AARON BROWN (PBS)

What’s your role in the movie?
I played myself, which has always been my worst nightmare, that my career would end with me playing me. I remember Mario Machado, Los Angeles local anchor, who was in every movie that needed an anchor, and I thought, Oh, man, I never wanna be that.

What’s the biggest difference between a movie set and a television news set?
Those [movie] people work so slow. It’s unbelievable how long everything takes. I was there for 13 hours. We shot the scene at about 4 in the morning. At one point, they said “Okay, roll.” I started to do Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men because I thought, If I’m gonna act, I wanna do something that’s meaty. And then someone said, “This stuff costs about 10,000 a second, so just do the scene. You’re not that funny.” However, I think I was that funny.

What do you think the plot of Swing Vote, which has the presidential election coming down to one man’s vote, says to voters today?
Average people have been screwed by American politics. Somehow, people who go to work every day and pay their taxes have been completely ignored by the politics and media. I thought the movie’s message of the significance of a single vote was a good and reasonable and accurate one. I thought someone should be saying that. 

How do you think the media has performed in this campaign?
Newspapers and traditional broadcast networks have done a pretty decent job in a fascinating campaign. As far as cable goes, people who hate the president watch Keith Olbermann and people who love the president watch Bill O’Reilly, and at the end of the day neither has learned very much.

If the election did come down to one vote, whom would you trust to break the tie?
Me. I’d trust myself with the tiebreaker vote—more than I’d trust Keith or Bill.