Scene from "Death of a President"

The maker of a controversial movie that portrays President Bush as an assassination victim admits he hid his true intentions from White House officials in order to film footage of the commander in chief on a visit to Chicago.

Gabriel Range, the 32-year-old British director of "Death of a President," told the Los Angeles Times his crew received official White House press credentials by proving they were affiliated with Britain's Channel 4, which will air the film this fall.

Range, who filmed the president's arrival at the airport and his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, spent six months in the city, where he filmed anti-war rallies and staged other rallies himself without attracting press attention, the Times said.

The film, which debuted Sunday night at the Toronto Film Festival, has been denounced for centering on the fictionalized death of a sitting president.

He told the Times he managed to escape scrutiny during the filming by referring to it as "DOAP." Very few people asked what it stood for, he said.

"To those who did ask, we said it stood for 'Death of a President' and it was a fictional film, the small distinction being that the president wasn't exactly fictional."

The Times said the film, shot in a documentary style, has hit such a raw nerve that "some liberals who had little love for Bush seemed unsettled by the idea of showing a real president murdered."

"I can understand how some people will find the premise offensive," Range told the L.A. paper. "But I think it's absolutely justified. The whole point is for the film to be about America today. And it couldn't be about America today – not the real America – if it didn't involve the real president. You just react differently to this as an audience than you would if it were, say, the president on '24.'"

Variety magazine reports film distributor Newmarket signed a deal in Toronto yesterday to release the film in U.S. theaters. Agreements also were made to release it in Canada and Europe.

Range said his main message is that the war on terror has undermined liberties in the U.S. by giving the government increased secret powers.

In the film, he has the wife of an alleged Muslim assassin, who is imprisoned without charges, say:" We came here for freedom and this is the freedom you give us?"

Says Range: "While I think that the intent of a lot of the responses to 9/11 was clearly good, the execution of it has had a really corrosive effect in America. The NSA wiretapping is very alarming-for a lot of regular people, not just ACLU types."

Actor Kevin Costner, who was in Toronto to premiere a film of his own, has come out in opposition to "Death of a President," saying Range failed to consider how Bush's family would react to scenes of the president being assassinated.

"It's awfully hard if you're his children, his wife, his mother, his dad; there's a certain thing we can't lose as human beings, which is empathy for maybe the hardest job in the world," Costner said, according to Contactmusic.com. "Whether we think it's being performed right or not we can't, like, wish ... or think that's even cute."

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