As a former journalist, Rod Lurie takes his relationship with the press seriously. He makes a point of calling his interviewer by name, and gives the targeted thrust of what he wants to get across a deliberate and genuine conversational flair. After interviewing movie stars for radio shows on KMPC and KABC, as well as writing reviews for magazines like Premiere, Movieline and Entertainment Weekly, Lurie must know what it's like to hear impersonal laundry lists of talking points.
His latest film combines Lurie's two main areas of expertise: politics and journalism. Nothing But the Truth is not the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame story, but it is the story of a journalist on trial for protecting the source of a CIA leak. Rachel Armstrong (played by Kate Beckinsdale) goes to jail for the principal of confidentiality, and the film follows the personal and public hell that ensues for her. Judith Miller never went this far.
As soon as he switched to filmmaking, the Israeli-born and West Point educated writer-cum-director's work took a political bent. Lurie's first full-length feature, Deterrence, followed a fictional U.S. president as he debated a pressing nuclear decision. The Contender, Lurie's follow-up, dealt with a sex scandal that threatened to derail the confirmation of a female vice-presidential candidate. His next endeavor, The Last Castle, centered around a military prison, and his short-lived TV series Commander in Chief explored a female president's navigation through the political world.
Last year's Resurrecting the Champ was a detour from Lurie's obviously political stories, but it probed his other passion, journalism. It too was inspired by a true story, that of former boxer Bob Satterfield, but took real life events merely as the inspiration to explore themes of journalistic ethics in a movie, a theme Lurie revisits with his latest release.
Fred Topel: It seems you're inspired by actual events but you like to carry them further and explore more than what occurred in real life. Is that accurate?
Rod Lurie: Yeah, I think it's very accurate. But what's even more important to say is that I don't care about the personalities that were involved in the real world, that Kate Beckinsdale bears zero resemblance in appearance or in characterization to Judith Miller, and that if Vera's anything like Valerie Plame, it's a complete coincidence. I don't know a thing about Valerie Plame other than she's really good looking. I just like the situations that were created. I don't care about the individual personalities that were involved.
FT: And while the real story has a less dramatic end, you get to explore the extreme to which it could have gone?
RL: Yeah, because in a way, you look at the story that happened in reality, and Judy Miller gets some sort of permission to speak and then speaks. So what? Nothing really big came of the whole thing. To be really honest with you, Fred, the biggest thing that I fear is that there is so much animus towards Judith Miller that the people who are lazy reporters and lazy critics, who say this must be the Judith Miller story, are going to get all in a stitch, in a twit because they think that it's romanticizing a woman that they don't like. It's just not her. Maybe I shouldn't have made it a CIA agent. Maybe that would have made life a little easier for me, but I just really like the actual circumstances so much that I thought it would make for the best story.
FT: You made it about an presidential assassination, which obviously didn't really happen.
RL: That didn't happen, and by the way, Judith Miller never wrote a story. I don't know if you know that. She never wrote a story. She had a source who she never quoted in a piece, and they still wanted to know who it was, but in this case, I don't think Judy Miller would ever expose a CIA agent. I think that's outside of her DNA. Everything is really a very different story. You're exploring that, and really, Fred, I tried to make a movie that's a commercial thriller as well as being something that's topical. I think that both audiences hopefully will go in and both be sated by the film. I'm hoping.
FT: How far can you push the emotional impact on her family before it becomes a dangerous crutch of, "Let's make you feel bad?"
RL: Well, you want to know something, Fred? That's the main thing that I was worried about as a director and as a writer, was not becoming overly sentimental because I've been guilty of that in the past. If I was a critic of my own stuff, I would say, "He's got really good stories and the acting is un-fucking-believable from his gang of actors, but Lurie's a little too sentimental, maybe a lot too sentimental sometimes. When he's not confident in himself, out comes the music and out comes, in the screenplay, a few hokey lines."
I did everything I could to pull back on that and I gave Kate's character a little bit of likeability issues. For example, in the beginning of the film, she says, "We're going to bring this administration down." No journalist should be saying that, or no journalist should be vocalizing those thoughts at all. But she does. At the end of the film, you go back and you try to square with yourself what is she really doing there? So I think that we went through some real efforts to not get too mushy in the film. In fact, I don't think we're mushy at all in the movie.
FT: Do you think gender is an important aspect of the story, that it's a woman?
