This is Peter Landesman, the writer and director of Mark Felt...
...and one of the producers of the film.
I wrote this movie 12 years ago.
Started writing it 12 years ago when Mark Felt came out...
...and confessed to being "Deep Throat" in the pages of Vanity Fair.
It was a shock to everybody because no one really knew who Mark Felt was,
...but everybody knew who Deep Throat was.
And, uh, but the anonymity of the answer to that great mystery shocked everybody,
...but something told me,
...the anonymity of it, the quietness of his name told me...
...that this was actually a remarkable story...
...because it somewhat took somebody that small and that anonymous...
...to take down something as big as the presidency of the United States.
I became obsessed with the Davis versus Goliath of it all,
...the idea that somebody so small...
...and really invisible...
...had the power and the ways you have,
...almost as if his anonymity and his smallness...
...empowered him to do it.
If he were well known, if he were celebrity,
I'm not sure he would have gotten away with it.
REPORTER: ...were in Jacksonville today on their campaign trip through Florida.
LANDESMAN: And a beautiful score by Daniel Pemberton.
I wanted something that...
...propelled the movie forward, like a thriller,
...but was beautiful and spare,
...and Daniel was really remarkable, delivered precisely that.
These early shots of Felt are important to me...
...because they tell me so much about him as a man,
...a man who's meticulous about his clothing,
...photographs in his house, the quietness of the house,
...a very still, quiet and tense suburban household.
This shot here where he lays this dress...
...across the feet of his wife is very important.
This is a man, the head of the FBI, who dresses his wife,
...he adored her, he loved her.
And she was this combustible engine,
...she was like, kinda, spontaneously combusted, alcoholic...
In the movie Diane Lane plays her just so beautifully.
She was drunk by 11:00 a.m. every day,
...and this man's running the world, running the FBI world with this,
I don't want to say "crazy," but really damaged,
...in-pain woman trapped in this cage house...
...in the suburbs of Virginia.
I wanted this shot of Liam to be the first time we see him,
...slow and come around, it was designed this way.
We've never seen Liam Neeson like this,
...his hair allowed to age,
...thin, thinner than he's really ever been, smoking,
...just quietly staring up at the sky, not with a gun.
This is the Liam Neeson from 12, 13, 14 years ago,
...around the Schindler's List time, the stage actor Liam.
That's the Liam I wanted in this film.
I shot these establishing shots of Washington...
...very, very specifically.
I didn't want postcard shots of vistas, and sunsets, and the monuments,
I wanted us to see Washington from the very beginning...
...as something mundane, as a place one lives and works.
Spends all your time, so you cross the bridge,
...you see the monuments, you see the White House,
...you see the Capitol building through trees.
You don't see it from the place as a tourist might see it,
...you see it as though this is just the daily route of your work,
...and your dreams and your family.
So I shot this all on the shoulder...
...from the point of view of a moving car.
Again, you're just on your way to work,
...you're on your way home, you're on your way to lunch,
...you just happen to be driving through the, uh,
...the cockpit of America.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
(CROWD CHANTING INDISTINCTLY) One, two, three, four...
LANDESMAN: There's the White House just like that,
...just as though you might just be passing it by on the way to, uh,
Costco, if they had Costco in 1972.
SECRETARY: (OVER INTERCOM) Mark Felt.
LANDESMAN: This scene is crucial.
He's walking into the devil's lair,
...he's walking into a White House that wants him...
...controlled, manipulated and destroyed.
And prior to this, Nixon had already tried to get Felt to...
...get in league with some of his corruptions,
...to, um... There was a memo, a very important memo,
...that would eventually point the fingers at the Nixon administration...
...for corruption, campaign fund corruption,
...that they asked Felt to pretend it was real,
...and to declare it real,
...and it fact it wasn't.
And he was refusing to go along with them,
...so they knew right away that Felt was a dangerous animal to them,
...that they couldn't rely on him.
So this scene is really about them poking at him to see...
...if he just might possibly consider taking Hoover's spot...
...if they were to get rid of Hoover.
Every president, almost every president Hoover worked for...
...tried to destroy him, tried to get rid of him.
Felt was a soldier, Felt was a loyalist,
...you know, for better or for worse, he believed in the FBI
...and Hoover as a last line of defense,
...as the police department for the United States.
And of course, you know, like all law enforcement agencies,
...like the FBI, Felt knew what was going on,
...the public did not, they knew nothing.
So he really believed... He believed in it as an entity,
...he believed in it as a culture and an institution.
And here he is reminding them...
...just who has the power and just who has the control.
"They think they're in power."
But the funny thing about presidencies is they come and go every four years,
...the FBI stays, the CIA stays.
The intelligence agencies that, uh...
The three-letter alphabet intelligence agencies,
...they don't go anywhere, these guys are there...
...for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
Presidents come and go,
...but they're the constants.
We write it all down in memos.
These memos come to me,
...and I decide what information Mr. Hoover needs to know.
LANDESMAN: These files Felt's talking about are interesting,
...because while some files definitely were destroyed...
...when Hoover died,
...often at Felt's behests,
...it's unclear just to what degree these files really existed.
Just the threat of them,
...the threat that Felt and Hoover...
...knew these kind of details...
...about people's inner lives and outer lives...
...was enough to control them and make them afraid of the FBI
...and really make them respect the FBI, to stay out of its way.
The whole point was to let the Bureau do its job alone,
...to let it be autonomous,
...and just let it be, let them do what they do,
...for better or for worse.
So just the idea these files may or may not have existed,
...no one ever saw them...
I love it. It's kind of a beautiful, uh,
...a beautiful fantasy that's been weaponized.
We, the FBI,
...all your secrets are safe with us.
LANDESMAN: Such a menacing line, "All your secrets are safe with us."
What he's saying, of course,
...is they're safe with us unless you screw us,
...and then we'll use them against you.
That's a lot of information.
LANDESMAN: And this was the Felt, the character,
...the man that I was interested in.
You know, this is not a documentary,
...this is based on truth but it's a film,
...it's a feature, it's entertainment.
I was much more interested in Felt as a man...
...than I was as him of kind of being superhero and...
...here we get into his home life...
...as he pulls up to this just very, very typical suburban home in Virginia,
...and there's Diane playing his wife.
Tony Goldwyn's playing his, uh... You'll discover who he is,
...his right hand man in the FBI.
They drank, they danced, they sang.
(CLAPS) Oh, come on.
LANDESMAN: Early '70s,
...lot of genies out of the bottle here socially.
Eddy, leave her alone, she's the best. Come here, you.
- PAT: Did you hear that? I'm the best. - AUDREY: I need a drink.
- PAT: I am the best! - ED: I heard that.
PAT: I am.
LANDESMAN: This shot of, um,
Felt and his wife, Diane and Liam in the kitchen,
...it's very simple, very beautiful.
You know, she's really a mess,
...she get a cigarette, she pours herself a drink...
...and he just holds onto her as though to keep her from floating off.
Just that. Very simple...
...interaction, very simple gesture.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
LANDESMAN: I learned that Felt and his wife, they loved to dance.
He was very elegant.
Loved the ideology of the FBI but also the image of him,
...of it, and of himself as a, uh,
...as a bureau man, as a G-man,
...but loved to dance, loved to smoke, loved to drink...
There was a kind... There was an element to these people.
It was very...
...fluid, I'd say.
Sexually fluid, perhaps,
...certainly morally fluid inside their home.
Outside their home, they put on the FBI hat and play a role.
(SPANISH MUSIC PLAYING)
LANDESMAN: And again, these shots of the FBI,
...as you've never seen them, from a car,
...subjective point of view,
...the buildings, the details,
...the elevators,
...the warrens,
...these long hallways,
...these bureaucratic rats in a maze.
All they did, the Bureau was all about paper,
...and data and information.
We shot the movie in Atlanta...
...in a particular location that really actually...
...was wonderful for Washington and the FBI.
But again, I love this building and the sets we created.
David Crank, my production designer, on this and Concussion as well,
...was brilliant at recreating the simplicity and the bureaucratic...
...spareness,
...almost emptiness, the vacuum of any kind of, uh,
...sensuality that existed in the FBI.
Here's that Weather Underground file.
LANDESMAN: Tony Goldwyn is remarkable as his lieutenant Ed Miller.
Just...
...a soldier,
...probably knows everything,
...knows everything that ever happened,
...but knows him as a man,
...he'll discover later in the movie.
You know, there are times when he calls Felt "Mark,"
...but Felt will never call him "Ed,"
...always "Mr. Miller."
They're embarrassing the FBI.
Get the New York office on.
He's dead.
Who?
Mr. Hoover's dead.
LANDESMAN: Hoover's death,
...the FBI had only known Hoover...
...for 50 years, 40 years,
...they'd only known Hoover... The whole thing was his invention.
They knew he was dead meant...
...that they were going to be vulnerable,
...that their secrets would be unleashed,
...but also that Felt was in charge. It was a very...
...big, beautiful moment for him,
...it was "be careful what you wish for" time.
You know, like any person who rises to power,
...who rises to the kingship or the presidency,
...the reality of...
...leadership is always very different than the fantasy of it.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
There's no question in my mind that as a man, as a character,
Felt knew he deserved this job.
He'd been there for 30 years.
He believed in it,
...he believed in the law.
He'd given up so much...
...to run the FBI,
...so much of his family, never saw his kids.
Marton Csokas is really just one of our great character actors...
...playing Pat Gray,
...who is assigned by, uh...
Who would eventually be assigned by Nixon...
...to take over the FBI, as you'll see in a few scenes.
And, uh, what I loved about Marton's performance is...
...he just walks that line of arch...
...and vulnerable,
...and almost villainous,
...but always pulls back. He's very human and very humane...
...all the time he's... And I loved him...
...against Liam's stillness.
It's why I cast them like that. Liam is...
In his grace he's very still,
...hardly moves,
...moves his head on the swivel of his neck,
...looks around with his eyes, but really...
He doesn't really give anything away.
Marton's performance as Gray is exactly the opposite.
This scene in Hoover's office...
...is really one of my favorites,
...it's very quiet, there's no dialogue,
...it's just image, image...
The idea of Felt coming in and sitting in this chair, that he'd...
I wouldn't say he wanted it while Hoover was alive,
I don't think he would have permitted himself...
