NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Awards hopeful THE FRONT RUNNER is a prescient take on the true story of a controversy that changed politics forever. Director Jason Reitman and star Hugh Jackman reflect on the story of Gary Hart, a contender who might be the best president the United St
In a small side room of a suite at London’s Soho Hotel, Jason Reitman is casting his mind back to the 1988 US presidential campaign, particularly the scandal involving presumed ‘front runner’ Gary Hart: the true story that forms the basis of his new film. “I was 10 years old,” says Reitman. “I think I was more interested in where the Back To The Future sequels were going than I was about politics.”
It wasn’t until a few years ago – when he heard the story of the Hart scandal on a podcast – that Reitman became immediately gripped by it. “It sounded like a movie,” he says. If Gary Hart, his campaign and the media circus that would ultimately derail them both are barely known about in the UK – it’s October 2018, and The Front Runner’s own campaign trail has arrived in town for the London Film Festival – in the US, it’s recalled as more of a pop-culture punchline than anything else.
“It’s been an interesting movie to make in that we’re not simply telling a story, we’re telling a story that people misremember,” says co-writer and director Reitman. “And they’ve slotted it into their memory as a humorous anecdote, and not as a moment where the country really shifted, and not as a moment where Donna Rice – a real human being – lost [everything].”
Hugh Jackman, working with Reitman for the first time to play Hart, also had hazy recollections of the ’88 campaign. “I think I had a vague memory of the story… I think,” he considers. “But when I read the script and Matt Bai’s book [All The Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid], I was shocked by how this moment was such a blip, and yet so important.
Like many people, I find myself asking, ‘How the hell did we get to where we are today? How did this happen? What’s the connective tissue?’ I think this really gives you an insight.”
Bar an opening scene set in 1984, The Front Runner zooms its focus on to one pivotal week in Hart’s campaign. At the time, Hart was pushing for the Democratic presidential nomination, and rumours swirled that he was a womaniser. An anonymous tip to the Miami Herald that Hart was meeting a young woman, Donna Rice, in his DC townhouse saw reporters descend, and a shady showdown took place in the alley outside Hart’s home. The evidence of an affair was circumstantial, and Hart and Rice denied the allegations, but it spread through the media like wildfire, and the way that politics was covered in the press would never be the same again.
“If you’re going to understand the divisiveness, and also the antagonism between the press and politicians that exists today, this was the turning point,” asserts Jackman. “This seemingly small part of American history, of which people say, ‘Oh it was just some sex scandal,’ was actually a massive turning point in the press coverage of politics and in what voters thought was important in making their decisions… The politics of personality.”
For Reitman, the story had the dual intrigue of sounding like a thriller – the potential next president of the United States in an alley in the middle of the night, having a western standoff with a bunch of journalists – while also speaking to key issues within contemporary politics and reporting. “It was kind of a thriller that had all of this connective tissue with 2018, whether we’re talking about gender politics, or the relationship between candidates and the press, or the relationship between public and private,” beams Reitman, talking with a mile-a-minute enthusiasm. “It brought up all the questions that we’re trying to answer right now, through this fast-moving vehicle.”
HART TO HART
“It’s nerve-wracking,” Reitman adds of meeting the real Hart. “What if I told you, ‘I’m going to make a movie about your life – I’m just going to pick the worst week, if that’s OK?’ I think there was anxiety from everyone involved. But at the end of the day – because they’ve all seen the film – I think there’s an appreciation for the empathy we’ve shown for all of them.”
The obligations that come with making a story about real people, people who are still alive today, weren’t lost on Reitman and Jackman. “You know there are real-life consequences to the story you’re telling and a responsibility to the people whose lives you’re depicting – and I felt that burden very keenly,” explains Jackman. “And so I did more research for The Front Runner than I’ve done on any other film. I watched a lot of footage and spent a lot of time with Gary himself.”
That research – which involved watching hours of unedited news footage from Hart at the time, as well as speaking to those closest to him (campaign staff, friends, family) – resulted in Jackman carrying around five ring binders full of notes. It’s a rare role for the gregarious Jackman, in the sense that Hart is very private and plays his cards close to his chest, and the film’s objective viewpoint and overlaid ambiguity always keeps the man, and his inner world, held at a remove.
“Whether he’s being Logan or P.T. Barnum, he’s an actor whose heart just beats out of his chest,” says Reitman of his lead. “He’s very emotionally expressive. So, to play a character that’s an enigma, and someone we’re trying desperately to understand but won’t completely let us in, is a unique and very challenging role for him.” Reitman also adds that, because Hart is a character that people will be inclined to judge, “I thought it’d be good to have some of that Hugh Jackman decency underlying it.”
