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VANTAGE POINT SYNOPSIS

Vantage Point tells the story of eight strangers with eight different points of view who try to unlock the one truth behind an assassination attempt on the president of the United States. Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) are two Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Ashton (William Hurt) at a landmark summit on the global war on terror.

When President Ashton is shot moments after his arrival in Spain, chaos ensues and disparate lives collide in the hunt for the assassin. In the crowd is Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), an American tourist who thinks he’s captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home.

Using new camera and editing techniques, Vantage Point takes the action genre to new heights and levels of skill from a film maker’s point of view.

For director Pete Travis this story was a chance to explore the idea of “the truth” – and the fact that truth is in the eye of the beholder. As Vantage Point unfolds, the film explores the period immediately before and after the assassination attempt from the unique points of view of eight key participants – ranging from the president himself to the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him to a tourist in the square only by chance.

“If you were to follow only one story, you wouldn’t find out the truth about what really happened,” says Travis. “As you see each story, you see something else that you never knew before. It’s only when you get to the end that you figure out what really went on.”

Film makers were called upon to use every tool available to differentiate the stories. Whether it was through the use of different lenses, or different film stock, or lighting, or different ways of shooting, such as handheld cameras, Steadicam, dollies, they used different tricks to try to make each of these stories feel individual, to keep the audience interested in the twists and turns and invested in each character’s story.