Thomas Harris chats with filmmaker Jason Reitman about his new film The Front Runner…
Jason Reitman is a busy man. His previous film, Tully, was only released in May and now he debuts his latest, The Front Runner – his best in years – at the BFI London Film Festival. Yet even having landed only 24 hours earlier and with seemingly no jet lag, he was about as endearing and charming an interview you would hope.
Is that tattoo of Downhill Racer?
Yeah, yeah it is. Are you a big fan of that movie?
Yeah, love it.
Robert Redford is just incredible in it.
No one seems to have seen it.
No one’s seen it, and it’s a very unique look at Redford too, it’s him being a little bit more cruel, a little bit more tough. That work that they [director Michael Ritchie and Redford] did together, all incredible.
So, how direct were you with Gary Hart when writing the film? Was there a lot of going through the book, trying to detach yourself from the person?
Great question. I never felt like I was making a biopic, and that effected my relationship with Gary Hart form the very beginning. I reached out to everyone, I spoke to Gary Hart, I spoke to the campaign, I spoke to Donna Rice. Me and my co-writers Matt and Jay felt as though we were making a movie about one week of American history when everything shifted, and once we took on that focus, that there were twenty main characters that changed our relationship with the real people.
I wasn’t too aware of the story…
I wasn’t aware of the story either; I was ten years old when this happened.
Your treatment of Donna Rice is so unobtrusive; it’s a very fair portrayal…
You have to understand, the American perspective of Donna Rice has not shifted in thirty years. We’ve shifted on a lot of people, like Monica Lewinsky who America has really taken a second look at her and realised, oh, we were really horrible to this human being and she deserves her life back, and now she is thought of as heroically. That has not happened with Donna Rice, and I can tell that when I talked to people about me doing the Gary Hart story. “What was the blonde’s name?” And you can see how they treat her as an object. So the idea of having empathy and decency and really showing her as she was which was smart and ambitious whose life was just ripped out of her hands, that was very important.
There’s a lot of discussion about post-truth. Your treatment of journalists also feels incredibly apt…
It was actually co-written by journalists. My two co-writers were Matt Bai who wrote for the New York Times, wrote through five presidencies and Jay Carson who was the press secretary for Hilary Clinton, Howard Dean and many senators who are currently in congress. It was a very unusual script for me in that the plot was already written, and now we were just figuring out how we were telling this and it was done through the eyes of someone who had been in the heart of politics for decades on both sides of candidacy and journalism. What we were trying to portray was this question, what do you decide to cover?
When we looked at the Washington Post, lets have a room with five or six journalists, different ages, different genders, who were trying to figure out-when the rest of the country is trying to figure out what you think is irrelevant, do you still have to cover it? What page do you have to put it on? To whose response do you have to respond to? And even as a journalist, do you have to ask a question because your editor is asking you, even if you think of it as indecent. And what is indecent.
And it feels as so, in American politics, these questions have gone by the wayside, because we have a president who is completely indecent. So if you try to track that back to a starting point, here is this lovely test case. You have a guy who was in many ways a great candidate, really smart, really charismatic, had great ideas. In 1987, he was saying America was addicted to oil, we’re going to encounter Islamic extremist terrorism, understood everything that was coming down the road. But also he was a flawed human being, made mistakes, some thought of him as a womanizer which obviously hues his perception of who women are, and served as a really great conversation piece on how much you need to know about this guy as a person. And that question was really put on the shoulders of journalists really quickly They had a week to figure out what they were to do. There’s a hole in the boat, what do you do? And everyone responded differently. You had these guys at The Herald who made the decision to stake out, which I have to imagine is a very tough decision.
Yeah, it’s ethically and morally questionable.
Exactly. Do you jump on a plane and hang outside his house? Do you follow him down an alleyway and start asking questions as to whether he is sleeping with someone inside? Maybe those questions aren’t a big deal anymore, but at the time they were. This is also the moment when journalists and candidates went from being able to spend social time together – they used to be able to just go for drinks, grab a burger, get to know each other as people. And now you have a Press Secretary who in this moment, their job is to make sure you can never talk to the candidate unless every single second, every line of dialogue is managed, you will never get a naturalistic response, you will never know who he is as a person unless you become a real private eye. So there are no good guys or bad guys, we’re just trying to figure how we got here and what happened in that particular week?
With the Miami Herald, compared to the Washington Post, you litter it with comedic actors like Kevin Pollock, Mike Judge and Bill Burr. Was that a deliberate decision to offset the Post, where you have Alfred Molina?
I think that the Herald has always felt like an outsider in that conversation and even in my conversation with the real journalists, they said that the Herald did not have the access that the Post did. They were great journalists and it’s a real paper, and I think Kevin Pollock actually provides a real decency for the paper.
But I also love how comedians play drama. I always have. And I think Bill Burr really shows his chops here. The strange choice isn’t that we put a comedian at that paper, and more that we took a guy who is so clearly from Boston and put him in Florida.
Many thanks to Jason Reitman for taking the time for this interview.
Hugh Jackman stars in Columbia Pictures’ THE FRONT RUNNER.
Oscar nominee Hugh Jackman stars as the charismatic politician Gary Hart for Academy Award-nominated director Jason Reitman in the new thrilling drama The Front Runner. The film follows the rise and fall of Senator Hart, who captured the imagination of young voters and was considered the overwhelming front runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination when his campaign was sidelined by the story of an extramarital relationship with Donna Rice. As tabloid journalism and political journalism merged for the first time, Senator Hart was forced to drop out of the race – events that left a profound and lasting impact on American politics and the world stage.
The Front Runner is in UK cinemas from 25th January 2019.
Thomas Harris