Jackman says that Hart’s main concern regarding the film – as it was back then – was his family. “He also kept saying, ‘I don’t know why an actor like you would want to play me.’” Jackman laughs. “It’s a complex thing, you know, to bring it all up again. But his main concern was always for his family.”
‘ THERE ARE NO GOOD GUYS AND NO BAD GUYS’
JASON REITMAN
It’s a transformative turn for the actor, who’s since attracted positive notices and awards buzz (it’s worth remembering that Reitman has previously directed four actors to Oscar noms). But the complexity was a challenge and an attraction for Jackman. “It was a huge challenge… I really did connect with it in many ways,” he says. “But it was I’d say, by far, the biggest challenge I’ve had. Thankfully, he didn’t have six-pack abs. That just would have been too much,” he laughs.
The role did require a physical transformation of sorts, though, to recreate Hart’s trademark ’do. “I had to do the wig,” he adds. “I would look into the mirror every morning and apologise to Gary. I don’t think I ever quite pulled off the hair. People used to always talk about his hair: ‘The greatest hair in politics.’ I just remember thinking, ‘I don’t think this does Gary justice at all.’ But you get used to it after a while,” he says, breaking into another laugh.
Reitman co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Bai, on whose book the film is based, and Jay Carson, a former press secretary for Hillary Clinton and political supervisor on House Of Cards. As well as all of the insider knowledge that Bai and Carson brought to the table, Reitman also sent questionnaires to many of the real people who had been involved in the Hart campaign – asking about their daily lives, preferred sports teams, favourite snacks, desk detritus – and incorporated it all in to the mise-en-scène. “Because we wanted to make these rooms in the movie feel so rich in detail, and so overlapping in their dialogue, that as an audience member it felt as though you were just dropped in the midst of the campaign,” explains Reitman. “And now you’re trying to pick up things in real time.” The intention is for the style to result in a viewing experience that varies with every audience member. “This is a movie that is constantly asking the audience, ‘What do you want to look at? What’s important? Where do your ears go?’” It’s leading to wildly different interpretations of the situation.
POINTS OF VIEW
“Matt, Jay and I always believed the movie has no good guys and no bad guys,” says Reitman, whose cast includes his regular good-luck charm, J.K. Simmons. “We wanted to portray 20 main characters – journalists, campaign people, the family – all trying to figure out the right thing to do, in the midst of the world shifting under their feet. It becomes this reflection of the audience. I found that one audience member heroises Hart, and wonders why he left politics, and the next thinks this is an early #MeToo truth-to-power story.” It was also important to show the women – particularly Donna Rice (Sara Paxton) and Hart’s wife Lee (Vera Farmiga) – “a kind of empathy they have not been afforded over the last 30 years”.
Ultimately, it’s going to be up to audiences to make up their minds. But Jackman and Reitman seem to agree that Hart would have been a good leader, had he ever had the chance to hold the highest office. “If you look at his policies, his ideas, and his kind of proven prescience on the Middle East, Russia, education, computers… undoubtedly, he would have been a great president,” considers Reitman. Jackman also feels that the world lost something, following Hart’s fall from grace. “I may be biased in that I’m now friends with Gary,” he says. “But regardless of my own personal feelings, for me he’s widely regarded by most everyone who worked on either side of the political [divide] as one of the most intelligent politicians of the last 50 years.”
If you need any sign of Hart’s prescience, and the relevance of this particular incident to the modern political landscape, then you need look no further than one of Hart’s most significant speeches, recreated in part in the film. Not least, when Hart says, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.” The whole speech almost feels too on the nose for a film like this, until you realise it’s verbatim from 1988.
“It’s astonishing that it’s real,” gasps Reitman when we mention it. “In fact, when you look at it after, you go, ‘Wait, there’s even more.’ We had to cut out [some of it]… because the audience was going to go, ‘This is ridiculous. There’s no way he said it.’ And he did.” It’s the moment that defines Hart the politician, and reduces The Front Runner down to its core message. “It’s an incredible speech,” Reitman concludes. “It was one that showed all his gifts – it boiled down complicated ideas into something anyone can understand; his ability to be charismatic and relate to an audience; but more than anything, his prescience – his understanding of what was to come.”
The FronT runner opens on 11 January.