...the pleasure.
But now that Hoover is gone,
...who else was gonna sit there?
And again it's very Shakespearean, right?
Somebody taking the throne after waiting for decades.
And, um...
But owning it, deserving it,
...and actually, I feel humbled before it,
...sitting in this chair as he looks over Hoover's office.
I don't know, when I was talking to Liam about this scene,
I was talking about humility,
...and, uh, and grace.
Daniel's score right here, just the piano,
...just the little moments,
...suggests all is not gonna be well,
...and, uh, I loved that.
There's nothing overbearing about it, there's nothing too much,
...nothing sentimental or melodramatic about it,
...it's just a little psychological...
(EXHALES) "Huh."
Tom Sizemore,
...one of my favorite actors ever, maybe,
...really loved casting him...
...as Bill Sullivan who is...
Gosh, there's a whole other movie about Bill Sullivan...
...who is Felt's nemesis in the FBI.
Hoover had two favorite sons, Felt and Sullivan,
...and Felt was Abel and, uh...
...and Sullivan was Cain.
In this movie, in reality,
Abel got rid of Cain and Cain came back to haunt him,
...and that's really at the end of day what this movie's about.
And Tom as an actor...
...is so combustible, he just vibrates.
And, uh, even when he smiles, as you're about to see,
...there's something so menacing.
There's something menacing in his humility,
...there's something menacing in Tom's sympathy,
...it's almost like he's a wild animal.
It's like the scorpion and the frog crossing the river,
...and the frog asks why the scorpion,
...uh, bit him and stung him,
...and the scorpion's answer always is, "Because I'm a scorpion,"
...and that's Tom, as an actor.
That's why everyone likes you.
Hell,
I even like you. I don't like anybody.
LANDESMAN: I loved writing this scene.
There's something... I thought to myself,
"How do you encapsulate a 30-yearrelationship..."
"...in a 42-second scene, a dialogue between two men?"
These are two men who hated each other,
...despised each other, and yet respected each other.
They stood for opposite things,
...they did opposite things,
...and they knew that they were the enemy.
They knew that if this were 200 years ago,
...they'd be on a field with two guns fighting a duel...
...and one of them would die.
And in a sense, in some ways that's really what happened.
...you know, these two were a duel, except it was duel by proxy.
That's how nature works.
Keeps everything in a balance.
Now, the king is dead,
...long live the king.
LANDESMAN: I wrote those lines specifically to sound Shakespearean...
...about royalty and regal responsibility,
"The king is dead. Who's the new king, is it you?"
And, uh,
...it's a test, you know. What's he supposed to say?
If he says, "Yes," he sounds like a arrogant prick,
...and if he says, "No," he sounds too humble.
You know, it makes me think about the, uh,
...the selflessness of leadership and also the thanklessness.
There's almost no way to win.
You have to decide early on to be a martyr.
And you have to decide early on...
...that you're gonna sacrifice more than you gain,
...and that's just your mission, that's your lot.
That's always what drove me about Felt.
I think he knew that he was sacrificing more than he'd ever get back.
Holding the end of your own leash.
LANDESMAN: There's Tom at this best, menacing best.
And Liam, I talked to him about this, his only response, don't move,
...don't move a muscle,
...moves his eyes and that's it, not a hair on his head.
If you're in the jungle that's the only way to survive.
It's the only way to survive...
...wild animals who want to destroy you and rip you apart,
...is just be still and keep watching, keep scanning,
...and then make your move at the very last second.
Dick.
LANDESMAN: This scene was a challenge because...
I told Liam this was a man who expected this job,
...and expected it to be offered to him.
And so when it wasn't...
...by the Attorney General,
...he had to pretend as though it was never gonna be his.
Smooth, fluid,
...never let them see you sweat.
I guess it's not that different than Hollywood, really, in lot of ways.
If you show any kind of vulnerability,
...you know, they...
In those days Felt was to be taken down.
Yes, a fresh start.
LANDESMAN: Of course he had no idea that Pat Gray was gonna be the answer.
Gray was everything Felt despised.
He almost would have preferred Sullivan...
...because at least Sullivan was aggressive and in his face, Gray was this...
...slippery, weak,
...and again, this is Marton's character, weak,
...fearful,
...trying to suck up to Felt in every way.
You'll see in this piece of dialogue right here,
...he's trying to reach out to him and connect to him as a man.
And you'll see Felt's response is, "Look, you know, we're not friends,"
"...we're never gonna be friends, this is not why you're here."
"We're here to protect the FBI... I'm here to protect the FBI,"
"...and so let's just be clear about only one thing,"
"...the only thing that matters is the FBI."
I'm not a suspicious man by nature,
...that probably makes me a strange choice to run the FBI.
In fact, when the president called, my wife...
...begged me to turn it down, but...
But the President wasn't asking, if you know what I mean?
LANDESMAN: I think Marton's beautiful there. Just the way...
...he expresses that kind of false graciousness...
...and yet seems so dangerous all at the same time.
It is one of the two cockpits that fly America.
And it is what it is because...
LANDESMAN: Felt believes that, "One of the two cockpits,"
...the other one being the White House.
You know, that's really the stake, that's really what he was fighting for,
...was to protect,
...keep that plane flying, because he felt...
And maybe he's not wrong.
You know, if the FBI planes crashes,
...the United States is in peril.
That is your battle to fight.
- But I'm going to help you. - Well, I appreciate that.
Don't.
It's not an act of generosity.
LANDESMAN: Again, his only motivation, his only interest here...
...is the Bureau.
Behind him, over his left shoulder,
...camera left is, uh, Josh Lucas playing his other lieutenant,
Charlie Bates, Josh...
You know, look, these are all leading men,
Tony is... Tony Goldwyn, Josh Lucas, even Marton...
They sign on for this movie to be part of something important,
...to be... To play Liam's wingman, or wingmen...
Liam just loves...
...and pulls in the greatest actors.
They all want to work with him, work around him,
...that's very fortunate.
Josh is, again, very energetic, very kinetic playing, um,
FBI agent who figures it all out as you'll see.
I put Diane in this red dress, in this antiseptic, white,
...sterile kitchen for a very particular reason.
I wanted her to feel like this candle flame,
...this trapped animal...
...as she was in the '50... Or these '50s housewives,
'60s housewives, they give up everything,
...just pacing, drinking, smoking,
...see the Martini and the cigarettes.
This dress to me...
It was almost the first thing I designed...
...with my costume designer, Lorraine Calvert, it's...
I wanted her to literally feel like she was gonna spontaneously explode...
...or burst into flame.
You could feel the tension building.
Her disappointment over him not getting the job...
...is almost bigger than his.
Her rage...
Diane's so good here, she's just...
Underplays it,
...lets the words do the work.
She's so animated without really moving much.
Hmm.
(EXHALES)
Thirteen homes to leave.
Thirteen homes...
LANDESMAN: I kept thinking about what that means, you know.
I live in modern America and I have kids and...
I moved around a lot before I had them,
...but once I have a family and to keep moving...
I mean, the idea of never being able to put down roots...
That was Hoover's intention.
He never wanted his Bureau soldiers...
...to really develop any kind of connectivity...
...with the people and things around them,
...just so they always felt loyal...
...and loyalty toward just the one and only thing...
...which was Hoover and the FBI.
The men get to go off and do their jobs but the woman have to stay home,
...alone and lonely and isolated with kids,
...no friends, no support,
13 homes.
So she'd given up everything,
...and her only idea was that he'd eventually take over the FBI,
...that would be the reward and even that was taken away from her.
You know, at the end of the movie you find out that...
...her fate was actually suicide,
...um, off-screen at the end of the movie.
But it was important to me to lay the bricks and the groundwork...
...for us to understand why she did it...
...so that it was a shock, but not a surprise.
(DRAGS CHAIR)
So all this we've seen so far is a setup...
...for the Watergate break-in and the stakes,
...and what really was at stake...
...which is, from Felt's point of view,
...the sanctity of the FBI,
...the sanctity of his marriage.
There's a sense... There's a daughter missing,
...there's a child missing,
...and all this is happening, all this in the air...
...just as Watergate happens.
(PHONE RINGS)
And now here it is,
...and then we now understand why he does what he does.
(PHONE RINGING)
What is it?
MAN: This is getting complicated. You better get down here.
REPORTER: Five men wearing white gloves and carrying cameras were caught...
LANDESMAN: Again, Washington, in the Watergate,
...the mundane version, the on-the-ground version...
There's the Watergate hotel right there, you've never seen it like that.
You always see it from the air, you see it from a helicopter,
...you see it... I wanted to look at this architecturally...
If you look at these shots of the Watergate hotel,
...it just looks like an anonymous...
...corporate cage,
...which is really just all that was.
It was a mundane, nothing place that became synonymous with...
...cultural scandal and political scandal,
...and it became a buzzword and part of our American lexicon.
It's just a crappy, shitty little hotel.
And across from it where Felt is standing...
...is an old Howard Johnson's across the street,
...again, these mundane, nothing, forgettable little places,
...which is where history is made.
Baldwin is one of ours.
LANDESMAN: And here is where he first gets the information...
...that this isn't just a normal break-in.
That the people who did it were in the CIA, formerly the FBI.
These were very high-end criminals, very high-end spies.
Felt, from the beginning, knew...
...that this meant this was something bigger...
...than merely the break-in of the Democratic National Committee.
CIA...
What the hell is this?
REPORTER: One of the most fascinating and exotic stories ever...
LANDESMAN: I always struggle with the idea of...
...splicing in...
...documentary footage and audio from the time,
...you know, I really don't like it.
I feel like it's a little bit of a cheat.
Um, and also...
You're never gonna really pull it off...
...if you try and recreate it.
And then if you don't have it,
...sometimes you lose a sense of...
...context, of chronological placement, and, um...
So it's a little bit of "choosing the devil you know,"
...or the mistake you can live with the most.
But I... I'd struggled with it my... And really, and...
Parkland, my first film, a little bit in Concussion,
...not so much 'cause of the NFL footage, but here,
...in this film, I really wished I could have done without it...
'cause I really would have wanted it to have a total immersion...
...in, uh, in the time.
Then he left the CIA to run security for the Attorney General.
LANDESMAN: Ike Barinholtz and Brian d'Arcy James...
