CS Weekly - 12/12/08 - Frost/Nixon Author Interview

The Limelight and the Wilderness: Peter Morgan on Frost/Nixon
BY AMY DAWES

The famous interviews on which it's based take up very little of the screen time -- it's mostly about the context and the machinations leading up to them. You structured it like a prize fight. How did you hit on that approach?

I had the idea to do it this way, before I wrote either The Queen or The Last King of Scotland, from the minute I saw Frost talking about it in one of those dreadful biographical TV pieces. Watching him talk about the interviews, I thought, "That would be like a verbal Rocky." You've got the outsider who takes a shot at the champ. It's a David and Goliath story. But when I first met with Frost, he painted a picture of it going terribly smoothly, so I thought, "I haven't got anything (to work with) after all." It wasn't until I met the real James Reston that I realized how chaotic and calamitous it had all been. And far from putting me off, that immediately inspired me.

And the inciting incident was?

They paid Nixon $600,000 to do these interviews. It was a breathtaking amount -- something like $5 million in today's money. This is a leader who had abused his power and completely devalued the American democratic process. Some people wanted to indict him for war crimes. That these payments were made -- the American networks were so angry, and Frost was vilified. [I imagined] the pressure he would have felt. And that he skated into it with no real comprehension, as an outsider, of how important this was to Americans. So I really thought this was a great, great idea, but I didn't have the confidence to write it. And then at a certain point, I had this hiccup with (director) Stephen Frears, where he postponed shooting The Queen for a year, and I thought, "I'll actually try that idea that I never had the courage to write."

Read Amy Dawes' entire interview with Peter Morgan in the latest issue of Creative Screenwriting.