If Trump hadn’t won, I would still have found an urgency to tell this story
Despite parallels between now and 1971, director says 2016 US election didn‘t influence his thinking in taking on media movie
AN ANGRY president curses the words of journalists and newspapers, and lies, corruption and scandal are rumoured...
But while there may be plenty of fire and fury from the commander-in-chief in Steven Spielberg’s new drama The Post, it all took place nearly 50 years ago.
The furious US president in question is Richard Nixon and the year is 1971, when his administration was fighting tooth and nail to stop investigative journalists from revealing the truth behind the Vietnam war in the notorious Pentagon Papers.
There are parallels with Donald Trump’s “fake news” claims against the media but Spielberg insists the true story at the heart of his film is more important than any one president, and denies that the film’s speedy nine-month gestation was as a result of the 2016 election.
In The Post, Meryl Streep is pioneering Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, who along with editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) risked court action and jail to publish the story.
Spielberg said: “A lot of my movies take a long time to develop.
“I buy books, develop scripts and years go by and I make other movies instead. They percolate, come back into my life and I finally get around to making them.
“In my entire span of 49 years of professionally directing, I’ve never had a film come together so quickly.
“The issues are much bigger than one administration. Had the election gone a different way, I would still have found an urgency to tell this story.
“The first thing that attracted me to The Post was Katharine Graham – her story, her evolution as a real person of real potential power but who did not really have the facility to exercise that power because she hadn’t quite found her centre of gravity and the power to use her own voice.
“For the obvious comparisons between 2017 and 1971, it was the Graham story and eventually the Bradlee-Graham relationship that would have made a good movie whether or not the last election cycle had gone differently, or at any time.”
The film, made by arguably the greatest director in the medium and starring two Oscar winning heavyweights, is heavily quoted for awards season and one of the most talked about releases of the year so far.
The story follows the expose of the US Department of Defense’s secret report into the Vietnam war, which predicted heavy casualties and revealed that the US government had
been lying about the conflict for years.
While the initial scoop was made by the New York Times, the Post caught up quickly and tracked down the papers.
With the Times under a judicial embargo not to print further details, the Post picked up the baton and went with the story.
Bradlee is desperate to land the massive story and get it in the paper while Graham (Streep) – the first woman to run a newspaper in the US – has to make the decision and risk her family business by running the story.
With her company facing financial sanctions and herself risking prison, Graham had the ultimate call in a case which served as a landmark for government reporting. Streep said that given the current climate, it’s vital to support a free press.
She added: “We all have to support them and call out the attempts by powerful interests to control their work and delegitimise the institutions that have given them work. I feel that more than ever right now.”
While researching the role of iconic editor Bradlee, Hanks was impressed by his passion for his job and the commitment to the truth.
He said: “Ben Bradlee was a man who loved his job.
“It’s a great job. You see the world, have an expense account, get to stay up late and have two Dubonnets at lunch every day. That’s a good gig to have. But he would say things like, ‘You’ve got a story but you don’t have the story. Come back to me when you’ve got the story’, meaning ‘Let’s aim for the confirmable almost empirical truth because you cannot suffer by going after the truth’.
“That code of ethics and ethos and desire does come down to an individual mandate that only the practitioners can decide.
“Rather than asking, ‘How can I promote fear? How can I promote outrage and where is the xenophobia we can comment on?’, asking, ‘What is going to be the interesting story, the attractive story?’ is a different question from, ‘What is the true story?’ He was always a fan of the latter.” ● The Post is released Friday, January 19.