...playing Angelo Lano and, uh,
Charlie Kunkel, respectively,
...two FBI agents from across the street, they were like in...
...the local DC precinct of the FBI.
Ike is a great comedic actor, just a funny man,
...and I wanted a comedian to play this role...
...because I wanted that sense of, um,
...comedic spirit underneath, as though everything to him was a joke...
...except, of course, it's not because, you know,
...underneath all comedy is tragedy.
Brian d'Arcy James...
...playing the chief of that precinct,
...um,
...special agent in charge,
...love his bureaucratic,
...friendly,
"What the hell is going on?" demeanor.
But again, this cast, from top to bottom,
...the bench on this cast is just so deep.
Every actor tells so much story with that dialogue,
...just sometimes with a look.
With the way they move their head, and, you know,
...you can't get day players to do that good a job.
You need real...
...pros, real guys who in any other...
I mean, in any other thing these guys do they're the leading men.
- We answer to the Attorney General. - You answer to me.
What about the Director?
LANDESMAN: This is Felt's first manipulation.
He knew right away...
...that this break-in was part of something bigger...
...and could have been used as an act of manipulation against the FBI.
Again, everything he's doing is just to stake out a perimeter...
...around the Bureau.
His first piece of real evidence is right here.
He sees John Dean, played by the great Michael C. Hall,
...in the office of the director of the FBI.
You know, in reality he brought a blue gym bag in here...
...and then left without it, and, um,
...it was pretty... It's almost comical, right?
He goes in there and what he's doing is he's leaving with, uh...
He's bringing in documents and leaving with other documents.
Because Gray, even though he's the director of the FBI,
...he's really working for the White House already,
...and this is within a couple of days after the break-in.
Felt immediately knows...
...what's going on here and just is hoping for the best.
You'll see he's about to go in and talk to Gray...
...and remind him who he really is now and what he really does now.
As though it's a surprise to Gray,
...that Gray actually runs the FBI
...and that he isn't still working for the White House.
What's John Dean doing here?
LANDESMAN: You'll see at the end of this scene...
Gray still is the director...
...and Felt is still the number two.
And so, as powerful as Liam's performance is,
...as imposing, he's standing...
I had Liam stand over Gray just...
You know it's six... All 6'3'' of him...
...just bearing down on Marton sitting in that chair.
At the end of this scene,
Marton's Pat Gray reminds Felt who's really in power here,
...and it's, uh...
It's one of those kind of Shakespearean turns...
...when you realize...
...that Liam's character, Mark Felt, realizes that if he doesn't...
...do something out of the ordinary, if he doesn't break the rules,
...it's all going to come tumbling down.
- The FBI is an independent body. - I'm aware of that.
Are you also aware that means we don't need...
LANDESMAN: At the time that I'm doing this,
...the relevance to our current presidency almost seems supernatural.
The lines Liam just delivered about FBI autonomy...
...and bureaucracy are almost prophetic.
We're living in a time when the FBI is also attempted to be manipulated...
...if not invaded by a hostile White House,
...and, um...
I thought a lot about this, I'm asked a lot about...
Obviously, I wrote this before...
...this current presidency came to power.
But I do have to say that...
...that dynamic of corruption at the top and integrity at the bottom,
...that David versus Goliath dynamic exists...
...everywhere, every time. So,
...while this is history repeating itself,
...it never really went away.
You've got 48 hours.
LANDESMAN: The idea that the director is giving...
...the titular head of the FBI 48 hours to finish an investigation...
...was unprecedented.
Never in the history of the Bureau...
...had the Bureau been instructed to stop an investigation...
...before it was finished, it's just unthinkable.
So here is Felt sitting alone, almost Lincoln-like,
...in his chair in his office,
"What the hell do I do about this? I've never faced this, I've never..."
"...been confronted by my superior telling me not to do my job."
So he's about to make a very, very important decision.
And of course the nail in the coffin right here is that...
...here comes Tom Sizemore's Bill Sullivan,
"What's he doing in my building?"
And this great line...
Sullivan delivers...
Nice to see you.
What brings you back?
Two words,
...re-venge.
LANDESMAN: That little look Sizemore gives at the end is just spectacular.
I loved writing that line.
You know, as a writer once in a while you get lucky...
...and you come up with something that you...
And you laugh sometimes when you write it down...
'cause you just know it works coming out of the right actor's mouth.
"Two words, re-venge,"
...out of Sizemore's mouth.
I almost don't even need to say anything else.
The truth about Mark Felt is that Bob Woodward...
...was not his only reporter friend or contact.
He regularly met with a lot of reporters.
In fact there were probably three, four, maybe even five others...
...he was talking to about Watergate,
...desperate to control the message, and desperate to control the truth...
...and control...
...the White House, really, to let him do his job.
And he met regularly, this Time magazine reporter,
...played brilliantly by Bruce Greenwood right here,
...met in this diner. They met often,
...they were colleagues, contemporaries,
...same age, same kind of man. You'll see, like,
...just as Felt sits down right here...
...across from Bruce.
You look like hell.
LANDESMAN: It's like they've been working, acting together for years.
The truth is Bruce showed up at 7:00 that night...
...from some other show,
...we shot till 8:00 in the morning.
We shot this scene and one other scene all night long,
...and, uh, Bruce just stepped on to a moving train just beautifully.
He's such a pro and just a lovely guy,
...and the two of them together were these titans.
Honestly, I...
No one at Time magazine...
...or any newspaper I know can figure it out.
Ex-spooks get caught planting bugs?
LANDESMAN: First, the production design and the art direction in this place,
I wanted a diner that was reminiscent of nothing.
The kind of place you'd be driving by,
...driving nowhere, nowhere through, you know, maybe desert or forest...
...for 50 or 100 miles then find this place for a piece of pie...
...or an omelette or a burger and...
I wanted nothing special about it.
Crappy walls,
...stupid shit on the boards,
...bad food, bad coffee,
...reminded me a lot of, uh,
...something Hopper-esque about it.
Edward Hopper, one of my favorite painters...
...and one of the most iconic painters of mid-century American life,
...was a painter of isolation, and beauty,
...and mostly the internal dialogue we have with ourselves...
...of our place in American society...
...and maybe American society within the world society.
A lot of these interiors, um,
...in terms of the cinematography,
I talked to Adam Kimmel, the DP on this film,
...and David Crank, my production designer,
I brought up Hopper a lot...
...because of Felt's isolation,
...the idea of Felt,
...even when he was surrounded by people was alone,
...and isolated,
...and in danger.
And these interiors, you know, lit by fluorescence,
...which to me fluorescent light is the, uh,
...is the equivalent of some kind of soul-sucking, uh,
...invention.
This is almost...
To me, fluorescent light is no light.
You know, you can see but you can't feel,
...you know, it's like hearing but not listening.
This is crucial. So Felt just tells Sandy Smith,
...who was one of the top political writers at Time magazine,
...that the director of the FBI just gave him 48 hours...
...to finish the investigation.
What's interesting is Sandy Smith never wrote it,
...so there's no article that ever came out,
...but what he did do was call Gray...
...and tell him that this is what he'd heard.
That's all Felt wanted, because Felt knew that...
...if Gray heard that, got that phone call,
...that was all that was required to take away that 48-hourlimit.
That's all he wanted, was just to... The FBI left alone to do its job.
In all the years that I've known you you've never...
...given up a single real secret.
LANDESMAN: Such a crucial line because he met with Smith often,
...but it was never to leak an investigation,
...never to leak details from inside a classified investigation.
It was always just to make sure...
...that people were getting it right,
"Don't go here, don't go there."
"What you've written, not accurate."
"Maybe you should think about looking at it this way,"
...that's all he would do.
So what he does right here with Sandy Smith...
...is the first time he's ever actually said anything...
...that's secret,
...that qualifies as something dangerous from within the FBI walls.
It's the first time he did it.
And you want me to light a fire around the edges...
...with a story.
LANDESMAN: I love Smith's line here.
Well, I can see why they didn't give you the job.
They must be terrified of you.
LANDESMAN: They were. They were terrified of him.
One thing about Mark Felt that they knew was he knew everything.
He knew everything about Nixon, knew everything about everybody...
Lyndon Johnson, their corruptions, who they were screwing,
...who they were paying off,
...how much they drank.
The idea of him being the head of the FBI
...just scared the crap out of them.
And all he's doing is proving it over and over again.
So he goes from the Smith meeting to a phone booth...
...where he would call Woodward and set up a meeting.
Again, there's something very le Carré-esque about it,
...very spy versus spy, espionage,
...even with his own agency like he's a mole.
I love that. Imagine how lonely that is?
I would think about how...
The quiet desperation men like this lived in.
And I go... I purposely went from that scene to this.
And here we discover that there's something even bigger,
...some bigger boogeyman in Felt's closet...
...and that is that his daughter is missing,
...has gone missing without a trace...
...for three years.
The truth about Joan Felt,
...his daughter, is that she was really the love of his life.
She was beautiful, went to Stanford,
...she was the very first female Fulbright scholar in the country,
...which is remarkable if you think about it,
...and, uh...
And then she vanished.
And, uh, she was political, she was left-leaning,
...this was the early '70s of course,
...but mostly it was about sexual dynamics.
I don't know, I have this theory,
...both as an old journalist and a war correspondent...
...and filmmaker that, uh, everything comes down to sex and money.
And, uh, I don't think there's anything that doesn't come down to sex and money...
...to some degree, and...
And her relationship,
...the daughter's relationship with her mother was really...
It was a triangle... It was...
...a triangulation with the man they both loved,
...and Diane Lane's character, Audrey Felt,
...the mother couldn't stand that the daughter...
...was really the object of Felt's greatest affection,
...and she chased her out.
She made life hell and she ran.
Joan was a great source of information for me,
I got very close to her and...
Great tragedy actually, but she was gone...
...and at this time Felt's greatest fear was...
...that she'd actually joined the Weather Underground which,
...you know, was the ISIS of his day.
Um, the idea that she had joined the Underground...
...meant that she was part of the same organization,
...an institution that the FBI was desperately hunting...
...because at the time they were bombing.
You know, we lost track of this history,
...but they were killing people, they were bombing...
They were vicious. There was some concern...
...they were joining up with the PLO,
...and the idea that Felt's, the head of the FBI,
...his own daughter had joined them is...
