Spielberg’s ‘The Post’ evokes today’s news cycle
Paper’s battle with Nixon White House not unlike modern media’s relationship with Trump administration.
WASHINGTON – Had Steven Spielberg never slid himself into a director’s chair, he thinks a reporter’s hat would have fit well.
“Look, your job is cool!” says the acclaimed filmmaker, perhaps forgetting for a second he’s the man who gave us Indiana Jones, E.T. and one very iconic hungry shark. “Of course, I’ve always said in my next career I would want to be a film composer, and just after that if I weren’t a director, I probably would have been a journalist.”
In his new drama The Post (in New York, L.A. and D.C. theaters Friday, nationwide Jan. 12), Spielberg tackles the newsroom of The Washington Post and its public 1971 tussle with Richard Nixon’s White House to print the Pentagon Papers and reveal a massive cover-up about involvement in the Vietnam War.
It was Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), her working relationship with editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and the hard decision she had to make — to publish or not to publish — that attracted Spielberg. The timeliness also helped, with a current news environment “that was very evocative of the Nixon administration and their attempts to suppress the truth through the judicial system,” Spielberg, 71, says.
“The great revelation that put all of us who made this movie in complete solidarity was the fact that sometimes history is best viewed through a lens, and there was a huge reflecting mirror that could take the date ’71 and flip it to ’17.”
Spielberg is also currently readying his retro fantasy Ready Player One (March 30) and eyeing a new version of the classic musical West Side Story. USA
TODAY talks with the Oscar-winning director about The Post, Trump and seeking out the truth: You’ve made a career out of heroes you’ve put on screen. Is that the label you’d give Graham, Bradlee and the Post journalists?
I see them as hard-working heroes. You can’t be a hero unless you’re bucking a system, and they had a huge system to buck called the Nixon administration. (H.R.) Haldeman, (John) Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, they were all at the throats of TheNew York Times and The Washington Post. The great thing (is) no matter what administration comes and goes, journalism is here to stay.
The Post ties into Watergate a little bit at the end. Would you like to continue this story and do your own version of All the President’s Men?
No, because my story ends where Alan Pakula’s story begins. Except for Katharine Graham’s very noticeable absence in All the President’s Men, I feel that movie is a perfect film.
Meryl Streep’s role rings true now especially, with women speaking out about sexual harassment and standing up for themselves in every way.
Exactly, she stood up for herself. The most amazing thing Katharine Graham brought into her world of publishing and high society — and what Meryl Streep
brought to the way she played Kay — is a tremendous amount of vulnerability but also in the lowest moments of Kay Graham’s life, there’s great dignity.
What do you worry about the most with today’s politics and society?
With all the engineered disinformation and calculated smear tactics in trying to subvert the truth into a lie, I worry that young people will have to work harder to decide for themselves what is true and what is not. There are so many sources of information today, it’s confusing. If you look at how polarized the media is between media that feels almost state-sponsored and other media that feels and is free, it depends on your ideology and where you stand. Do you stand in the center of the abyss between the blue and the red, or do you have a more objective, patient look at reporting today?
Do you see similarities between Nixon’s and Trump’s administrations in terms of the media?
When Nixon (in the movie) says, “Well, The New York Times, they’re our enemy, I think we should do it.” — meaning “I think we should get John Mitchell to take them to court and stop them from printing.” — it was a horrible impulse to suppress the truth because they weren’t pleased by the truth. But at the same time, it was organized and it was legal. Today, there just seems to be a tremendous amount of scattershot in trying to create layers and layers and layers of confusion. And it’s the confusion I worry about. It was a lot more black and white in 1971 than it is today.