(gravel strikes)

- You know why you're on trial here?

- We wanna underscore again that we're coming

to Chicago peacefully,

but whether we're given permits or not,

we're coming.

- There's no place to be right now, but in it.

- They're not going to storm the convention

with tanks or mace.

- Cops is gonna be a half inch from losing their minds.

(dramatic music)

We're not concerned about it.

We're counting on it!

- These eight defendants had a plan,

and the plan was to incite a riot.

They succeeded.

(crowd yelling)

- We were gassed, beaten, arrested, and put on trial.

- [Tom] If blood is gonna flow,

let it flow all over the city.

- What was that?

An order to start a peaceful demonstration?

- [Crowd] The whole world is watching!

The whole world is watching!

- 1968 was a bad year in America.

Martin Luther King was shot and killed.

Eight weeks later, Bobby Kennedy is shot and killed.

And this is all happening against the backdrop

of the Vietnam War.

The Democratic Convention in Chicago was the place

that a number of leaders of the anti-war movement

had decided to bring demonstrators.

And so activists, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden

Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Wiener

and an eighth Bobby Seale,

the head of the Black Panthers,

came to Chicago for three days to lead

what we're supposed to be peaceful protests.

(crowd yelling)

That peaceful protest ended up being

an incredibly bloody clash with the police

and the national guard.

We've never really seen anything quite like it

in this country.

(crowd clashing)

- It was a big question of who caused the violence?

Did the protesters start the fight

or did the police start the fight?

And that was a hotly contested question.

Ultimately it kind of blew over and no criminal charges

were really leveled against anybody.

Then Richard Nixon won the election,

and decided we are going to press charges.

- And we watched for a decade

while these rebels without a job,

tell us how to prosecute a war.

- And so the legal question is whether or not

they conspired together to incite a riot

at the Democratic Convention in 1968?

- I'm not with these guys.

I never even met most of them until the indictment.

- We will have order.

- You have eight of us here.

- We will have order. - They have signs out there,

free the Chicago Seven.

I'm not with them.

- One of the wonderful things about this group

of eight people within this trial,

is they all had very different takes

on the same subject matter.

They were all bound by the idea that sending

these Americans off to fight a war,

at a place which they couldn't necessarily pin

on a map to a people that they had no engagement

or understanding of,

was madness.

- You can't just put these guys on trial,

'cause you don't like them.

(dramatic music)

But that's what they did.

- I call this portion of the trial,

With Friends Like These.

- [Man] Ready in five, a few minutes to go.

- One of the things I love about this film

is that every character has an arc

and every character has a moment.

And I think it's a testament to the depth of the script

and delicious quality of Aaron's writing.

He's attracted such a band of players.

- We were asking of these people,

all of whom can and frequently do carry their own movies

to be part of an ensemble, a large ensemble.

This story is so big that every single one

of these protestors should have a standalone film.

It is the finest group of actors, Eddie Redmayne

Sasha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt,

Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Yahya Abdul-Mateen,

John Carroll Lynch, and Michael Keaton.

- It's really something to put that many actors in a room.

We're getting to observe all of our different processes

and different people on the different days

get to sort of have their moment.

- Eddie Redmayne plays Tom Hayden and is brilliant

in the movie.

- We are going to show that we as a generation

are serious people.

- Tom had a very specific voice,

and Aaron was very strong to liberate me early

in the script as I was working on my voice.

And he said, "I don't want this to be

a replica of Tom Hayden."

- Yes.

- [Eddie] I want you to play my version of him.

- Eddie is like ferociously intelligent person

and also very generous and has a lot of perspective.

- He has such a depth and such an authenticity.

and a nobility to his spirit that Tom had.

- I think Tom Hayden is a bad-ass of an American patriot

I was always interested in Abbie Hoffman.

He's this clown who is deeply passionate.

He's ready to risk his life.

He uses the media for political ends.

He's funny.

He's cool.

He's got amazing hair.

- Sasha Baron Cohen,

I just can't think of anyone else

who could play Abbie Hoffman.

Abbie Hoffman still has a kind of iconic mannerism,

that iconic Boston accent,

and is just a wild guy.

