In The Line of Fire - Production

Production

Producer, Jeff Apple, began developing "In the Line of Fire" in the mid-eighties. His previous credits included Zapped!, a teen comedy starring Scott Baio. For "Fire", Apple made several research trips to the U.S. Secret Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. and recruited Secret Service agents, including Robert Snow, to consult. Snow helped lead Apple to the real Secret Service Agent the Clint Eastood character is modeled on. The Secret Service also gave an official nod to Apple's project.

Apple planned on making a movie about a U.S. Secret Service Agent on detail during the Kennedy assassination since his boyhood. Apple was inspired and intrigued by a vivid early childhood memory of meeting Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in person surrounded by Secret Service Agents with earpieces in dark suits and sunglasses. The movie concept later struck Apple as an adolescent watching televised replays of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1991, writer Jeff Maguire came aboard and completed the script that would become the movie.

Filming began in late 1992 in Washington, D.C. Scenes in the White House were filmed on a pre-built set, while an Air Force One interior set had to be built at a cost of $250,000.

A sub-plot of the film is the President's reelection campaign. For the scenes of campaign rallies the filmmakers used digitally-altered scenes from President George Herbert Walker Bush's and Governor Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign events.

The movie also uses digitized imagery from 1960s Clint Eastwood movies inserted into the Kennedy assassination scenes. As Jeff Apple described it to the Los Angeles Times, Clint "gets the world's first digital haircut."