...almost impossible to metabolize for him.
So he went on a search,
...and that's what these letters are about.
It was really one of the most beautiful and simple pieces of counterespionage...
...you could ever think about as.
He thought about... Made a list of all the places she might have gone,
...all the communes, all the lefty communes,
...the politicized ones, the a politicized ones,
...and he just wrote them letters,
...wrote letters and sent one to each of these addresses.
And at the end of the day,
...one didn't come back.
So in other words, she was at none of them...
...except that the one didn't come back,
...and that was an indication to him that that's exactly where she was...
'cause she got the letter,
...she saw her name, she saw his name.
She may not have written,
...but she opened the letter and kept it for herself...
...and that's how eventually he figures out where she is.
Very, very simple...
...and beautiful in its simplicity.
(PHONE RINGING)
Where the hell did they get that?
LANDESMAN: You know, again, thinking about that,
I never think about characters as...
...political mechanisms, especially when I'm telling true stories,
I think them as men and characters first...
...and then everything else emerges out of that.
So this pain, this underlying pain that Felt suffered,
...combustible wife, a drunk wife,
...a vanishing daughter,
...it informed everything he was and everything he did.
Even in this scene where he, you know...
Truly another form of counterespionage, where he accuses...
...someone else of leaking to the press.
This morning, our Time magazine pal, Sandy Smith,
...called the acting director to say that he is prepping a story...
...that the FBI is plotting a whitewash.
He said that the Director has put a 48-hour cap on the investigation.
- What's your point? - Is that true?
Someone in this office is talking to the press.
The point, Mr. Lano...
LANDESMAN: The way Felt protected himself...
...in his effort to take down the presidency...
...was to lay ground fire in other directions...
...and to create distractions,
...so people thought it was somebody else talking to the press.
And he was expert.
Now,
...the character, this guy, Ike Barinholtz plays,
...was ultimately sacrificed badly by Felt,
...in order... In his point of view, "for the greater good."
I tried to show Angie Lano the movie but he just wouldn't...
You know, from his point of view Felt was just a scumbag...
...and a traitor, and I get it,
I completely understand. He was sacrificed for the, uh...
For what felt like was the more important thing,
...which was to protect the Bureau and take down the corrupt President.
But the information Felt gets here is crucial,
'cause what they're saying to him is,
...when they go to the White House and they want to interview somebody,
...they already know what they wanna know,
...they already know who they want to talk to,
...which means someone inside the FBI
...is telling the White House everything.
It means the goddamn punks are running the country!
LANDESMAN: I popped wide out here for that line.
I thought hard about it, could've stayed in the office,
...but I fell out wide...
...so we could hear that line from the other side of the glass...
...so we hear his rage.
It's really only one or two times in the movie where we hear him...
...raise his voice,
...lose his cool.
This is the real Felt, this is the...
So the bubbling volcanic rage underneath him that the, uh...
That Washington and the presidency could be...
...falling upon the FBI and feeding on it,
...it just drove him insanely angry.
WOMAN: Mr. Felt, I have the White House on the phone.
LANDESMAN: So you go from that volcanic rage...
...and you follow Felt into his office...
...and, uh, John Dean has called him,
...and now you see just how cool a customer he is.
Love this scene.
Dean tries to lord over him...
...and manipulate him and kind of threaten him,
...almost intimidate him...
...into doing something about these press leaks...
...which, of course, Felt himself was responsible for,
...such a beautiful irony.
Felt's the cause of all this,
...and everybody else is going to him to try and solve the problem.
You know, he's in charge of the investigation to find himself.
It's such a remarkable irony.
And, uh, but just the way he handles it, the way he just...
...fires back these tennis balls in a way that just...
...keeps Dean in his place and the White House in their place.
I did these little interstitial shots,
...of these FBI files just to remind you, the audience,
...that the FBI had everything on everybody and they knew,
...they knew everything.
So here he is holding all that information back,
...but suggesting...
...and informing them that the White House has nothing to suggest...
...or no way to control the FBI.
It's a beautiful little exchange.
Also the way I shot this,
I wanted this scene incredibly moody and beautiful,
I wanted it to feel like a painting,
I wanted it to... For the chiaroscuro light pouring out of the windows.
There's something very beautiful about this film.
I told Adam Kimmel...
...at the very top of the film...
...that I wanted this movie to be exceedingly beautiful.
We used this lovely blue, storm blue filter over the lenses.
Uh, I shot on the Alexa for convenience...
...but I used anamorphic,
Cooke anamorphics, which are antique lenses,
...to give the movie a kind of...
...organic fluid feel.
Slightly impressionistic, so it would not feel modern,
...it wouldn't feel old, it was like in its own interstitial space.
Here's Felt's first big counterespionage move.
He's gonna send a canary into the coal mine...
...to find out exactly how the White House knows what it knows.
He already knows the answer but he just wants to confirm it.
So he tells his guy,
"Take these names off the lists, tell the Director."
And of course he knows the Director is going to go right to the White House...
...and tell them and that's how he's going to find out.
Really beautiful. Again, very, very simple, no cell phones,
...no surveillance, no computers,
...just spy versus spy, human nature versus human nature,
...man versus man.
Really just, uh, Felt's a tremendous thinker...
...and interpreter of human behavior.
May I call you Charlie?
How much of what we're getting on Watergate am I actually seeing?
Mr. Felt gives me the headlines, I type them up,
I give Mr. Felt the original and bring you a copy.
Mr. Felt doesn't want to waste your time with details.
LANDESMAN: But Marton is so close to camp here.
It's... It's... I laugh even just looking at it.
But he just doesn't get there, he just keeps it on the right side.
It's all about his fluidity...
...but you feel the menace and you feel...
You feel the jungle animal circling Felt...
...trying to use his own guys against him.
And again the hapless, uh,
Kunkel played by Brian d'Arcy James is stopped on the street.
He's just a work-day guy doing his job,
...neither brilliant nor stupid, just sort of very average.
We shot this in Atlanta,
...and there were a handful of streets that felt federal enough,
Washington enough, you could see the buildings behind them,
...they're marble, some hedges,
...it feels okay.
I went to Washington later to do some exteriors,
...but this scene felt like it's something I could pull off in Atlanta...
...if I stay close enough.
Of course.
LANDESMAN: Mark Felt was also other things, he was a painter...
...and a dancer, a great lover, actually.
And I shot these great dancing scenes with him and Audrey,
...and then Audrey alone, just combustible and beautiful.
But Felt loved to paint, you know, and he, um...
He was unapologetic about it and he was just as...
He felt like, you know, he was like a modern man...
...trapped inside an old fashioned man.
And, uh...
I shot an additional scene of him painting.
It was a way for him to contemplate, it was a way for him to connect to...
...nature and, you know, his own soul I suppose...
...is what he would say.
So I love when he shows up and crosses his front yard...
...in his robe to this scene which is...
The scene where it's revealed...
...how it is the White House is getting its information,
...so against the... You know, Felt in his robe,
God he almost looks like Hugh Hefner, um,
...in, uh, in this old version,
...sitting in that car and then...
...plotting this response with his two lieutenants.
Take a look at the paintbrush as Liam plays this scene.
He begins to tap this rhythm in the seat.
Rhythm and, uh, and tempo,
...and...
...space,
...tapping,
...would really compile to become an important metaphor in this movie.
Very, very intentional and culminates in this scene towards the end,
...we'll talk about it when we get there.
But the idea of tapping on a person,
...on an institution in a rhythmic way...
...as a way to test its strength, test its solidity,
...but also to begin to dissemble its molecules is very, very important.
Did I do something wrong?
Mr. Bates tells me...
...you've been giving Mr. Gray everything we're collecting on Watergate.
LANDESMAN: Again, I wanted this scene to be very beautiful.
Backlit, very blue,
...almost like, uh, they're in this cave.
Well, he didn't say it was a secret or anything.
LANDESMAN: This is the scene that really coalesces exactly what's happening.
You know, how Pat Gray at the behest of the White House...
...was using Kunkel, Brian d'Arcy James there, as a mechanism...
...to gather information about what was happening in the FBI.
Felt and his men realizing exactly how it was being used and what it meant.
And this scene is going to culminate in a very important question.
Is...
If they could get indictments, how high could they get...
...with the implication, obviously, could they get the President?
Felt is, what he's saying to us here is he now knows...
...that the only way to protect the FBI and maybe even the country...
...is to take down the presidency.
He's putting a box around Watergate.
We can't touch anything before the break-in.
We have to stay away from all the White House corruption.
LANDESMAN: It's a complicated story.
Lots of ins and outs,
...lots of stuff for an audience to track,
...and so every once in a while in a scene like this I would just...
...have a character, usually Liam, usually Felt,
...just stop...
...and tell us and catch us up exactly what's happening.
Obviously, it can't sound like a professor moment,
...it can't sound like a lecture. Who wants to...
...watch a history lesson?
But it's... It has... So, it has to come out of character,
...it has to come out of motivation, it has to come out of plot.
It's very tricky... It's a very tricky thing...
...to walk that line as, you know, the writer in me,
...not the director in me, but the writer,
...thinking hard about how to transmit information,
...but have it be interesting and character-driven...
...and, uh, and fun to watch.
In your opinion,
...who would we get?
How high?
LANDESMAN: At this point his lieutenants, played by Josh and Tony,
...aren't really aware of Felt's endgame.
You know, these guys are again...
...just pushing inside the insides of an investigation...
...while Felt is sitting at 30,000 feet...
...trying to figure out where this is going to go.
What about the President?
If the President's lying.
Is the President lying?
They're all lying.
LANDESMAN: At this point his disgust is just rampant.
And I'd say it's from really here on out where his disgust is weaponized...
...as a way to, um,
...to execute his endgame.
I think at this moment Felt knows...
...that he has to go for the President's jugular.
I think at this point he now knows...
...what the stakes are...
...and the way to get there.
NIXON: I received repeated assurances that there were none.
LANDESMAN: This sequence was interesting.
I played it with a number of different versions of it...
It's almost a nightmare,
...but there's nothing in it that's not real or not happening,
...but you can imagine a man like Felt...
What's happening is a nightmare, it's a living nightmare,
...um, both from within his home and from without.
And you'll see in just a moment how...
I brought in a kind of reverb and echo to suggest sleep or a nightmare...