RL: No, I don't think so. There's a moment where she's questioned as a mother, right? She says, "You know, if a man goes to jail to protect a principal, they build a statue to him. If he goes off to fight a war, they name a highway after him. But a woman does these things, she's a terrible mother and she's a monster." The reason why I did it, Fred, put that line in, first of all I think the character would say it. But the other thing is that I think that a lot of women in the audience are wondering why is she leaving her son? Why is she going to jail? Screw the source. Why would you go to jail? They wouldn't understand why a mother would do that, but they would understand if it was a father, right? I wanted to call it out, to try to answer it for the audience before they became overly consumed by that question.
FT: There's also one scene where she sort of says she's sticking up for the credibility of female journalists.
RL: "What are we going to tell our sources, that you can trust [journalists] unless they're mothers because they'll crack?" So does that disqualify all mothers? Because if you're dealing with highfalutin stories, and sometimes not so highfalutin stories, you run the risk of going to jail if you grant confidentiality to a source. The government will demand that you tell them, and if you say, "I'm not going to tell you," they're going to throw you in jail. If you know ahead of time that you're crackable, that you're not willing to go away from your family to protect a source, you have no business being a reporter probably. Certainly not at that level, certainly not covering those kind of stories, I think.
FT: We don't want to give away the ending, but did you have to let the audience know who the source was after all this?
RL: I would say that when we tested the film, we found the ending to be enormously satisfying to audiences. Not so much in the sense of they liked what they saw, but they liked that the rug was pulled from under them. That's what I would say. The ending I think is satisfying without being hokey. It's definitely resolved. The movie's definitely resolved.
FT: Ten years after you made the switch, is filmmaking all your dreamed it would be?
RL: You know, I never understood that much about the politics behind creating TV and film. That's not what I dreamt it would be. I had a very idealistic view of being in charge of my movies and doing my thing, which I did have on Nothing But the Truth and I did have on The Contender and Resurrecting. But when you look at the big studio films, it's a much more difficult process than I ever imagined that it would be and I wish I didn't have to deal with a lot of the politics that exist there.
FT: How did you not know that having talked to directors and producers and been on sets?
RL: Because directors bullshit you, Fred. If you have a difficult actor, you're never going to talk about that in a junket. You're never going to talk about that in an interview. You're never going to talk badly about the studio that's marketing your film at that moment. So I didn't really get a sense of it, or I didn't think it was really believable, but now I have run into studio heads and people who run television networks that are exactly like the Tom Cruise character in Tropic Thunder.
That character is no fuckin' joke, I promise you. I really mean it. It's no joke. To some people, it's a caricature. To other people, it's a perfect depiction of two or three or four people that are in this town. Some of them are very, very smart, very smart people. Like for example the studio head that I'm working with now on the screenplay of Straw Dogs really knows his shit and is very artful. But that's few and far between.
FT: Do you have any former colleagues that are especially hard on your work still?
RL: No, I don't think so. In fact there are a couple of people I think give me a pass now and then. To be honest with you, not many, but it used to be, Fred, that when I began, when I did Deterrence, my first film, "Film critic Rod Lurie has made a movie." Then when I did The Contender and Last Castle, they call me, "Film critic turned director." Then when I did Resurrecting the Champ they're saying, "Former film critic Rod Lurie." Now hopefully they'll just say, "Director Rod Lurie." That has all sort of gone away. Unfortunately, so many of the critics that I knew and I was friends with have been fired, don't have their jobs anymore.
FT: You must be happy about Obama. Can you believe the Republican pundits are already saying he can't live up to our unrealistic expectations?
RL: I don't think it's unrealistic. I think he's an extraordinary guy. I think he's an extraordinary man. He was a year ahead of me in my high school at Punahou, although I didn't know him.
FT: How does a state like California pass Prop 8?
RL: It was really disturbing and really rather shocking to see. I think that a lot had to do with the Mormon church putting so much money into trying to defeat it. Why a church in Utah would come here to try to restrict the rights of the citizens is really rather extraordinary and very upsetting. You want to know something, Fred? In the end, one thing that's been consistent in the United States is that our gravity is human rights. We always end up giving people rights. We don't take them away. It really bummed me out. Milk could not be coming out at a better time.
FT: What's going to happen the day I don't like one of your films. Can we still talk?
RL: We will be able to talk. You just have to be convincing when you write. Just write well, it's all we care about.
