David Frost on Frost/Nixon

Peter Kramer/AP Evans: Well, Michael, how did you cope, managing to be Mozart in Amadeus since you never met Mozart, or at least I don’t think so.

Sheen: No, I never met Mozart. Of Course, you have more of a free hand with people in the more distant past. I wouldn’t consider that the same sort of research that I’ve done when playing Blair, or Sir David or Kenneth Williams, Brian Clough – any of these people. It demands a different kind of preparation.

Evans: As is happens, I was Nixon’s last publisher when I was president of Random House. He was always pretty impressive when I met him. When you were doing the interview, David, were you aware of just how thick skinned, how armored, he was like an armadillo? Had you met him before?

Frost: Yes, I had met him before. I interviewed him for a series called The Next President in 1968. But that was a short ten minute interview and so on and he was the candidate. He
had just moved in, we got into his offices in 450 Park Avenue, I think it was, slightly ahead of the furniture, but we managed to find a couple of chairs to sit on. And we did the interview there, which he referred to again towards the very end of the actual interviews in 1977. 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.  And that’s one of the reasons, perhaps, why he never developed small talk at all, extraordinary for a such an extraordinary politician that he never worked on his small talk. He worked on everything else, but not on that. He was very affable all the way through.

And the interesting thing was, and this is absolute reverse of the situation usually, is that Nixon would be a bit nervous and not very vocal and not many words, not much small talk 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. Whereas sometimes, it’s the other way around. The person is very articulate before the interview and nervous in the interview. He was the other way around. It wasn’t a problem of getting him talking on the screen when he was interested in the question, the problem was talking to him before hand because he was so shy, in a way, shy in that way.

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. He hadn’t seen the other two, obviously, because he didn’t have the right to see any of the programs until they were broadcast. But for about 20 minutes when Caroline, my girlfriend, who was featured in the film too. Played by Rebecca Hall. 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.

Evans: That’s very interesting. Now, Michael, when you were interviewing Nixon, I mean Frank Langella, that was an amazingly convincing relationship between the two of you. Did you study Nixon as well as Sir David?

Sheen: Yeah, I did a bit of study of Nixon because, obviously, Sir David knew a lot about Nixon, so I needed to as well. I watched some documentaries and did some reading.  But, mainly we were about creating the right kind of relationship between me and Frank when we were performing. One of the things about Sir David  when he’s interviewing people, he is very respectful of them, but doesn’t let that get in the way of holding on and sticking there like a carrier of what he wants to find out. I enjoyed that combination of deference and the respect being paid to Nixon. But at the same time finding the frustration of dealing with a man who is very slippery and who can dodge around. And then eventually honing in and focusing in on what Sir David wanted to get at with him. And this bit of information that they had discovered that started the discombobulation process of Nixon – the stuff about Colson.

Evans: Let’s go back to real life for a moment, friends. David Frost –Had you really prepared and expected Nixon to break down as he did. Were you on pins and disappointed with how the interviews had gone until that moment? Just how did you get that climatic moment?

Frost:  Well, one of the little bits of fiction I think really that exists because Peter wanted to build up me as the underdog as it were before the climax at the end. In fact, the first two or there sessions actually went rather well. And in fact, one of the key lines in the film about, ‘if the president does it, it’s not illegal.’ That came from one of the earlier tapes. That wasn’t really accurate, that was building up Frost the underdog. Do you build down an underdog? I don’t know.

Evans: How did you get the break? You must have been at least a little anxious during the first sessions.

Frost:  The thing was the sessions, the Watergate session, which is one climatic, incredibly powerful scene in the film. They actually took two days, the taping of the Watergate sessions. And one knew from the word go, that one had to somehow seize control because although we got up to 6 hours in the Watergate that’s not a long time when you’ve got a lot of ground to cover. In fact, we ended up doing about 5 hours because we reached the climax after 5 hours. But basically, going into it, on the way down to the first of the two Watergate Sessions, 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.

Evans: Michael Sheen, if I might may so, you actually did represent that moment extremely well.

Frost:  Yes, Michael caught that perfectly.

Evans: Michael – how did you catch the body language between the two so 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.

Evans: Do either of you feel now or then, do you feel any warm residual sympathy – I did watching the movie, did you feel it for Richard Nixon?

Frost: Well, speaking personally - It was difficult at the time to use a word like sympathy because we were very aware of the fact there were 20 or 30 people who were in prison because of doing what Nixon wanted them to do, or asked them to do, or told them to do. And so, one had those people also in one’s mind. So one didn’t have sympathy, but one had a certain empathy with him as you realized again and again that he had so hoped – at the end of my book I described him at the end of the session as a fat (sad)  man that so wanted to be great. He wanted to be great, but his paranoia and the flaws in his character ruled it out. So in the end you did feel an empathy, but at the time you couldn’t feel sympathy because of his victims.

Sheen: I think that’s right. I think empathy is something it would be inhuman not to feel. We can all relate to the idea of wanting to be better than we actually are and being brought up against our own flaws. So it would be inhuman not to empathize when someone is displaying those qualities. But sympathizing, I think you’re right Sir David, is a slightly different thing. It is hard to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of one man’s actions.

Evans: Well I want to thank David Frost, i.e. Michael Sheen, and David Frost, i.e. David Frost, for that fascinating discussion between the two men, one of whom assumes the other’s personality so brilliantly in the Frost/Nixon movie. Just a thought – how could we compare what we see in this marvelous film with what really happened? Is the television encounter now available on a DVD or something, David?

Sheen: I would urge everyone to watch the actual interviews themselves.

Evans:  Oh yeah, good point.

Frost:  That would be lovely because people are so excited and interested by the film and have wanted to see the original interviews, we are bringing out the original Watergate as a DVD, as Michael mentioned.

Evans:  That’s wonderful, when will that be out?

Frost:  That should be in the shops now.

Evans: Produced by Paradigm Productions or what?

Frost:  It is brought to you by those friendly folk at Paradigm Productions.

Evans: Before we go off, what a great moment it was when David Frost decided to put his own money down to get that interview and BBC was kind of nervous.

Frost: It was tense and hairy at moments but well worth it.

Evans:  Well thank you both of you on behalf of The Daily Beast and the Beast viewers.
We much appreciate the conversation.

Frost:  Thank you, Harry and good to hear you Michael.

Sheen: And you, Sir David.