FROST/NIXON Feature

By Ian Spelling on December 4, 2008

Frank Langella often plays stern, humorless characters, and it’s no surprise given his imposing stature, jagged facial features and dark, haunted eyes. And yet as he enters a room to meet journalists on behalf of his latest movie, Frost/Nixon – in which he reprises his award-winning West End and Broadway stage role as disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon – Langella is clearly in a good mood. Of course, you would be, too, if everyone was throwing around Oscar buzz about your new film.
 
“I’m surprised you didn’t get up,” he jokes as he settles into a chair at a Manhattan hotel. “They don’t get up for the president, do they?”
 
Taking into account the film, a Dec. 5 released directed by Ron Howard, and his stage performances of Frost/Nixon, Langella has played Nixon hundreds of times at this point. The man most definitely seeped into the actor. “Well, he’s a very affecting person to play,” Langella says. “Usually characters leave me relatively quickly, but Nixon stayed with me a lot. The depth of this man’s pain and the depth of his desire for greatness is what came to me more than anything else. So the continual suspicion and paranoia that he lived with stayed with me at times. I used to look at taxi drivers like, ‘What do you want out of me?’
 
“So in that sense he was always around in my head, still is. I mean, I don’t live my life in any way consumed by him, but the particular things that drove Nixon are in all of us, and he just happened to have more of it than anybody else. I think it’s why we are so fascinated by him and why he makes people cringe, because he makes us think, ‘Oh, I have those qualities, but I try to hide them.’ He couldn’t.”
 
Frost/Nixon is set in 1977, several years after Nixon became the first president to resign. The Watergate scandal, of course, led to his downfall, and British journalist/presenter David Frost sought to interview Nixon extensively about his life, career and Watergate. Nixon agreed to talk, for a hefty fee, and figured he could verbally manhandle Frost during the multi-part interview. Meanwhile, Frost aimed to make the interview the trial that Nixon – who’d been pardoned by Gerald Ford – never got. For much of the process, Nixon expertly kept Frost at bay, but finally Frost compelled Nixon to acknowledge the criminality of his actions in the legendary cover-up and also to apologize to the American people for betraying their trust. The result: Nixon came clean and began to rehab his image, while Frost, who nearly bankrupted himself financing The Nixon Interviews with David Frost, as they were called, made a mint and emerged as a media darling.
 
Preparing to play Nixon, Langella was never at a loss for source material. Before anything, however, he began with a great deal of factual study. “I was at the Museum of Radio & Television, I think, for 10 hours one day,” he recalls. “I interviewed Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Frank Gannon, anybody I could think of who knew him, talked to him, worked with him, and I absorbed as much factual information as I could. Then, once you start playing a part, all of that really should go out of your head and you should begin to get a sense of the essence of the man. So, if you will have it, the second half of the preparation was much more about uncovering his soul for me and finding a way into it.”
 
As with any politician, particularly one as polarizing as Nixon, there’s been plenty of revisionism when it comes to Tricky Dick. The amusing thing is that there are more than a few people out there who find his crimes almost quaint and who’d take a Nixon administration again over what’s going on right now. One reporter in the room, makes that point to Langella, but caps it with this closer: Was he competent? Langella’s eyes narrow as he replies. “Well,  Richard Nixon was far more than competent,” he says. “Richard Nixon was brilliant. He had a great mind and he had great aspirations toward doing great things for the country. He was, I think, brought down by his own personal inability to stay at the top. I think he preferred climbing the ladder than being on top of it, and he unconsciously undid himself so that he could go back to the bottom and climb up again. One of the things that drove this man constantly was, ‘I’ll show them. I’ll show those muthers. I’ll get ‘em. Those guys are against me.’
 
“He sort of needed that to keep going. And my own personal sidewalk psychology is that when he was then elected to the greatest mandate of popular and, indeed, liked by the public to that degree, some deep, dark of him which is in everybody, went, ‘Oh, I don’t think I belong here. The winds of this, the winds of terror of this are a little bit too high for me.’ And he undid it. I don’t think he woke up in the morning and consciously thought that. I just think Nixon was always more comfortable swimming towards the big boat rather than being in it.”
 
Later, Langella smiles just a bit when queried as to whether or not, as a result of the film or the play, he’s ever received any feedback from the Nixon family. The answer is he has. “The only feedback I got from the Nixon family was a visit from Tricia Cox’s whole family,” Langella says.”Is it Edward Cox that she’s married to? I think her husband’s name is Ed Cox. Her children all came, and quite a few members of his staff over the period of two years dropped in every now and then. And everybody was really, really wonderful about it. His granddaughter said, ‘I didn’t know Grandpa very well, but you made a person. Thank you for making a person.’ Imagine how painful it must be for all of them to have their father and grandfather continually vilified this way and made fun of, all the caricatures, so much. That’s not to forgive the crime. It’s just to remember the person.”
 