Nothing But the Truth opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, December 19. The film is then scheduled for wider release on January 9, 2009. HIt the official site for more info.
His latest film combines Lurie's two main areas of expertise: politics and journalism. Nothing But the Truth is not the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame story, but it is the story of a journalist on trial for protecting the source of a CIA leak. Rachel Armstrong (played by Kate Beckinsdale) goes to jail for the principal of confidentiality, and the film follows the personal and public hell that ensues for her. Judith Miller never went this far.
As soon as he switched to filmmaking, the Israeli-born and West Point educated writer-cum-director's work took a political bent. Lurie's first full-length feature, Deterrence, followed a fictional U.S. president as he debated a pressing nuclear decision. The Contender, Lurie's follow-up, dealt with a sex scandal that threatened to derail the confirmation of a female vice-presidential candidate. His next endeavor, The Last Castle, centered around a military prison, and his short-lived TV series Commander in Chief explored a female president's navigation through the political world.
Last year's Resurrecting the Champ was a detour from Lurie's obviously political stories, but it probed his other passion, journalism. It too was inspired by a true story, that of former boxer Bob Satterfield, but took real life events merely as the inspiration to explore themes of journalistic ethics in a movie, a theme Lurie revisits with his latest release.
Fred Topel: It seems you're inspired by actual events but you like to carry them further and explore more than what occurred in real life. Is that accurate?
Rod Lurie: Yeah, I think it's very accurate. But what's even more important to say is that I don't care about the personalities that were involved in the real world, that Kate Beckinsdale bears zero resemblance in appearance or in characterization to Judith Miller, and that if Vera's anything like Valerie Plame, it's a complete coincidence. I don't know a thing about Valerie Plame other than she's really good looking. I just like the situations that were created. I don't care about the individual personalities that were involved.
FT: And while the real story has a less dramatic end, you get to explore the extreme to which it could have gone?
RL: Yeah, because in a way, you look at the story that happened in reality, and Judy Miller gets some sort of permission to speak and then speaks. So what? Nothing really big came of the whole thing. To be really honest with you, Fred, the biggest thing that I fear is that there is so much animus towards Judith Miller that the people who are lazy reporters and lazy critics, who say this must be the Judith Miller story, are going to get all in a stitch, in a twit because they think that it's romanticizing a woman that they don't like. It's just not her. Maybe I shouldn't have made it a CIA agent. Maybe that would have made life a little easier for me, but I just really like the actual circumstances so much that I thought it would make for the best story.
FT: You made it about an presidential assassination, which obviously didn't really happen.
RL: That didn't happen, and by the way, Judith Miller never wrote a story. I don't know if you know that. She never wrote a story. She had a source who she never quoted in a piece, and they still wanted to know who it was, but in this case, I don't think Judy Miller would ever expose a CIA agent. I think that's outside of her DNA. Everything is really a very different story. You're exploring that, and really, Fred, I tried to make a movie that's a commercial thriller as well as being something that's topical. I think that both audiences hopefully will go in and both be sated by the film. I'm hoping.
FT: How far can you push the emotional impact on her family before it becomes a dangerous crutch of, "Let's make you feel bad?"
RL: Well, you want to know something, Fred? That's the main thing that I was worried about as a director and as a writer, was not becoming overly sentimental because I've been guilty of that in the past. If I was a critic of my own stuff, I would say, "He's got really good stories and the acting is un-fucking-believable from his gang of actors, but Lurie's a little too sentimental, maybe a lot too sentimental sometimes. When he's not confident in himself, out comes the music and out comes, in the screenplay, a few hokey lines."
I did everything I could to pull back on that and I gave Kate's character a little bit of likeability issues. For example, in the beginning of the film, she says, "We're going to bring this administration down." No journalist should be saying that, or no journalist should be vocalizing those thoughts at all. But she does. At the end of the film, you go back and you try to square with yourself what is she really doing there? So I think that we went through some real efforts to not get too mushy in the film. In fact, I don't think we're mushy at all in the movie.
FT: Do you think gender is an important aspect of the story, that it's a woman?
RL: No, I don't think so. There's a moment where she's questioned as a mother, right? She says, "You know, if a man goes to jail to protect a principal, they build a statue to him. If he goes off to fight a war, they name a highway after him. But a woman does these things, she's a terrible mother and she's a monster." The reason why I did it, Fred, put that line in, first of all I think the character would say it. But the other thing is that I think that a lot of women in the audience are wondering why is she leaving her son? Why is she going to jail? Screw the source. Why would you go to jail? They wouldn't understand why a mother would do that, but they would understand if it was a father, right? I wanted to call it out, to try to answer it for the audience before they became overly consumed by that question.
