August 30th, the biographical film “Reagan” opens at theaters across the country.

Its director, Sean McNamara was in Edmond, Oklahoma Wednesday for a special premiere, held there because about 90 percent of the film, he tells KRMG, was shot in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

[Hear the KRMG In Depth Report on Sean McNamara and his film “Reagan”]

The Masonic temple there, he says, was perfect - they were able to build sets that depicted both the White House and Kremlin there.

It didn’t hurt that the Oklahoma Film and Music Office helps productions secure fairly large tax breaks, and McNamara says he was pleased to learn that the expertise needed for a major Hollywood production was readily available.

His own story as a filmmaker began when he finally persuaded a relative of a well-known television director, Martin Pasetta, to get him an interview.

“I was sitting in front of him and he goes ‘all right, kid, what do you do?’” McNamara told KRMG. “And I was just like deer in the headlights - and I’m like ‘uh... I’m in a band I plug in microphones for us to sing’ and he goes ‘audio! That’s for you!’ He picks up the phone, he calls Best Audio, and he goes “Larry! Larry, I’ve got this kid, a friend of my son’s give him a job on the (mumbles unintelligibly.”

He wasn’t sure what the word was or what it meant, but the next day a limousine showed up at his home to take him to the airport, where he caught a plane to Washington, D. C.

Turns out that word he didn’t understand was “inauguration,” and the man of the hour was none other than Ronald Wilson Reagan, being installed as the 40th President of the United States.

McNamara couldn’t dream that years later, he’d be tapped to direct a film depicting Reagan’s life.

He tells KRMG “Reagan” covers decades - it tells the story of the man before and after he became the nation’s chief executive.

“’Reagan’ is not about just his presidency. We pick it up from when he’s a little boy, Dutch Reagan, in the 20′s, and meeting his mom who’s really religious, and his dad who’s an alcoholic, and that starts to form who the man is. And then he becomes a lifeguard, I mean really - a lifeguard, saving people’s lives - and then he becomes a radio announcer, and they start to realize he’s ‘the communicator,’ he’s got a good voice.”

The screenplay is based on the book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” by Paul Kengor.

“They sent me the script, and I read it, and I was intrigued by the fact that the narrator was a Russian KGB spy,” McNamara said. “That, to me, was like ‘wait, we’re doing a Ronald Reagan movie about America, but it’s from the point of view of a Russian spy.’ So that was, I think, cool.”

He says it depicts “the Gipper” realistically, warts and all, including some aspects of his presidency that were considered failures or mistakes.

“He didn’t get into the AIDS epidemic early enough, he let people out of mental hospitals - that’s all in our movie,” he told KRMG. “But again, the presidency doesn’t even start for a whole hour into the movie, and then that part of it’s only like 45 minutes, and it’s after, when he retired, fall of the Berlin wall, I mean when he got into his Alzheimer’s - and knew it - and wrote a letter to the American people.”

McNamara will continue visiting Oklahoma as he has another major film in the works, called “Will to Win.”

KRMG will go in depth on that story after the Labor Day weekend.