My name's Gary Hart and I'm running for President.
How much is the public entitled to know about a politician’s personal life?
And, ultimately, who gets to decide?
These are the questions at the heart of the new film, The Front Runner.
The film is based on the true story
of Senator Gary Hart’s run for the 1988 democratic presidential nomination,
a campaign that derailed after The Miami Herald reported allegations
that Hart was having an affair with an model Donna Rice.
Directed by Jason Reitman,
who co-wrote the screenplay with reporter Matt Bai
and former political operative Jay Carson,
the film tells the story of Harts doomed campaign through the eyes of his family, campaign aides,
and a press corps wrestling with the idea of what is newsworthy.
Senator, I wanna ask you some questions about the woman in your townhouse.
Can you tell us how you know her?
You can't be serious, no one is staying in my home, there's no need for that.
I am serious sir.
I couldn't quite believe there was this moment in our recent history
when the presumed next President of the United States
wound up in an alleyway, middle of the night, behind his home with some other journalists
no one knew what to do, because no one had ever been there before.
I mean it just sounded like a movie, a thriller.
Why are we standing in an alley on a Saturday night?
I mean, don't you think you owe it to use to be forthcoming.
Owe you?
You're denying what we've seen with our own eyes!
The only thing that I deny is the idea that somehow you have the right to ask me these things.
You're running for President!
I'm aware of that, Tom, it's in the papers.
Well you have a responsibility!
I know full well what my responsibilities are, do you know yours?
It had all this connective tissue with today,
all of these questions about our public lives versus our private lives,
gender politics, our relationship with journalism
and what we want to know about our potential leaders,
what flaws we're willing to put up with in our leaders.
And there's something about this moment in 1987
where we suddenly showed a very deep interest in Gary Hart
not only as a politician, not in the way of someone with ideas
but someone as a flawed human being who had made a mistake.
We wanted to know more about that mistake.
We've come to where we live
in a culture that kind of revolves around shame in an interesting way.
And if you are someone who experiences shame, you drop out of the race.
But if you are someone who doesn't experience shame,
not only do you stay in, but you thrive, so-
You're drawn into the process!
You're drawn into the process yeah.
So it is a process that really supports the shameless.
But in this story, we don't have good guys and bad guys
we're not placing blame on any of the people in there
we're trying to show human beings that are placed into difficult choices
and are doing the best they can in those circumstances that no one had ever faced before.
And so we literally tried to show the journalists as humans, the candidate as human,
the operatives as human.
I got a hundred kids unpacking boxes in Denver right now
because we told them you would do what it takes to win this thing,
I told them, people are sacrificing for you!
And I'm not sacrificing, what, should I sacrifice my privacy, Bill, my self respect?
And it won't just be me that get's dragged down,
none of those kids you're talking about will work another campaign
where some candidate doesn't have to account for who comes and goes to their bedroom
and that is just the beginning.
Okay, okay but we're not, we're not talking about that right now-
I am talking about that!
We're talking about how you get through today
without pissing away everything we've all worked for on this campaign.
This campaign is about the future, not rumors, not sleaze
and I care about the sanctity of this process whether you do or do not!
Between the two of us we spent over 40 years in politics
and a broken system broke us.
And so, you know, we came to this, this process has been somewhat cathartic
and I feel a good bit of catharsis every time I watch the movie,
I've seen it over a dozen times now.
Because, you know, we're exploring, we're exploring some of the story
of how it got so messed up.
It's funny, 'cause I have a similar experience when I watch it I think
'could that be me, could I be in the alley, could I be where Tom Fiedler is?
could I do, what would I have said in that Post meeting'
And I never find a really satisfactory answer to that.
The answer is never 'of course not, I would never do that.'
And that's not realistic and so you're always, to me,
It's, you can watch it differently and come away with a different perspective every time.
Yeah, I see the operatives doing stuff that I used to do and think
'hell that's no big deal.'
And I see it on the screen and I go 'ooh that looks really, that looks really unattractive.
I can't believe I used to do that every day.'
Reitman's earlier work also resisted passing judgement on his characters.
In an interview about his critically acclaimed 2007 film Juno,
which tackles teenage pregnancy,
Reitman said "I'm not really pro choice, I'm not really pro life
I'm libertarian and I think people should make decisions for themselves."
In his 2005 film, Thank You for Smoking,
which delves into the alliance between politicians and big business,
Reitman doesn't condemn cigarette use, as he told the Arizona Republic at the time
"... as a libertarian I don't like government control.
People should be left to their own devices."
I mean you've self described in the past as sort of a libertarian with a heart.
With that sort of world view,
I wonder what kind of discussions you guys had about this
when you're hashing out the script and story.
I mean, I'm like anyone, I look around and wonder how the hell we got here.
The conversation is so shrill, you go on twitter and you just see people tearing each other apart
so I'm, I'm desperately in search of a reasonable conversation.
Yeah I think our discussion as we are all writing in this sort of iterative process
it was never about, it was never an argument over the animating questions or how we felt
it was more, it was more 'is that real? is that authentic?
is that the way it would really be? you know, and is it complex?
The complicated part about making a movie in 2018
is making sure that everyone has an access point to the story.
Because, you know, it's not as much a movie about Gary Hart
as much as it is a movie about a group of people trying to understand Gary Hart, you know.
And the first half of the film specifically, cinematically follows over a dozen people
at the Washington Post, at the Herald, at the campaign staff, in his family.
Men, women, young, old, veterans, newcomers,
each trying to understand an enigma of a human being.
Who is not self aware of himself and we kind of knew that
alright, each one of these characters that we're following is gonna give us an access point in
and sometimes we have to stretch that a little, you know,
like Ann Devroy, you know an editor at the Washington Post,
we gave her more language from 2018 when it comes to the women's movement
because that is part of this conversation
and at that point, while it was important for us to be accurate to 1987
it is more important for people now to be able to watch this film
and feel as though they hear that voice within the argument
and they kind of watch it ping pong off the other voices within the film.
This isn't a movie I think people should or will walk out of thinking 'now I've got the answer.'
But it is hopefully a movie where people walk out saying and we've seen this
with some of the, you know, initial screenings
is people walk out saying 'I think he was wrong. I think he was right.'
You know, I mean you know those are great experiences,
we've all had the experience of leaving with your, you know,
you're wife or your friend and you're in the car arguing about what the movie was really about,
who was at fault, what the decisions made that were critical.
I think that's what we're going for here is to let people think for themselves.