I am so excited about this film.
Frost/Nixon dramatises the real-life story behind David Frost’s landmark TV interviews with Richard Nixon in 1977, just three years after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation as President.
As a dramatic scenario, the lead-up to some TV interviews and then the enactment of those interviews – which you can pretty much watch for real on youtube – might not sound exactly thrilling, but trust me, it is. The TV broadcasts can only hint at the complex motives and objectives both men carried into the 12 days of interviewing that actually took place; here we see them laid bare.
Frost/Nixon started life as a terrific, hilarious, downright fascinating stage play, which ran two years ago in London and then on Broadway. Pitch-perfect performances from Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, plus the blistering dialogue that writer Peter Morgan imagined for his ego-driven protagonists, made for a riveting drama of almost hypnotic intelligence.
All the portents suggest the film will work just as powerfully, for the original actors have kept their parts, direction has been entrusted to veteran filmmaker Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) and, perhaps most importantly, the play’s writer – British script ace Morgan – also penned the screenplay.
Morgan has a knack for political relationship dramas – his previous work includes The Deal, which dramatised Blair and Brown’s infamous forward-planning Granita dinner, and 2006′s Oscar-winning The Queen. Frost/Nixon repeats Morgan’s previous success in splicing historical fact with imaginary scenes from the private moments of people in power, delicately tracing their human-ness and our own destructive forgetfulness of that.
For me, a 1980s baby, emotionally unschooled in Watergate, the play finally awoke a sense of the ground-shaking significance of that first ever -gate, against which Lewinsky-gate, Cherie-gate, Camilla-gate – all seem hilariously tame in comparison. For Frost/Nixon restages an event that remains astonishing: a deceitful, expedient American President being held to account in public; a person in the utmost position of power admitting wilful and protracted wrongdoing. It’s scintillating and of course highly resonant stuff. No wonder it’s the LFF’s opening film.
Frost/Nixon will open the London BFI Film Festival on October 15th.