Universal, which is releasing Frost/Nixon, clearly believes in the film. They’ve brought out not just Langella to meet the press, but Michael Sheen, who plays Frost; Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt who appear respectively as Nixon critic James Reston Jr. and reporter Bob Zelnick, Frost’s consultants/writers as he prepped for the showdown with Nixon; Rebecca Hall, who plays Frost’s girlfriend; Matthew MacFayden, who is John Birt, Frost’s producer; and Ron Howard. There’s no room here on Latino Review to include everyone’s thoughts and comments about Frost/Nixon – there’s HOURS of material -- but certainly it’s worth hearing from Sheen, who played Frost opposite Langella both in the U.K. and New York, and Howard, for whom the film is something of a low-budget affair.
 
Sheen explains that Frost/Nixon presents that classic actor’s problem of portraying a real person on film or on stage. His way around it: think of Frost as a character. “I can only refer to Frost the character,” he says. “I don’t know Frost the man that well. I’ve come to meet him quite a few times now. But it would be incredibly presumptuous of me to say that I know anything about Frost the man, really, and it’s difficult because, obviously, people will watch this and to a large extent believe that how I portray this character is what the man himself is like. But for the purposes of our story, Peter Morgan (writer of both the play and film) has leaned on certain qualities that Frost appears to have in real life in order to make the story work. Some people refer to it as ‘Rocky’ for journalists and in order to have that kind of underestimated underdog feel for Frost for most of the film the story requires him to seem a bit out of his depth and not really on top of the interviewing thing, whereas in real life Frost was very seasoned campaigner by the time he got to this interviews and he talks about his interview technique as being a bit like Ali against Foreman, the whole rope-a-dope thing.
 
“Now how much truth there is in that, I don’t know. There may be a bit of revisionism going on there, saying that he kind of let Nixon run ragged all around him because he knew that the only interview that mattered was Watergate and then he got him on Watergate. The jury’s out on that. But, nevertheless, you do have to lean on certain qualities of the man – his ambition, his superficiality, his lack of substance, his lack of purpose – I choose to look at it as being more instinctive – that he’s spontaneous and instinctive. People used to say that he would come into the studio when he was doing his shows in Britain and in America and he wouldn’t have done any research and he’d be handed a kind of crib sheet about the person he was going to interview and he would look at it very quickly and make lots of notes on it and then go on and do it. Some people would describe that as lazy and a lack of a work ethic or something, but other people would say that that’s what he fed on. That was his technique. Flying by the seat of his pants gave him a sort of spontaneity to what he was doing, so I liked that in that character.
 
“So, I suppose, I learned that nobody is black and white and nobody is clear cut about what people’s motives are, and I think one of the interesting things about the film is you get to the end and on one level you kind of feel like, ‘Yay, Frost the underdog won!,’” Sheen continues. “And on another level, you go: ‘Hmmm, I’m not sure I feel good about that or not. I don’t know.’ It’s not clear cut, the end. And I like that. I think that’s really good.”
 
Finally, Ron Howard enters the room. It’s been said that one of his gifts as a director is to create very human characters. Howard accepts the compliment and explains that realizing Frost/Nixon as a film opened up the story and allowed Langella and Nixon to make their respective characters even more multi-dimensional. “Unless you’re doing the broadest kind of genre, you want conflict, you want to define the nature of the conflict and the differences in the central characters, but you always want the audience to feel they understand something about the character,” Howard says. “You know, empathy is not sympathy. I wasn’t looking for sympathy for either of these characters. And what I like about the writing is that explores the greyer areas of the event, and both of these figures were and are real paradoxes in a lot of ways. And you really mine that for humor or emotion or drama, as well as offering insight into the event. For me, it’s imperative to go for that. And actors respond to that because of course they want to explore the nuances.
 
“So one thing I really felt (Sheen and Langella) could do with a movie was to delve into every aspect of what they had come to know of these characters (from) what ongoing research offered, but more importantly what Michael and Frank had come to understand of the characters doing the play for over a year,” Howard adds. “And I assured them that we had the time and I had the energy to really get all those feelings and all those ideas on film and take them to the editing room and explore them. If there’s anything they’re pleased by, I think they felt safe in sort of continuing to experiment with the characters.”

Source:Latinoreview

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