David Frost on Frost/Nixon

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Ralph Nelson In a Daily Beast exclusive, broadcaster David Frost and the actor who plays him, Michael Sheen, talk about how he (they!) broke through Nixon's defenses, the truth about the drunken phone call and the most unexpected sequel to the interview.

Plus, interviews with the former aide depicted in the film, Diane Sawyer, and the former girlfriend, played by Rebecca Hall, who was at Frost's side throughout, Caroline Graham.

The man who famously broke Richard Nixon in 1977 was a young British television personality, and we see him do it in the riveting new movie Frost/Nixon. Well, we see Michael Sheen doing it, playing the brash interviewer David Frost to Frank Langella’s slippery Richard Nixon. How did Frost get under Nixon’s skin—and how did Sheen get under Frost’s?

Sheen is the brilliant chameleon who was British Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen and The Deal, and Mozart in the London stage revival of Amadeus. The Daily Beast got the real Michael Sheen together with the real David Frost, to explore what they thought of each other’s performance. Harold Evans moderated. An audio version and highlights from the conversation are below.

Click Below To Hear Highlights of the Interview

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Sheen and Frost on getting Nixon to fess up:

Frost: John Burt said to me, ‘You’ve got to do that physical thing you do. I don’t know how to describe it, but you’ve got to do that physical thing of taking control of the interview physically.’ And that is one of the things you have got to do, particularly when you’re forcing points home. It’s a body language point. It’s a leaning forward point. It’s getting a little closer to the subject and so on. And that was key to the first day, the first two hours, when he in fact wouldn’t admit to anything. The second day he started to admit to mistakes for the first time. And then it was a question of pushing him further and further. But the body language comes into it as well as the words... Yes, Michael caught that perfectly.

Sheen: It’s funny because I’ve not heard Sir David talk about the body language before, but it’s something that I—That’s exactly what I was trying to do. You can physically dominate someone without jumping all over them. You can physicalize your desire to probe and to confront and not allow someone to wriggle out of things. And that was something I definitely tried to do in that interview.

Nixon's rambling drunken phone call. Did it happen?

Frost: No, it didn’t. That was one of the bits of fiction. There’s 10 or 12 percent fiction in the piece and that’s one of them. That, I think is absolutely brilliant character study of  Richard Nixon.

On Sheen's performance as Frost:

Frost: You can’t do an impersonation in a drama that lasts two hours, it would kill the drama, if you had the most brilliant impersonator doing funny lines, it would destroy the drama. So what Michael had to do, I think, was to base it on me, but to create a character that he has created around me, but not an impersonation.

Sheen: I based the character around you. That’s exactly what I did. It’s not an impersonation of you, but obviously, it refers to you. So it’s a character that I based around you… An audience can only handle an impersonation for maybe a minute or two.

Plus: Diane Sawyer talks about working for Nixon and what the movie gets wrong and read a Q&A with Caroline Graham (played by actress Rebecca Hall) about her romance with David Frost.

On Nixon behind the scenes:

Frost: He was very reserved then. Nixon was always affable but I always felt—when you talk about armor—that Nixon had in a way built a screen around himself to screen himself from a closeness with other people… extraordinary for a such an extraordinary politician that he never worked on his small talk.

Nixon would be a bit nervous and not very vocal...before the interview in the green room, or wherever it was. But then when he got into the interview and the question interested him or absorbed him, then he would really come free.

And the only time I ever saw, I guess very few people have ever seen this because when I went to take my leave of him two of the programs had been broadcast, the other two we had finished editing and I was taking my leave of him… We went to take our leave and for 20 minutes for some reason, he was, a word you never hear about Nixon, he was carefree. Just for 20 minutes he was carefree. The clouds lifted, the reserve lifted. He took Caroline on a tour of San Clemente and said, ‘Brezhnev slept in that room. He was a great swordsman you know, the Russians are, you know.’ And then he said to Manolo, his batman, as it were. He said to him, ‘Manolo, get out the caviar the Shah sent us for Christmas. But before you go, do your impression of Henry Kissinger. Go on, do your, do your impression of Henry Kissinger.’ And this was a carefree Nixon that one had never seen. And then just towards the end of the conversation, the screen came down again and he was still affable, and so on, but he was no longer carefree.

Read the full transcript of the conversation between David Frost and Michael Sheen.