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Despite the all-star cast, Bobby is not yet backed by any major studio. In fact, the whole project is pretty much the baby of Estevez, whose directing experience is largely limited to television. The film has had various false starts, including the familiar story of the original production company going bust before filming began. Then there was the problem of putting the script together with Estevez suffering from writer’s block. “In the end I just got on the road and sort of sentenced myself to some time alone in a motel, which is a familiar route for scriptwriters to take,” he says.

It was there that he met Diane (played in the film by Lindsay Lohan), a woman then in her fifties who had been at the Ambassador on the night of the assassination. “She told me this incredible story,” Estevez says. “She was there marrying a second husband so that she could save the boy from having to go to fight in Vietnam. I realised then that everything is connected, in some way or another.”

Suddenly the script that Estevez had been carrying around with him for months — and which was nowhere near ready — began to move around this central story. “Diane is basically the heart of the piece,” says Estevez.

However small or significant, each of the roles seems to have been snatched up by a top Hollywood name, none of whom is being paid anything like an A-lister wage. Stone, for one, read the script and agreed to do the film for free. “It really spoke to me,” she says. “I was the daughter of a farmer and our family worked very hard. We felt that Bobby really represented who we were and what we were trying to do.”

Macy recalls simply thinking “that they were just going to take them all out one by one. JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby. Who was left from that political vein? Nobody. It went from there straight to Richard Nixon becoming President".

David Armitage, professor of history at Harvard, Kennedy’s alma mater, considers 1968 to have been a unique year in American history. “Too often this story is dwarfed by the assassination of JFK, which is more controversial, or Martin Luther King, who is more universal. But Bobby Kennedy was almost certainly going to be the next President. So it is actually extremely important from the point of view of what a difference that one bullet made to the future of America.”

Although Estevez refuses to admit that the film has any outward political connotations, he does believe that the America he was raised in is one still reeling from the effects of the Sixties. “I think that we became cynical from that point on. For me the job still all goes back to what Frank Capra said: ‘We have to let them know that we care.’

“That’s what I think everyone got involved in this film for. Because we care.”

Page 2: Jack and Bobby: the Kennedys on film ()

Jack and Bobby: the Kennedys on film

EXECUTIVE ACTION (1973)
Starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan and directed by David Miller, the plot concerns a group of oilmen who assassinate John Kennedy because his policies are bad for business. The story plays down the conspiracy theories of government cover-ups, although it does show three riflemen performing the shooting, against the official conclusion that there was only one.

MISSILES OF OCTOBER (1974)
Directed by Anthony Page and based on Robert Kennedy's book Thirteen Days, this made-for-TV film about the Cuban missile crisis starred William Devane as JFK and Martin Sheen as Robert Kennedy.

JFK (1991)
Oliver Stone’s epic drama, starring Kevin Costner, about the conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy, gave Stone’s version of the events the gravitas of which most historians could only dream. JFK created an “official” version of the killing for a generation of people too young to remember what happened.

RFK (2002)
Starring Linus Roache as Robert Kennedy and directed by Robert Dornhelm, this film covered the last five years of the politician’s life.

THIRTEEN DAYS (2000)
Kevin Costner returns to the aid of John Kennedy, this time playing his assistant during the Cuban missile crisis, in Roger Donaldson’s film. Set during the height of the Cold War, it follows the countdown to the near-destruction of Cuba and the beginning of nuclear war. At the same time, it dramatises the pressure put on the Kennedy brothers, Robert and John, to make the first strike.

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