- He is a provocateur playing a provocateur.

He creates a character that has to be so lifelike

that people don't even know he's acting.

- In Shakespearean times,

the fool was the guy who came and appeared to be the comic,

but actually was somehow sort of busy exposing people

to themselves?

And I feel like what Sasha has done

with a lot of his career,

is he's made people fall on their own source.

- Sasha, as we all know is a brilliant clown.

He went to clowning school,

and Abbie was a clown who was also the most serious guy

in the room.

It's, Sasha is too.

- In a way, there are two Abbie's.

There's the public persona of Abbie where he's trying

to inspire people,

and there's the private Abbie.

So there's the balance between the clown and the intellect.

- [Reporter] How much is it worth to you?

What's your price?

- To call off the revolution?

My life.

- [Man] Beautiful, that's great guys.

Jeremy Strong is just brilliant as Jerry Rubin.

Jerry in this story really is the militant in a sense.

Put down your guns, fight like men.

Laying down in front of the troop train,

stopping the troop trains going to Oakland.

- He embodies Jerry Rubin's sense of confrontation

and provocation both in the scenes and outside the scenes.

- He's always in character.

He's always believable.

He's a great guy to have by your side.

You just look to him.

(dramatic music)

- An actor you're gonna be hearing a lot more about

named Yahya Abdul-Mateen, plays Bobby Seale.

- When I play a character who is living,

one of my first instincts is to understand

what they were after.

And I wanna understand their soul.

I wanna understand their concerns.

And my performance is my interpretation

of their needs, their wants, their voice, their desires.

I'm sitting here saying that I would like to cross examine

the witness. - I'm tired of hearing that.

- Couldn't care less what you're tired of.

- Yahya is doing such a fantastic job

of bringing that real sincere emotion to his performance.

- Obviously, it was a figure that I knew of

from growing up.

And in the script,

I think Aaron wrote a character

that is extremely passionate, smart, witty,

stands up for himself.

- The way Yahya does it is just,

it's powerful and it's direct and it's authentic.

And it's a really good representation of Bobby, honestly.

- My trial has begun without my lawyer.

- Court assumes that you are being represented

by the Black Panther sitting behind you.

- Throughout the course of the trial,

there was one person who was in support

of Bobby Seale and that person is Fred Hampton.

Fred Hampton was the Chicago leader

of the Black Panther Party.

- And he was a close advisor to Bobby.

And certainly during the trial,

and he sat, sits behind Bobby during the entire trial.

- Extremely smart, intelligent, passionate.

- Four hours!

- [Frank] Mr. Hampton.

- That's how long Bobby Seale was in Chicago.

(audience claps) - Quiet!

- That's four hours.

- He's not to be defeated.

- Aaron Sorkin has done a really smart and interesting thing

in creating a character on the antagonistic side,

on the prosecutor's side, that isn't just a bad guy.

- Richard Schultz,

who is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is conflicted.

We know from the beginning of the movie

he doesn't think they should be prosecuting these guys,

but the Attorney General himself has said,

You better do this.

You gotta win.

- You pay me for my opinion.

- I pay you to win.

- I'm not sure we can get a good indictment

on conspiracy, sir.

- My parents were peace activists in the '60s and '70s,

so I grew up knowing who Abbie Hoffman was,

knowing who the Yippies were.

These were fairly common ideas and characters

in just my family conversation,

and my parents were excited to say the least when they heard

that I was doing this.

And then intrigued, if not dismayed,

to hear that I would be playing the prosecution.

On top of everything else,

we're giving them exactly what they want,

a stage and an audience.

I admire that he's asking these questions

based on principles rather than

whether or not he personally likes the people involved.

- Now, Dave Dellinger was a Boy Scout troop leader.

He was an eighth grade science teacher.

He was also a conscientious objector,

and believed fervently in nonviolence.

- [Boy] What if the police start hitting you?

- [David] Why would the police start hitting me?

- [Boy] What if they do?

- [John] I'll duck.

- David, he watches the news.

- I'm fortunate in comparison to other people in this film,

because Dellinger was so assiduously private.

You just have to get it from the material.

You're a thug.