FT: There's also one scene where she sort of says she's sticking up for the credibility of female journalists.
RL: "What are we going to tell our sources, that you can trust [journalists] unless they're mothers because they'll crack?" So does that disqualify all mothers? Because if you're dealing with highfalutin stories, and sometimes not so highfalutin stories, you run the risk of going to jail if you grant confidentiality to a source. The government will demand that you tell them, and if you say, "I'm not going to tell you," they're going to throw you in jail. If you know ahead of time that you're crackable, that you're not willing to go away from your family to protect a source, you have no business being a reporter probably. Certainly not at that level, certainly not covering those kind of stories, I think.
FT: We don't want to give away the ending, but did you have to let the audience know who the source was after all this?
RL: I would say that when we tested the film, we found the ending to be enormously satisfying to audiences. Not so much in the sense of they liked what they saw, but they liked that the rug was pulled from under them. That's what I would say. The ending I think is satisfying without being hokey. It's definitely resolved. The movie's definitely resolved.
FT: Ten years after you made the switch, is filmmaking all your dreamed it would be?
RL: You know, I never understood that much about the politics behind creating TV and film. That's not what I dreamt it would be. I had a very idealistic view of being in charge of my movies and doing my thing, which I did have on Nothing But the Truth and I did have on The Contender and Resurrecting. But when you look at the big studio films, it's a much more difficult process than I ever imagined that it would be and I wish I didn't have to deal with a lot of the politics that exist there.
FT: How did you not know that having talked to directors and producers and been on sets?
RL: Because directors bullshit you, Fred. If you have a difficult actor, you're never going to talk about that in a junket. You're never going to talk about that in an interview. You're never going to talk badly about the studio that's marketing your film at that moment. So I didn't really get a sense of it, or I didn't think it was really believable, but now I have run into studio heads and people who run television networks that are exactly like the Tom Cruise character in Tropic Thunder.
That character is no fuckin' joke, I promise you. I really mean it. It's no joke. To some people, it's a caricature. To other people, it's a perfect depiction of two or three or four people that are in this town. Some of them are very, very smart, very smart people. Like for example the studio head that I'm working with now on the screenplay of Straw Dogs really knows his shit and is very artful. But that's few and far between.
FT: Do you have any former colleagues that are especially hard on your work still?
RL: No, I don't think so. In fact there are a couple of people I think give me a pass now and then. To be honest with you, not many, but it used to be, Fred, that when I began, when I did Deterrence, my first film, "Film critic Rod Lurie has made a movie." Then when I did The Contender and Last Castle, they call me, "Film critic turned director." Then when I did Resurrecting the Champ they're saying, "Former film critic Rod Lurie." Now hopefully they'll just say, "Director Rod Lurie." That has all sort of gone away. Unfortunately, so many of the critics that I knew and I was friends with have been fired, don't have their jobs anymore.
FT: You must be happy about Obama. Can you believe the Republican pundits are already saying he can't live up to our unrealistic expectations?
RL: I don't think it's unrealistic. I think he's an extraordinary guy. I think he's an extraordinary man. He was a year ahead of me in my high school at Punahou, although I didn't know him.
FT: How does a state like California pass Prop 8?
RL: It was really disturbing and really rather shocking to see. I think that a lot had to do with the Mormon church putting so much money into trying to defeat it. Why a church in Utah would come here to try to restrict the rights of the citizens is really rather extraordinary and very upsetting. You want to know something, Fred? In the end, one thing that's been consistent in the United States is that our gravity is human rights. We always end up giving people rights. We don't take them away. It really bummed me out. Milk could not be coming out at a better time.
FT: What's going to happen the day I don't like one of your films. Can we still talk?
RL: We will be able to talk. You just have to be convincing when you write. Just write well, it's all we care about.
Nothing But the Truth opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, December 19. The film is then scheduled for wider release on January 9, 2009. HIt the official site for more info.
nicole_powers:
As a former journalist, Rod Lurie takes his relationship with the press seriously. He makes a point of calling his interviewer by name, and gives the targeted thrust of what he wants to get across a deliberate and genuine conversational flair. After interviewing movie stars for radio shows on KMPC and...