Parallels on celluloid

Most writers would probably do little victory dances in their agents' offices if a play of their devising had film directors circling.

But in the case of Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan wasn't so sure at first if Hollywood's interest was a compliment.

Known chiefly as a screenwriter (The Last King of Scotland, The Queen), Morgan had a job strategy in developing the story of David Frost's 1977 television encounter with former US president Richard Nixon for the theatre.

The stage in Britain remains the foremost venue for a crafter of dialogue and Morgan wanted both the validation and the added career option.

“I took that as a slight on my theatrical chops,'' Morgan, 45, says. “The thing I didn't want people to think was that I was workshopping a screenplay in the theatre.''

Morgan got over it, evidently: The film version of Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard and featuring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, is to be released on December 25.

And yet, in Morgan's crossover anxieties, an intriguing parallel exists in the depiction of Frost, a celebrity interviewer who turns to an arena of his profession with more rigorous expectations — and wonders whether he can pull it off.

The dramatic issue on which the stage and film versions hang is whether the suave Frost can get to the wily Nixon, compel him to acknowledge his role in the Watergate cover-up.

In so doing, the film, like the play, treats the series of interviews Frost conducted with Nixon as a kind of death match — the demise in this instance being of the efforts of one of the men to rehabilitate his reputation and perhaps even establish a new public role for himself.

For the stakes to mean anything to contemporary audiences, some complexity is necessary in the portrayals of the two human beings at the story's core.

Sheen, who played British prime minister Tony Blair in The Queen, was “a given'' to play Frost in the film, the writer says.

And though there had been some discussion among executives at Universal Pictures about enticing a bigger star, Morgan adds, Langella became the inevitable choice after winning a Tony Award for the role.

Privy to solitude

To be granted access to a man's motivations, not to mention a sense of his painful solitude, is for an audience to forge a bond. Which is what happens via Langella's performance as the disgraced Nixon.

Some early notices for the film have remarked on this phenomenon, including one by The New York Times's Manohla Dargis, who calls the film's take on Nixon “a portrait designed to elicit a sniffy tear or two along with a few statuettes''.

(There has been early buzz about Oscar prospects, primarily concerning Langella.)

The filmmakers, for their part, say they wanted to humanise Nixon but only to a point. “We never wanted it to be an apology,'' declares Howard, 54, an Oscar winner for his direction of A Beautiful Mind.

At the notion that the film engenders compassion for Nixon, Morgan looks a bit pained.

A similar discussion, he says, developed around Helen Mirren's depiction of Elizabeth II in The Queen, the 2006 film directed by Stephen Frears.

He and Frears “were mortified by the reaction'', Morgan says. “If we had felt it would have aroused so much sympathy, we might not have written it.''

To Morgan, the virtue of Frost/Nixon is that it takes no side at all. Perhaps what people glean from the piece has a lot to do with their own views.

One of the things that interests Morgan, for instance, is the way the play became a cultural Rorschach test: In London, the perception was that it was a play about Frost. Across the pond, too, the disgraced president is a dim memory.

The transatlantic division played a role when it came to choosing a director for the film, a process in which Morgan says he played a decisive part.

His notion was someone who could provide “emotional perspective'' on the events in the script.

“I wanted an American for whom this meant something,'' he says. “Is there anyone more American than Ron Howard? I felt he could see it with the impartiality that it would need to flourish.''

Howard and Morgan had known each other and talked previously about a collaboration. At first a drama whose climax was an interview had not struck Howard as sufficiently cinematic.

“But when I read the play, I was immediately intrigued creatively by it, and impressed and surprised. Then when I saw the play, I was surprised all over again,'' Howard says.

Morgan's initial impulse for the film had been to get rid of what amounts to the infrastructure of the play, the narration supplied by a member of each of the camps preparing the men for the interviews.

“I wanted to enhance the supporting characters' roles, to see what the corner men were feeling,'' says Howard, using a term from his boxing film, Cinderella Man, for the guys who counsel the men in the ring.

If Frost/Nixon beats a filmgoer over the head a bit with metaphorical intimations of a prizefight, Morgan thinks of the film as something more contemplative, too — a rumination on the weaknesses of those who seek power.

In a private moment that takes place in the play and the film, Nixon suggests to Frost that each of them should have taken the other's route.

It is the crux of what Morgan wants to say about how paths lead to the events of Frost/Nixon.

“It's the tragedy of a man,'' the screenwriter says, “picking a career that is totally dependent on being liked.''