...or a bad dream, and...
As we're seeing shots of the Watergate, this could almost be subliminal...
...or subconscious as he's watching the TV or as he's asleep.
And then something terrible happens at the same time...
...which is the Pentagon is bombed by the Weather Underground,
...which is exactly where he fears his daughter has been lost.
And to him, this is the coalescence of every thread in his life,
...professional and personal,
...his wife, his daughter,
...the FBI, the White House, all converging in a giant car crash.
MARK: Which river is that?
The Potomac?
It's CIA.
CIA's telling us we need to taper off.
Taper off?
GRAY: We're getting too close.
- MARK: Too close to what? - I can't tell you.
You can't or you won't?
It's a matter of national security.
LANDESMAN: See Marton just playing this beautifully,
...just as it's about to come apart, just dissembling,
...realizing he's really no match for Felt at all.
NIXON: ...very bizarre incident.
GRAY: The CIA is telling us we need to taper off.
LANDESMAN: The truth is right around the same time...
...an additional thing happened which is the Munich massacre...
...in the Olympic village in Munich, Germany.
The PLO, if you remember, of course, was behind it all...
...and they also discovered, the FBI did,
...that the PLO and the Weather Underground were talking.
So this added an international aspect to it.
It used to be in the movie, it was in the script,
...there was just too much I think for an audience to metabolize...
...and hold on to,
...so I decided to simplify it.
But again, it's yet another thing that Felt had on his plate.
At the top of their list, I told you that three months ago.
GRAY: But can they really hit it?
They just hit the Pentagon.
I want us to open files on every member of every counter-culture organization...
...in the country.
Hunt them to exhaustion, no holds barred.
The President is fighting for the White House.
That's not my job.
The President needs order,
I promised the President he'd have order.
LANDESMAN: These are two men who are really facing each other down now,
...they're circling each other.
Think about these two wild animals circling each other in the jungle,
...waiting for the next move to come.
They both know that the jig is up, they both know they're enemies,
...they both know that they're working against each other's interests,
...but they're both stuck with each other.
I also, you know, believe strongly, in fact, even know that Gray...
...never thought that Felt would betray him in any kind of way.
You know, he never did believe he was Deep Throat,
...and I'll tell you something...
You know, Felt to the end had Gray convinced...
...that he wasn't Deep Throat...
...past their careers into retirement,
...and when Felt confessed in 2005 to being Deep Throat,
Pat Gray, really out of nowhere, just died.
He died out of heartbreak a couple of weeks afterwards...
...just having spent his entire life defending him.
These are...
So this odd thing that Gray felt beholden to both respect...
...and to denounce him all at the same time.
This scene is crucial for me.
This scene is where Felt's personal and professional worlds crash...
...and co-mingle and become one.
He's talking about taking down the Weather Underground...
...and really admitting to us that he's willing to break the law...
...to do wiretaps, to do break-ins,
...which would really come back to bite him in the ass a little later.
But really what this is about is his daughter, listen to this.
Protecting the nation by spying on senators...
...and their mistresses...
...while we're here just trying to...
...keep all this goddamn mess together!
Hey, Mark,
...we're on your side here.
LANDESMAN: Felt never loses his cool.
And again, the thing that's driving him is this...
...missing child, really.
We're talking about business, but really we're talking about...
We're really understanding that this is about the personal.
How many more do we let just vanish...
LANDESMAN: "How many more children do we have to let vanish into oblivion?"
And of course we know what he's really talking about here.
Now Josh Lucas' character has no idea,
...he just thinks that this is about the Weather Underground,
...and business, and Watergate,
...but watch what happens here once he leaves the room and then...
Liam's character, Mark Felt,
...is left alone with Tony Goldwyn's character, Ed Miller.
Ed, of course, knows the family, knows the kids,
...and he'll make a quiet approach.
He doesn't want to interfere,
...but he knows what this is really about.
It's almost my proxy,
...almost my desire to get in that room with Felt himself.
You heard from her?
Joan?
You think she's involved with all this?
The Underground?
How could she?
She's just like me, exactly like me,
She worships you.
LANDESMAN: I wanted to shoot this scene on the shoulder as well.
You can see, feel that little float,
...because I wanted to give it a sense of danger,
...of jeopardy,
...not presentational, not perfect.
There's a price to pay for what we do, Mr. Miller.
There's a price to pay for what we become.
LANDESMAN: There it is right there, really, thematically,
...what the movie's about, the price you pay to do the right thing,
...the price you pay for what you become...
...if you're in the position of leading or as a lawman.
You're gonna see right here in this scene the compromise Felt makes,
...almost to throw himself under the bus...
...in order to do his job,
...because if he can't do his job, if he can't stay in his job he can't...
...save the FBI, take down the President, find his daughter.
So he's gonna make a huge compromise right here.
You'll see in the TV screen he shows up with, uh,
Richard Kleindienst, who was...
...the Attorney General at the time.
What the hell, man?
ANGELO: Get me Felt on the phone.
- JOHN: As to the White House... - Hold on, hold on, wait a second.
I understand the FBI's Watergate investigation...
...is in a state of repose...
...and unlikely to be reopened.
Anybody tell us this was over yet?
Get me Felt on the phone.
Or Bates.
God damn it! Get me Felt!
- She can't. - Why the hell not?
'Cause he's right there.
REPORTER: And now let's return to the press conference...
...of the US Attorney General...
LANDESMAN: I did this push-in on Felt on the TV,
...heavily pixelated.
Even through the pixelation you can see the pain he's in,
...the lie he knows he's telling,
...and the lie he's embodying in order to stay in his job to complete his mission.
He goes from that,
...that compromise, that self-deception...
...to his wife...
...and the mother of his missing child,
...who was in just agony.
And here you're gonna learn a little bit about...
...why she's in such agony,
...who she really is, and how she really sees her husband,
...and why maybe the daughter was chased off.
Diane's remarkable here.
She's one of these actresses who transmits...
...just worlds, and histories, and decades,
...and, uh, even lifetimes of pain or happiness,
...you know, through her gaze.
Almost effortless.
Incredibly hardworking actress,
...between each take so frail and so interested in notes...
...and wanting to improve.
She's really remarkably open.
Maybe she's right out there watching us.
To see what a man like you does...
...when your daughter just vanishes in one night for no good reason.
Joan had a reason for everything.
You hated her.
Mothers don't hate their daughters.
LANDESMAN: This dynamic between a man...
...who's a savior, who's a white knight,
...and a woman who is in need of saving.
You know, this is the stuff of fairy tales,
...and it's the stuff of romance,
...but the truth is, it actually creates a really toxic environment,
...unless you can get your arms around it,
...because they're both in for disappointment.
They're both going to disappoint each other, maybe fatally,
...and they do in this marriage to some degree.
I mean, she ends up killing herself, of course.
Because no man, obviously, is a hero,
...and no man is, uh,
...you know, a white knight in a fairy tale,
...and no woman is Rapunzel.
You know, we're all flawed and, uh,
...and combustible and just doing the best we can sometimes...
...and often failing, and we'll fail each other.
And, uh, this is a marriage that, uh,
...they're, like, they're trapped in need...
...and also in each other's failures,
...and the pain of a missing child, which is a kind of primal thing...
...you never really get over.
Our homes are the only homes I've ever known.
You were both mine.
LANDESMAN: It's so true, it's very simple, "You were both mine."
I mean, you know, it's simple and complex...
...all at the same time but...
She's forcing him to make a choice,
...and he never wanted to, never really felt he had to.
That daughter of yours, Jill?
Joan.
Well, I hear she's terrific.
Fulbright scholar...
LANDESMAN: See here's Pat Gray thinking he's won.
You know, the Watergate investigation is over,
...the President is safe, he's the Director of the FBI,
...he has the great Mark Felt under his thumb, as the number two,
...and he reads Felt a draft of a press release he's gonna give...
...as the Director of the FBI
...saying that Nixon is innocent and could never have not been innocent...
...and... What's Felt's move?
What does he do in the face of this? He's losing.
He's really... If this were a battlefield...
...or even a baseball game, I mean, he's getting clobbered.
And he really... He's just running out of bullets,
...running out of weapons and ammunition.
And then we'll see what he does next.
What do you think?
It's just fine.
KUNKEL: The Democrats have issued a statement this morning.
LANDESMAN: This scene is about shame.
It's about, um,
...what the FBI feels...
...about having been publicly...
...excoriated for failing...
...to, uh, get to the bottom of the investigation.
It's so clear to everybody involved...
...that they're protecting the White House,
...and of course they're doing it at the White House's own behest,
...they're really screwed.
And here's Felt, the head, and this FBI lifer,
...and here's Kunkel talking about the accusation that...
...everything they've done is a whitewash.
I mean, you can imagine for these men there's no worse...
...source of shame and self-disappointment.
To me this was Felt's Henry V speech,
...it's his speech about Saint Crispin's Day.
It's, "We're losing, we're gonna lose,"
"...the odds are against us, but God damn it, we're gonna win."
And...
You know, I designed it like that and wrote it like that,
...and, you know, Liam and I discussed it like that,
...and you could see the slow crescendo of him...
...just laying out exactly what we know now, which is...
...everything the White House is saying he says is bullshit.
And, uh, they know the truth, no one knows the truth,
...no one else knows the truth,
...the country doesn't know the truth.
But this line at the end of this scene...
...where he says, "No one can stop the driving force..."
"...of an FBI investigation,"
...and then he says, "Not even the FBI,"
...is crucial, because what he's saying is,
...these things we're talking about, these institutions are bigger than us,
...bigger than any one person.
They had their own life, their own momentum,
...their own energy, their own control, their own self-control,
...and also there's own self-destruction.
And he is just reminding them...
...that they have a higher purpose.
And what he's really doing, of course, is reminding himself...
'cause these FBI agents are clueless as to what's really going on.
What he does next, of course,
...is to betray everything the FBI stands for,
...everything he stands for as an FBI lifer...
...which was to become Deep Throat,
...which is to...
...reveal the inner workings of an ongoing investigation...
...to a reporter, in this case, Bob Woodward,
...because the bureau itself was being stymied and destroyed.
And so the only way for the truth to get out...
...is to give it to somebody else to carry across the line.
He hated himself for it.
