Thirteen Days and History

Peter Almond

Thirteen Days is a dramatization inspired by some of the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, benefiting from over a generation of scholarship, memoir writing, and journalism; it represents a perspective gained by looking back at a series of critical events that took place roughly 38 years ago. First and foremost, I would like to say that the film is not meant to be the last word, or the first word, on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, it is a kind of evocation of the great moments of this two-week period as we best understand them from today's vantage point. Inevitably, we have been forced to compress events and, at times, even conflate the comments and functions of participants of the crisis to meet the demands of a dramatic narrative. We believe, however, that this kind of dramatic narrative imposes a responsibility upon us as filmmakers to remain faithful to the most important themes and issues which a consensus of historians and policy experts have identified as constituting the historical record.

It is difficult to establish absolute criteria for assessing dramatic interpretations of history, but at the same time it is necessary to recognize that standards do exist, and that they must be identified and served by responsible filmmakers. In the case of Thirteen Days, the writer and producers and director were so struck by the nature of the historical record itself that they felt it was unwise to range widely from it. The problem was more one of effective story telling in dramatic film narrative--distilling the powerful events and issues of the Cuban Missile Crisis in an accessible format--than it was one of manufacturing a dramatic story. The very nature of that situation--the pressure of a nuclear threat posed in the early years of the cold war-made our job simply one of effectively conveying the intensity of that moment.

In terms of portraying historical personages and analyzing how the crisis was resolved, we needed to isolate the character traits that got people into this situation and ultimately helped them get out of it. We were inclined to stay close to the actual nature and behavior of the key people, to focus in on a small number of them, and to make the movie story as clear and easy to follow while simultaneously remaining consistent with the historical record. As a result, we studied the personalities, behavior, and positions of the President, the Attorney General, and their advisors. We tried to suggest the Russian side of the events in the appearance of Gromyko and Dobrynin, but our main focus was on the United States' side of the calculation. We wanted the audience to watch the debate go back and forth among the civilian and military advisors and to track the decision-making process. Again, the record itself was so compelling that we didn't think that it needed much from the filmmakers.

In terms of our hopes for the film, we want to inspire the audience to learn more about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because it contains some important lessons for today, and because it sets a standard for how we view leadership, public leadership, in the face of tremendous adversity. We have struggled to be faithful to the historical record, if inspired by it to dramatize the story, but dramatized in such a way that central themes of the crisis, the nature of leadership and its importance, the nature of the nuclear threat, the importance of judgment in the office and person of the President the United States accurately reflect the events of October of 1962. We hope that these key themes are embodied in the film and that, ideally, the audience will seek information about these important events, through web sites, testimony, transcripts, documents, and through the scholarship and various memoirs that have been produced in the years since the crisis.