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In all the presidential biographies, what I try to do is get past the stereotypes. What I wanted to do in TR was to get beyond the stereotypical image we have of him as the man with the glasses charging up San Juan Hill, teeth flashing, crying "Bully!" How do you get to know the real man? That's really my job and that's really what I set out to do. What I've tried to do is to find, is to see all sides of the man. TR -- we think of him as this energetic, optimistic, spirited man -- which indeed he was -- had another side as well which existed simultaneous, which was also a part of him.

He was a melancholy man also, there was a darkness there. Remember he had experienced terrible tragedy when both his wife and his mother died on the same day. Remember how much he loved his father and his father died young, 46 years old, another tragedy in his life. These things weighed heavy on his heart and they're not things that people think about when they think of TR, yet they are a part of him. His frailties, his vulnerability is what makes him human. The frailties of FDR, the frailties of LBJ, are what make them human and it's important to balance those, let them weigh in, weigh in the balance with the more public sides of their character with which we are more familiar.

Of course in making Theodore Roosevelt one of the things that was different than in making LBJ and FDR was we were dealing with a character, a figure, who's farther back in time. We're dealing with a figure who lives at the turn of the century and there's much less photographic material, much less archival film and photographs. It was necessary to find ways to visualize scenes for which there was no photography. The charge up San Juan Hill, for example. How do you evoke the feeling of a little boy with asthma lying in bed struggling to breath? Scenes like that had to be drawn without the aid of photographs or film. We had to construct in an impressionistic way scenes that could evoke those feelings.