It's why, ultimately, Mark Felt refused to...
...admit he was Deep Throat in order to confess...
...until he was a very, very old man on his deathbed.
And, uh, it was his greatest source of shame.
(THUNDER AND RAIN)
Again, this Hopper-esque shot right here,
...laundromat, lonely laundry lady,
...the building at the far end in the background...
...with the single porch light...
I love Hopper, I grew up loving Hopper,
I loved his ability to create a psychological...
...bubble of loss and isolation.
You know, right now Felt is at his most...
...isolated and quiet, and, uh,
...and really on the edge of destruction,
...just prior to him making this enormous betrayal.
In the screenplay I wrote that this is...
...like a moment a man has before he walks into a motel room...
...to have sex with somebody, begin an affair.
This moment, right now,
...when he's staring out the windshield of his car...
...wondering whether he should do it,
...how he's gonna do it. He knows that nothing's ever gonna be the same.
And then he knows... And then in the case of the metaphor,
...he opens the door, he walks in and closes the door.
And then his marriage is never the same and usually ends in tears.
In this case he walks into a telephone booth and gives...
Gives away information that he never should give away...
...and betrays the Bureau and everything it stands for,
...its quiet, its self, uh,
...self-reliance,
...and him as a man of his word and a man of the FBI code,
...he just throws it all away here...
...for what he hopes is the greater good.
...is Alex Shipley.
LANDESMAN: What he's doing here is giving away this information...
...that is going to help Bob Woodward get to the plumbers,
...which was the group of spies and operatives that the White House...
...had assembled to do its dirty tricks campaign.
And they... No one really knew who these people were,
...or what they were really about, and this is Felt telling them...
...because he and his men had figured out exactly who they were...
...and what they were really up to and what their endgame was.
But unless he did this, it was over.
This comes from classified FBI files.
The Department of Justice has it, the White House has it,
...and, now, you have it.
LANDESMAN: There it is.
And again, popping back out to this Hopper-esque shot...
...and then cutting to Nixon who's about to win the White House...
...in a landslide.
He seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut.
REPORTER: North Vietnamese military attempts...
...to break through South Vietnamese lines...
...have been met with an intense bombing attack by US aircraft.
General Creighton Abrams, the United States commander in Vietnam...
...ordered every available B-52
...into the northern sector of South Vietnam.
REPORTER 2: Though baseball season is over,
...the Philadelphia Phils went to the Ozarks for a new manager today.
LANDESMAN: The scene that happens next, that comes next,
...is the scene that was made famous by All the President's Men,
...which is one of the most extraordinary films ever made.
Extraordinary director,
...great performance in Robert Redford,
...just one... Maybe the best screenplay ever written,
...just perfect procedural of a reporter's journey,
...a reporter's version of this which is the procedural element.
But they only knew what they knew and Felt wanted them to know it and...
This garage scene, you know,
I suppose you could think of it as a companion to the other one,
...the other one is so iconic,
...you know, Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat stepping out of the shadows.
This is the scene about Deep Throat who's the man in the shadows...
...just desperate, and afraid, and confused,
...and not knowing what to do and...
Instead, in this scene, it's Woodward who emerges...
...and as this kind of doe-eyed, wide-eyed rookie...
...who really didn't know what he was doing.
And that's true. He was 26 or 27,
...anyway, in his mid-20s, late-20s...
No idea what he's doing, no idea what he had.
The story isn't moving.
LANDESMAN: I wanted this scene, visually,
...to be its own thing.
I didn't want it to reference the other movie,
I didn't want it to pay homage to the the other movie,
I wanted it to...
...live on its own terms.
And the only other way to do that, of course,
...is forget the other scene, forget the other movie, the...
The overlaps and the similarities are what they are because...
...we're talking about a similar story, but at the end of the day I can't...
...answer to that, I can't, um...
That can't be my responsibility or obligation.
I have... My first obligation is to this movie,
...this character, this actor,
...these actors,
...and then the consequences are gonna be what they are.
To me this is a scene about a man...
...dissembling before our eyes...
...in the face of this rookie reporter,
...just beginning to come apart, showing his vulnerability.
This is dangerous stuff you're playing with.
Especially, if it's known before November 7th.
That's election day.
You put out the right story, the public will scream.
The Attorney General will have to let me keep going.
LANDESMAN: You know, in reality, Felt did just what he does...
...in this scene right here is,
...he sits on the floor, lights a cigarette,
...he's totally defeated, he has no idea what to do next.
And Woodward squats next to him and these two men,
...both wanting the same outcome, but not knowing what to share...
...or how to get there.
And this is when Woodward tells him about his own nickname which is just...
...the other reason Felt was so ashamed of what he did is...
In those days "Deep Throat" was a reference to a porn movie...
...and, uh, Linda Lovelace and...
It was kind of a flippant remark made by one of Woodward's editors,
...it wasn't even meant to stick,
...and now it's become synonymous with whistle-blowers around the world,
...but the truth is it was just a flippant remark by an editor,
...probably at 3:00 in the morning when they were all exhausted...
...and drunk on fatigue.
And, uh, but it stuck.
And Felt was a Christian, he didn't like it.
He didn't want anything to do with it.
In fact, when Woodward called him to tell him...
...when the book All the President's Men was about to come out and, uh,
...and Felt was revealed... Well, Deep Throat was revealed...
...as the source,
...and Felt heard "Deep Throat" and he just lost his mind, apparently.
He screamed at Woodward, hung up the phone on him,
...and didn't speak to him for six years.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
So this article this morning is the result of that...
...very famous, infamous garage...
Secret garage rendezvous, and it was the beginning of the end.
The first domino to go over,
...the first real big revelation, big headline in The Washington Post,
...all out of the mouth of Felt.
And he spends the next period of time,
...you could see him driving, listening to the radio,
...walking into the FBI... "Do they know?"
Who knows it's him?
Of course, from the point of view of a man who knows everything,
...he, uh... The paranoia was almost paralyzing.
REPORTER: ...inside the Department of Justice.
(DOOR OPENS)
LANDESMAN: What he does now, the decision he makes now...
...was the only way to survive, the only way to get away with this...
...is to work even harder to send out some kind of distraction,
...to create some kind of Mr. X
...as someone else is suspected as being the leak.
That's us, God damn it.
And he goes, of course, to the lowest hanging fruit,
Angie Lano, played by Ike Barinholtz.
This scene now...
Charlie Bates, Josh Lucas' character, you're gonna see here,
...it's such a beautiful performance,
...it's so subtle. Not a word is said, but he,
...because of what Felt's doing,
...and because he knows what's on Felt's desk,
...of course, because he puts it there.
He knows... He starts to sense what Felt is doing.
He starts to sense right here with that look...
...that Felt is beginning to...
Well, he's beginning to understand that Felt is laying cover fire elsewhere.
And... But why would he be doing it?
And if he's doing it it must be because he himself was the leak.
And you can see right there with the look on Josh's face.
That his hero and his mentor and his superior...
...was actually a spy.
And what the hell does he do about that?
And Felt even feels it, you see it right there in Liam's look,
...you know, "Who knows?" He knows.
So what does he do?
You're going to find out in the next scene...
...that Felt gets rid of him, he sends him to San Francisco,
...he has him transferred.
You know, you might say it's cruel, you might say it's, uh,
...cold, and it is, can't deny it,
...but it was also necessary.
GRAY: ...the other good men in this room,
...his family, God,
...not to mention the bureau and the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover,
...step forward.
Right here,
...right now.
LANDESMAN: Great little moment here as Felt turns away,
...leaves the room finally having gotten away with it,
...and Lano walks over to Josh's character, Charlie Bates.
Love this shot of Brian,
...actually right here Brian is just livid, rageful, "What is going on?"
Charlie, (EXHALES)
...we got an office pool on who the leak is.
And my money's on you.
LANDESMAN: It's what Felt wanted,
...distraction, have these guys feeding on each other,
...distracted from the idea it might have been him.
The truth is that by now, actually,
...the White House knew it was him.
Um, there are tapes that have been revealed,
...the famous Nixon Oval Office tapes,
...where there's Nixon, and Haldeman, and Dean,
...maybe Ehrlichman are heard, standing around,
...realizing that it had to be Felt...
...because he was the only one who had access to all this information.
I mean, looking back on it, of course, it seems...
Who else could it have been?
But they couldn't do a damn thing about it.
And you'll see this great scene coming up with Felt and Gray...
...played by Marton Csokas.
You know, the only thing worse than, uh,
...keeping Felt was firing Felt, because short of murdering him...
There's nothing he didn't know, they were terrified of him,
...they didn't know what to do,
...he had them completely up against the wall.
KUNKEL: Well, at least it's Frisco.
Yeah.
Great.
How many years you put in here, Charlie?
(EXHALES)
The whole run.
My kids were born here.
(APPLAUSE ON TV)
LANDESMAN: This scene is really unusual, so...
There's an element of this movie that didn't make it into the final cut...
...that I really love, and frankly, honestly, I miss.
Felt grew up on a farm,
...had a horse,
...the horse got sick...
...and his father instructed him to euthanize the horse himself...
...with a gun, and, um...
The idea being, of course, teaching the boy responsibility...
...but also the ability to kill something if it needed killing...
...to save itself and also to save everyone the pain around him,
...or around it,
...um, which became the operating principle of his life, and...
So elements of that original story are preserved here,
...but you can see Charlie Bates furious.
He's been shipped away, just before he's been shipped away,
...he and Miller get together for a drink...
...with Felt,
...and, uh, Bates is about to put it to him,
...tell him what he knows.
Miller,
Tony is just amazing here,
...just transmits so much with so little, just...
...reminds Charlie what the greater, the bigger goal is here...
...which is their jobs...
...and to put their own egos on the shelf.
Just check yourself.
Bates is about to do it right here, he's looking at him.
Nixon of course has won the election,
...it just seems like they've all failed anyway.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
- Mr. Felt... - What are you doing, Charlie?
What is it, Mr. Bates?
LANDESMAN: Felt, even though he's drunk and tired...
...calls the bluff,
...faces Bates down,
...basically says to him to bring it on.
"What do you wanna say?"
Bravo.
LANDESMAN: It's really the act of someone in supreme command,
...someone who has total confidence...
...that he won't waver.
Who knows what he was thinking in his mind and in his heart...
