out if it was love or something else. She didn’t dare to meet me in the real world… that was why I was forced to come up to her world… she can choose to be in any film she wants… look at what she chooses: The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs. I’ve been through a number of tests about things about identification… it doesn’t work like people think, you don’t just choose your idols among people you look up to… JR Ewing, why do people like him… not because he’s handsome… but because he was a shit.

- Because people are shitheads themselves… because they recognise themselves in him, because he’s a bigger shit than they want, dare to be, because they want to be bigger shitheads themselves.

- They sentenced me to psychiatric care… if I’d been black I would’ve got the electric chair… Travis Bickle didn’t manage to shoot the president… the Secret Service stopped him before he could… he said to one of them that he lived on Hopper Street and wanted to be a Secret Service man… I hit one of them with a bullet… the psychologist my parents hired was also called Hopper.

- I got to play with loads of dolls… put them in contexts they… a forensic psychiatry test. Fourteen different experts got to look on, none of them reached the same conclusion… my parents paid some of them half a million dollars. To say that I was ill… the prosecution paid their experts. Of course I understood that they needed it for something… you don’t play any which way if your audience is worth a million dollars. It was voodoo, I’m alive… the dolls just had to behave in the right way… if you control them properly everything turns out fine… like actors in a film.