The Last Glimmer

With 'Bobby,' Estevez Revisits Pivotal, Painful Moment

LOS ANGELES -- Molly Ringwald. "The Breakfast Club." The Brat Pack? That was back in the Late Cretaceous Period. Emilio Estevez sits at the luncheon table, folding a soiled napkin, unfolding, folding. His busy hands appear to have a mind of their own. He is wearing a blazer and carrying a briefcase. He looks like an agent from State Farm.

Except. Estevez is leaning forward, and his eyes, these blue ice cubes -- it's freaky. He is a ringer for his father, Martin Sheen, in "Apocalypse Now." He is Willard going upriver to find Kurtz.

Decades ago, Estevez was a cult hero as Otto in "Repo Man" and then he was a heartthrob in "St. Elmo's Fire." Now 44, Estevez confesses he is nervous.

"Your confidence takes a beating," he says. "I've been down for the last decade."

We had heard he was making wine for a living. "I did what I had to do to keep the wolves on the other side of the door," he says.

Estevez is nervous, specifically, about his new movie, "Bobby," an ensemble drama he wrote and directed (and stars in) about the day -- June 5, 1968 -- that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

No one wanted to finance the film.

"We decided not to go the studio route," Estevez says, which is Hollywood-speak for the following: "Every independent company in town had seen the script and passed on it," he explains.

Finally, a Russian businessman with a Belgian passport named Michel Litvak invested, and his girlfriend, Svetlana Metkina, got a part.

We love that it took a Russian.

"He read the script and just got it," Estevez says.

The project was shot in 37 days. The initial budget was $5.5 million, though eventually they spent close to $10 million. They were filming at the shuttered Ambassador as it was actually being demolished. The actors were paid scale, which is $2,000 a week.