...whether he could really get away with it,
...but to his men he was the king.
(APPLAUSE ON TV)
(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING)
I love Daniel's score here. There's something...
...terrifying underneath in the bass,
...but this sort of ongoing, wavering, psychological,
...almost vibration as it's continuing through Felt's mind, obviously,
...and through our speakers,
...but, really, it's all psychology in Felt's mind.
And this right here, of course, is about the daughter.
He's finally...
He's gotten letters back from every, uh,
...every one of those communes except one,
...and there it is just...
Again, no cell phones, no surveillance,
...just old-fashioned...
US mail.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Genesis commune.
Ben Lomond, California.
Check it thoroughly.
LANDESMAN: So now that he knows where his daughter is, what does he do?
If he takes down Nixon before his daughter is found,
...then he loses his position and his job,
...and then the daughter may be lost to him, so he waits.
But while he's waiting,
...they come for him.
And here is Gray telling him, of course, what I told you,
...which is that they suspected that he was the leak,
...the Deep Throat leak to The Washington Post.
And this is Gray, and it's unclear what Gray really knew,
...and what he was really posturing at,
...but he tells Felt here that the FBI's been bugged,
...and they've been watching him, and...
And, uh...
It's just a punch/counter-punch, it's just spy versus spy.
I don't know.
I can't imagine their thinking.
LANDESMAN: So I talked to Liam long and hard...
...about what it is to be a man in his position, the king...
Why don't they fire me then?
LANDESMAN: ...who is being challenged,
...who knows in fact...
...that the other side has the ammunition it needs...
...to destroy him but can't...
...ever let him know that it does.
Dean did say something strange.
LANDESMAN: I love this... These are called French overs here,
...this camera position with Felt and Gray.
And, uh, this is just... They're like two colts, you know,
...challenging each other, just knocking heads right here,
...just whispering in each other's ear.
And this is where Felt begins to come apart.
The one moment I allow him in the movie to really...
...dissemble and to question himself,
...and to raise his voice and to question his own security,
...and, um, it all amounts to, um...
It all amounts to an act of desperation, really.
You'll see he meets...
...with a character who's unnamed but who is his...
...level, you know, a guy in his same level of position in the CIA,
...played by the great Eddie Marsan,
...who I've now worked with a couple of times in different movies,
...and one of the great character actors of our time, one of the great faces.
I purposely didn't give this guy a name or position,
...but you can tell from his dialogue that he's in the CIA
...because he says this thing that I said before, which was,
"Presidents come and go, but the FBI and the CIA,"
"...they're the constants, they have to watch out for each other."
"They're not going anywhere,"
"...they're too busy protecting the country."
But he also knows that Felt is the source of those stories,
...because, like Felt, this guy has all the information,
...and knows that who else could it be but Mark Felt.
So, there's this beautiful unsaid moment between them,
...unspoken moment where...
...they both... Where the CIA man,
...which is what he's called in the screenplay,
...tells him, "I know everything."
"I'm not gonna speak about it,"
"I'm not gonna get hit for it,"
"...but I'm also not gonna go down with your bus."
"So if you're going down I'm not going down with you."
The FBI stays.
We are the constants.
I almost forgot.
Time magazine's person of the year is going to be Richard Nixon.
I thought you'd like to know.
Happy holidays.
LANDESMAN: This next scene is really in some ways...
...the nail in his coffin...
...before he decides to make the ultimate...
...last piece of sacrifice to take down Nixon.
This might be my favorite scene in the movie in some ways.
I know we all have our favorite ones, directors have their babies, but...
What I love about this scene is...
...there's two men sitting next to each other...
...in the dark in the car.
And I used very specific lenses in this scene,
...very macro and tight and...
...almost the entire scene plays...
...in these very large close-ups,
...these very tight shots of just their eyes.
And I'm dealing with two actors...
...who really understand how to use their faces,
...and you can hear the dialogue, what's being said.
Gray is basically laying it all out, challenging him one last time.
Felt says practically nothing, but if you watch...
When I move in tight,
...not even here but even closer on their eyes, right here with Gray,
Marton Csokas does something that's really, enormously...
...skillful and subtle, and...
Tell a story with his eyeball,
...you know, in the light in the lens...
...in tight.
I don't know if I was tired of words, I don't know if I was tired of, uh...
Or didn't... You know, the dialogue is strong...
...it's not that... It's not that I didn't trust the dialogue,
I just wanted the story to be told by something other than dialogue here...
...even though it was present.
GRAY: The Germans had the right idea during World War II.
If they went through a town...
LANDESMAN: See the light playing off the eyeball, the glint.
See the pores and the lines in the face.
It's like the geography of their faces is really the, uh...
It's time to clean out the FBI.
LANDESMAN: There's a whole parallel dialogue, really.
You know what that will mean for me.
Remember, they're afraid of you.
LANDESMAN: It's in Felt's silences and Liam's quiet, his...
His not delivering a line, his non response,
...the fact that his eyes betray nothing,
...that says everything to me.
Just give 'em what they want.
The traitor's head on a platter.
(OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING)
(DOOR CLOSES)
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
(OPENS DOOR)
LANDESMAN: This is probably the closest we see...
...except for the very end of the film...
...to Liam really coming apart...
...and Felt having, showing true emotion,
...but, of course, it's behind a closed door.
That's actually his daughter's bedroom, it's significant.
I didn't pull out wide here, because at the end of the day...
...it was too much story to tell, but that is where he is.
And then back into the bureaucracy the habit trail,
...sort of the rats' maze of the FBI.
...what he should do. And, I tell him.
LANDESMAN: Tom is kinetic and strange and bizarre here,
...but I just kinda love it.
I didn't have this scene in the movie for a while...
...and then I went back to it, and realized...
...there's something about Tom's...
...otherworldly performance here against Liam's stillness...
...that just said a lot to me, so I decided to put it back in the film.
Think they'll let you keep your badge?
Huh?
You got a lot of people worried in Washington.
They think you're gonna unwrap everything.
Everything from all the years.
Everything we, you and I, know.
Is that what you want to know, Bill?
This your last little errand?
To help the President sleep at night.
(ELEVATOR OPENS)
I'm just sayin', you open those scabs,
...a lot of things underneath.
Just remember, no one likes informers.
They only remember you as a rat,
...even if you were their...
Even if you were their rat!
(MUSIC PLAYING)
LANDESMAN: This is a moment...
...where Felt is trying to figure out what he can save.
He thinks it's all over.
And the one thing he thinks he can save, of course, is his daughter.
And that phone call he made from his office,
...he had sent an agent out to try and find her,
...just put eyeballs on her, to see and...
I love this scene and I...
I cast this young African-American actor from Atlanta...
...to play this agent.
They don't want to know who he was. This is 1972.
Racial relations were not exactly at an apex in our country,
...and the Bureau was white and male...
...and middle-class,
...and, pretty rough organization.
So I loved the dynamic,
...almost that this kid's the enemy,
...but, of course, he's an FBI agent, he's just undercover.
He's from the, uh,
...the communes, but I love the fact that he's the one who delivers...
...the information about the daughter and the truth of her.
Definitely some people of interest in there.
- Maybe some with the Underground. - But the target?
If you ask me,
...just someone's kid looking for a way home.
LANDESMAN: I love the simplicity of that line,
...and then I love Liam's performance here.
Just a father...
...hearing for the first time that his daughter is safe...
...after three years.
Can't even metabolize how that might feel.
And then the agent steps out,
...and then it's just Tony and Liam alone in this car,
...two men, two friends,
...they're not FBI agents, they're both fathers,
...and, uh, both family men.
Obviously, nothing's expressed or said,
...but everything's understood.
(DOOR OPENS)
(MUSIC PLAYING)
LANDESMAN: So here's his final plan, he has one shot left.
Nixon has gotten away with it,
...he's been re-elected,
...it looks like the FBI investigation's shut down for good.
And so Felt executes the last piece of his last desperate plan,
...his Hail Mary, which is...
...to go back to the man he knows and trusts, Sandy Smith,
...and give him, not a piece of Watergate,
...but actually something else that would force Gray to come apart...
...and reveal the entire plot.
It's really brilliant, very unusual and unexpected.
But what he talks about here with Smith is the underlying principle,
...the operating principle of this film,
...and I feel like almost any film,
...any story about spies, and espionage, and betrayal,
...and politics, and the people who were inside of those machines,
...it's the rhythm.
It's the tap, tap, tapping on the institutions that can...
...destroy an institution by...
...setting the molecules upon themselves,
...so the electrons inside of this superstructure...
...begin to come apart.
What he's doing here is he's admitting...
...a lot of the bad shit the FBI was doing under Hoover.
And again, this wasn't Pat Gray's problem,
Pat Gray wasn't in the FBI then...
...but he knew that Gray would be put under withering questioning...
...in the Senate Confirmation hearing which is gonna come up next.
All this truth.
The truth is hard for you.
LANDESMAN: I love that line, "The truth is hard for you."
These men live double, triple, quadruple lives.
It's hard to keep track of what's true and what's not true.
The FBI illegally, unconstitutionally and reprehensibly...
...bugged and taped...
...and secretly photographed and memorialized...
...every move that those people made.
Them and their wives and their mistresses and homosexual lovers.
- Who did the wiretaps? - Bill Sullivan.
It became a rogue FBI operation.
LANDESMAN: Here Felt is making a distinction...
...between himself and Bill Sullivan,
...you know, he's the good FBI, Sullivan's the bad FBI, I'm sure...
I'm sure that's a little reductionist and a little simple,
...but I think it's basically true.
And, uh... But he's just...
...opening up the entire can of worms and he's just letting it all out.
Yeah, they couldn't count on you.
The White House is packing all its crimes in separate little boxes.
LANDESMAN: This is crucial,
...and it's crucial to understand exactly what's happening...
...now with the Trump administration.
The idea that if you...
If an institution like the White House is committing crimes,
...the way it protects itself...
...is by putting them in little boxes and separating them and trying...
So they don't coalesce and become one giant piece of criminality,
...otherwise it's a pattern that's too easy to detect.
And the Nixon administration was adept at this.
They were terrific at making everything seem discrete and unconnected...
...and keeping people apart.
And, uh, but of course, Felt was able to put it all together...
