"We start shooting in October," he said, before going on to confirm that the film will focus on a small portion of the source material.  "Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team Of Rivals is much too big a book to be a movie, so the Lincoln story only takes place in the last few months of his Presidency and life. I was interested in how he ended the war through all the efforts of his generals...but more importantly how he passed the 13th Amendment into constitutional law. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war powers act and could have been struck down by any court after the war ended...But what permanently ended slavery was the very close vote in the House of Representatives over the 13th Amendment - that story I'm excited to tell."

The massive cast of Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln has been increased by one. Jackie Earle Haley will play Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Haley bears more than a slight resemblance to Stephens, and I’m happy to see the actor cast in a prestige picture. I’m hoping the role won’t be the boilerplate antagonist type. Stephens was noted for the Cornerstone Speech, delivered prior to the Civil War, in 1961 in Savannah, GA.:

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

And yet prior to a life in politics, Stephens made a name for himself as an attorney who successfully defended the wrongly accused; one frequently cited case saw him successfully defending a slave accused of murder. So there’s a bit more to the character than being simply a blinkered defender of slavery.