"Frost/Nixon": The Interview That Was a Play Becomes a Film
THE details don’t really matter. What matters is that a few years before his screenplays for “The Queen” and “The Last King of Scotland” propelled him to the head of the class, Peter Morgan was so fed up that he was ready to try anything — anything! — that wasn’t a film script.
He considered bungee jumping and mountain climbing, he said not long ago from his home in London. But he chose something even riskier. He wrote a play about the landmark 1977 television interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard M. Nixon. Relying on the accounts of participants and fictionalizing here and there for effect, he made sure to write it, he said, “in a way that breaks every single rule of screenwriting.”
“Frost/Nixon” was picked up by the small but prestigious Donmar Warehouse, where the director Michael Grandage and the designer Christopher Oram incorporated onstage video screens to allow close-ups of Michael Sheen’s unctuous, eager-beaver Frost and Frank Langella’s sly, subtly decomposing Nixon. Mr. Morgan loved the effect. But, he recalled, it gave him pause: “I hope people don’t make the mistake of thinking this has any sort of filmic life in it whatsoever.”
That was then. Now, for all of Mr. Morgan’s determination to make it impossible, “Frost/Nixon” the movie is scheduled to open on Dec. 5, right in time for the Hollywood awards season. Directed by Ron Howard, whose previous forays into 20th-century history include the Oscar-winning “Beautiful Mind” and the Oscar-nominated “Apollo 13,” the film retains the stage production’s acclaimed star performances, its often verbatim re-creations of interviews that ranged from droning wonkishness to high-stakes drama and its eerily familiar litany of military disasters abroad and assertions of presidential power at home.
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He considered bungee jumping and mountain climbing, he said not long ago from his home in London. But he chose something even riskier. He wrote a play about the landmark 1977 television interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard M. Nixon. Relying on the accounts of participants and fictionalizing here and there for effect, he made sure to write it, he said, “in a way that breaks every single rule of screenwriting.”
“Frost/Nixon” was picked up by the small but prestigious Donmar Warehouse, where the director Michael Grandage and the designer Christopher Oram incorporated onstage video screens to allow close-ups of Michael Sheen’s unctuous, eager-beaver Frost and Frank Langella’s sly, subtly decomposing Nixon. Mr. Morgan loved the effect. But, he recalled, it gave him pause: “I hope people don’t make the mistake of thinking this has any sort of filmic life in it whatsoever.”
That was then. Now, for all of Mr. Morgan’s determination to make it impossible, “Frost/Nixon” the movie is scheduled to open on Dec. 5, right in time for the Hollywood awards season. Directed by Ron Howard, whose previous forays into 20th-century history include the Oscar-winning “Beautiful Mind” and the Oscar-nominated “Apollo 13,” the film retains the stage production’s acclaimed star performances, its often verbatim re-creations of interviews that ranged from droning wonkishness to high-stakes drama and its eerily familiar litany of military disasters abroad and assertions of presidential power at home.