...and here he is giving Sandy Smith a glimpse into, uh,
...the unity of its efforts.
But then, you already knew that.
SANDY: Gray is ready to fall now.
Watch where it leads.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
LANDESMAN: You know, Pat Gray was really the great tragic figure.
Marton is so good here, he's just...
He was used by the Nixon administration, he was used by Felt,
...and he was the man in the middle and he was used by everybody...
...and then just discarded.
I'm not even sure he understood...
...at the end, until Felt confessed that he was Deep Throat...
...and then he died,
...exactly how he had been manipulated and used,
...an then, of course, when he did figure it out,
...he, uh, he passed away.
It's, um...
It's hard to even, uh,
...understand what that might be, whether he felt his whole life had been...
...for nothing, and just as a tool, really.
It's an awful fate.
SENATOR: ...contains information on alleged wiretaps...
...requested by the White House...
...installed by the FBI.
How do you respond to these charges?
It was before my time, Senator.
What about the assertion in this article...
...that a White House aide slipped Donald Segretti,
...a target of the Bureau's Watergate investigation,
...copies of what the FBI had?
We didn't look into that.
- Why on Earth not? - I'll have to look into that.
SENATOR: Did you know that the White House had your confidential file?
I did. Yes, Senator.
(CAMERA CLICKS)
Let me tell you how that might have happened.
SENATOR: Please do.
GRAY: White House counsel John Dean told me...
...the White House wanted everything the FBI had on Watergate...
...to help with its own investigation.
So Mr. Dean took all those FBI files.
SENATOR: How many Bureau reports are we talking about?
How many reports did you give Mr. Dean?
I believe it was 82.
As the acting director of the FBI, why on Earth would you do that?
- Because I was told to. - SENATOR: By who?
Who would have ordered that?
(CLEARS THROAT)
- The President. - (ALL CHATTERING)
NIXON: One of the most difficult decisions of my presidency,
I accepted the resignations...
LANDESMAN: There's a conflation of time here...
...where the distance in the time between Gray's confirmation hearing...
...and then Dean resigning, and then everything falling apart,
...eventually Nixon resigning, of course, you know,
...it brings up one of the questions that I wrestle with,
...as someone who's made three movies in a row about a true story...
...and the obligation to the truth, the obligation to chronology in time...
...and ultimately the audience,
...which to me is the real arbiter of the success of storytelling...
Um, you have to be able to...
...have an underlying foundation of what's real,
...and to accept it, hold onto it,
...not stray too far from it.
But at the end of the day...
...a film like this,
...a piece of semi-fiction,
...can be spiritually truer in some ways than a documentary...
...because you can tell an emotional story, perhaps,
...and get at an emotional truth that you might not be able to...
...because you don't have the information or the data.
Movies, people go to see movies to have an emotional tether to...
...characters and perhaps even themselves,
...and, you know, in this film,
...you know, his emotional tether, his emotional crescendo is right here.
You know, if this were a documentary...
...this would not be in it.
Um, but he finally, once he succeeded with Nixon and politics,
...was able to go after and find his daughter.
Maika Monroe is this beautiful young actress playing his daughter...
...who photographs just exquisitely and...
There's something very Days of Heaven about this ending.
We shot this at the very end of one of our last days...
...and we were running out of light and we didn't have many takes,
I wasn't lighting it, I wanted to do it naturally and...
Liam and Maika Monroe had to really just get this done.
And, um...
Liam is one of the most efficient actors I've ever known,
...and ever could know of, and he knows exactly what he's gonna do.
And he's a mechanic in that way but by no means robotic and...
It's the first time in the movie that he...
...feels emotion.
His face breaks apart, there's Diane,
...playing this almost Lady MacBethian...
...cold wife who's not really interested...
It's the first time they're meeting their grandson.
You know, in some way's it's this perfect psychological...
...emotional reward...
...for a man who's lived in his head and had to...
...work from his head and his...
And his, uh...
And without his heart...
...for 30 years.
This scene between, uh,
...mother and daughter, Diane and Maika, is...
It's extraordinary, and, uh...
I had this desire,
...whether it's from my own childhood or not,
...for her to change places...
...and forgive her mother and become the mother to some degree...
After the mother confesses to her daughter...
...her crime of, uh,
...intolerance, really.
I asked Maika to do this,
...it wasn't scripted and Diana wasn't expecting it,
...but I asked Maika actually to...
...stand up and go to her mother,
...and, uh,
...almost be her father, take her father's role as, uh,
...someone who could forgive and someone who could give...
...power and get to emotional truth,
...and I told her to just walk up to Diane,
...and, um,
...take her head in your hands...
...and forgive her.
To become the adult.
You know, the mother was so impossibly...
...impacted by her own childhood she was incapable of doing this.
And, uh,
...and Maika goes over and Diane's reaction in the scene is real,
...um, unscripted,
...she wasn't expecting it,
...and, um,
...it's a very beautiful moment for me,
...and very authentically performed...
...and, uh,
...and beautifully shot by Adam,
...and, um, all the way around, everybody did...
...a very understated, simple thing here...
...which is...
What would you do if you were a mother of a young woman you've chased off...
...who came over to tell you it's okay, I understand?
(MUSIC PLAYING)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
MARK: Ooh, look at that big...
(COOING AND LAUGHING)
LANDESMAN: It's Felt's retirement party after all this.
So Nixon is on his way out,
...and he's found his daughter,
...and to some degree it's kind of a fairy tale end...
...and he's at his retirement party, and of course, no one really knows...
...any of what I just told you or any of the movie you just saw and...
They've no idea what he's done,
...and they just think this is a guy who's been there for now 31 years...
...and time to hang it up.
And, um,
...of course, politically, he knew he had to resign,
...he was forced out.
The administration suspected he was behind their destruction.
So, again I used this macro lens,
...very tight close-ups on Felt...
...and you'll see on Audrey,
...to get beyond the, uh...
What they were showing, the room, which was a kind of satisfaction...
...and gratitude.
And of course, you know,
...be it, the truth was much more complex than that.
Felt knew what he'd done,
...so did she.
You can see Liam, just, really just beautifully transmitting...
...the, uh, the ambiguity of the moment for him,
...and then steps out into a crowd...
...of adoring FBI agents.
And, of course, when they learn that he was Deep Throat...
...little more than 30 years later,
...most of those men standing out there clapping for him would despise him.
Not knowing of course what he'd done and sacrificed,
...why he done it.
All they knew is that he betrayed their code.
WOMAN: Congratulations, sir.
NIXON: I have never been a quitter.
To leave office before my term is completed...
...is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.
LANDESMAN: You know, it's not one man who takes down a presidency,
...it's a system, and...
You know, one thing I would say is that in this case the system worked,
...the institutions worked.
The judicial branch, the FBI,
...the fourth estate,
...reporters, journalism,
...all kind of conspired to, you know, obviously,
...not with any intent,
...but they all kind of conspired to do the right thing...
...and the right thing did happen, and...
It actually gives me a lot of pause and a lot of optimism...
...that this democracy, which is deeply flawed,
...is probably the best version of itself.
This scene is crucial.
Four years later, Felt was being...
...indicted for some of those black bag operations...
...he had executed under Hoover...
...and then to find the Weather Underground.
There's Noah Wyle playing a prosecutor...
...who I've got to know well named Stan Pottinger who was...
...working for the Carter administration,
...and, you know, he despised these guys.
He was a left-leaning progressive...
...and he wanted to hang these guys up by their toenails...
...and just really nail them to the stake.
And, um,
Felt does something extraordinary that was never revealed.
And, in fact, I think this film...
...is the first time it's ever been revealed anywhere...
'cause Stan took it, you know, took it...
Through to the end of his career he's working in New York,
...but he never talked to anybody about it,
...never told anybody that this happened but...
Felt was here testifying and you'll see and he had this one moment where he...
...was vulnerable or weak, or older, or just lost track of reality,
...or what he was really doing when he inadvertently confessed...
...to being Deep Throat.
And, um,
I get out of this scene early...
...before he actually answers the question,
...but the truth is...
...that Felt said no.
And Pottinger knew that he was perjuring himself, he could smell it,
...and he gave Felt the chance to take it off the record,
...take the question off the record,
...so he wouldn't have to perjure himself but could protect his identity,
...because Pottinger realizes, Noah Wyle's character realizes...
...that he's actually no longer looking at...
...the devil, at Satan, you know, a man who represents everything he hates...
...but he's actually looking at his hero.
And it's another moment of incredible ambiguity...
...where as humans we can hold two opposing thoughts...
...in our minds at the same time.
It's really the only thing that separates us from being animals,
...is we can hold on to contradiction and accept it,
...and one side of the contradiction...
...doesn't necessarily cancel each other out.
And, uh,
...uh, I think if there's a through-line between the stories I tell...
...and movies I've made, it's that.
Is that no hero is not flawed,
...but no flawed person doesn't have an opportunity or the capability...
...of doing something heroic.
...had to be Deep Throat.
What did you just say?
MARK: I said I was with the White House...
LANDESMAN: And I love that, uh,
...it's a, uh,
...an average citizen of Washington, D.C.
...that asks him the question he's about to ask him,
...not a prosecutor, not a judge,
...not a reporter.
I think, in fact, he might have been a plumber,
...this guy right here in the flowered shirt.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
JUROR: Well, were you?
Was I what?
JUROR: Were you Deep Throat?
LANDESMAN: You know, of course, he was and wasn't.
You know, he was the source of that information,
...he was the reason,
...ultimately, the administration was brought to its heels...
...and dissembled and resigned in disgrace.
But there's a whole system around him,
...so, you know, the answer is both yes and no.
And, um...
But I have to say that at the end of the day,
...you know, heroes, superheroes don't wear tights and capes,
...they, uh,
...they do difficult things like this,
...and they do things often at their own expense...
...and their own peril.
And to me, that's the true meaning of heroism.
You know, the true meaning of philanthropy, of course,
...is building a hospital when you're not putting your name on it.
So the fact of his anonymity for more than 30 years to me is...
...only testimony to, uh,
...to the righteousness of his intent.
And it was a great honor to first write this movie,
...and of course, then make it, and...
Liam, I think, is beautiful in it and, um,
...it's just been an incredible honor to be part of this film...
...and to have brought it to you.
(PIANO MUSIC PLAYING)