Eric Schultz knows his way around the White House. He served as deputy White House press secretary during the Obama administration from 2014 to 2017.
It’s one of the reasons that he now frequently consults on Hollywood projects about Washington.
His latest gig was helping the cast and creatives get everything right in “Zero Day,” the Netflix political thriller about a former president (Robert De Niro) who is pulled out of retirement by the current commander-on-chief (Angela Bassett) to investigate a worldwide cyber attack.
“The producers called because they wanted somebody on set for the filming of the White House scenes, and they wanted someone who had been in the actual White House to help inform how those conversations and meetings and discussions would take place, whether it was in the Oval Office or the Press Briefing Room,” Schultz tells me.
He even helped with props. Presidents usually have a bowl of treats on the Oval Office coffee table – Ronald Regan famously offered jellybeans while Barack Obama had apples and Joe Biden had chocolate chips on hand. In “Zero Day,” Schultz helped decide that Bassett’s character would have a bowl of oranges. “They became consequential later on because the speaker of the house [Matthew Modine] peels an orange when he’s in her office as a flex during one of their heated conversations,” Schultz recalls.
What was it like telling Robert De Niro how to do something?
I will say Bob was very focused on making sure he got things right and being as authentic as he could be in the role. He’d have questions and the whole team would have questions that we would go over to make sure we had the etiquette, especially the Oval Office, right. They wanted a sense of the energy and the dynamic of the room. Where would a president sit? Where would a former president sit? In the press briefing room, who enters first? It was a lot about getting that minutia right so that the story would feel as credible as possible.
What was it like on set for you because everything looks so real?
It’s completely surreal. The production folks and the set designer did an absolutely incredible job in creating those spaces, especially the space that we call the Outer Oval, which is sort of the office space that leads into the Oval Office. It’s not a space that is widely used in film and television. But they recreated it, and they just did an impeccable job with that as well as the Oval, press briefing room and the joint address to Congress.
JOJO WHILDEN/NETFLIX © 2023
Tell me more about the joint address scene.
We had to keep telling the actor who played the Sergeant at Arms, “Louder, louder,” when he announced the former president. We showed him a YouTube video of how it should be done. I live in a world where everyone watches State of the Unions and other speeches before Congress, and I forget not everyone would know how things are done. It should not surprise me that most people outside of Washington don’t closely follow the processional for the State of the Union address, right?
How real was the storyline and is it something that could really happen?
If you talk to any expert when it comes to national security, cyber threats are the top of the list of things that keep them up at night. I think the constantly evolving threats against our technology, and especially cyber warfare, remain acute challenges. In that regard, the story is on point. I also think making sure that people in power have expertise and integrity is also, unfortunately, a question we’re all we’re grappling with at the moment. I think the story, which was written years ago, was prescient.
