Nixon is a
1995 American biographical film directed by
Oliver Stone for
Cinergi Pictures that tells the story of the political and personal life of former
US President Richard Nixon, played by
Anthony Hopkins. The film portrays Nixon as a complex and, in many respects, an admirable person, though deeply flawed. Unlike Stone's earlier film
JFK,
Nixon begins with a disclaimer that the film is "an attempt to understand the truth [...] based on numerous public sources and on an incomplete historical record".
Plot
The film covers all aspects of Nixon's life as a composite of actual events. It depicts his childhood in
Whittier, California, as well as his growth as a young man,
football fan and player, and suitor to his eventual wife,
Pat Ryan. It fully explores most of the important events of his presidency, including his downfall due to abuse of executive power in the
White House.
Nixon's
alcohol dependence, as well as that of his wife, is fully implied in the film, as is the medication addiction he faced during his remaining years in office (Nixon's health problems, including his bout of
phlebitis and
pneumonia during the Watergate crisis, are also shown in the film, and his various medicants are sometimes attributed to these health issues).
The film ends with Nixon's
resignation and famous departure from the lawn of the White House on the helicopter,
Army One. Real life footage of Nixon's state funeral in
Yorba Linda, California, plays out over the extended end credits, and all living presidents at the time,
Gerald Ford,
Jimmy Carter,
Ronald Reagan,
George H. W. Bush and
Bill Clinton, are shown in attendance.
Cast
Stone cast Hopkins based on his performances in
The Remains of the Day and
Shadowlands. Stone on
Anthony Hopkins: "the isolation of Tony is what struck me. The loneliness. I felt that was the quality that always marked Nixon".
When the actor met the director he got the impression that Stone was "one of the great bad boys of American pop culture, and I might be a fool to walk away".
What convinced Hopkins to ultimately take on the role and "impersonate the soul of Nixon were the scenes in the film when he talks about his mother and father. That affected me".
, who is emblematic of "big business" in general. The character may be a reference to
Richard Nixon's meetings with
Clint Murchison, Sr., although he also illuminates Nixon's relationships with
Howard Hughes,
H. L. Hunt and other entrepreneurs.
Production
Origins
Eric Hamburg, former speechwriter and staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, got the idea of a film about Nixon after having dinner with Oliver Stone.
Originally, Oliver Stone had been developing two projects — the musical
Evita and a movie about Panamanian dictator
Manuel Noriega. When they both did not get made, Stone turned his attention to a biopic about Richard Nixon.
The former President's death on
April 22,
1994, was also a key factor in Stone's decision to make a Nixon film. He pitched the film to
Warner Bros., but, according to the director, they saw it, "as a bunch of unattractive older white men sitting around in suits, with a lot of dialogue and not enough action".
In 1993, Hamburg mentioned the idea of a Nixon film to writer Stephen J. Rivele with the concept being that they would incorporate all of the politician's misdeeds, both known and speculative.
Rivele liked the idea and had previously thought about writing a play exploring the same themes. Hamburg encouraged Rivele to write a film instead and with his screenwriting partner, Christopher Wilkinson, they wrote a treatment on November 1993.
They conceived of a concept referred to as "the Beast", which Wilkinson describes as "a headless monster that lurches through postwar history," a metaphor for a system of dark forces that resulted in the assassinations of
John F. Kennedy,
Robert Kennedy, and
Martin Luther King, Jr., the
Vietnam War, and helped Nixon's rise to power and his fall from it as well.
Stone said in an interview that Nixon realizes that "the Beast" "is more powerful than he is. We can't get into it that much, but we hint at it so many times — the military-industrial complex, the forces of money".
In another interview, the director elaborates, "I see the Beast in its essence as a System ... which grinds the individual down ... it's a System of checks and balances that drives itself off: 1) the power of money and markets; 2) State power, Government power; 3) corporate power, which is probably greater than state power; 4) the political process, or election through money, which is therefore in tow to the System; and 5) the media, which mostly protects the status quo and their ownership's interests".
It was this concept that convinced Stone to make
Nixon and he told Hamburg to hire Rivele and Wilkinson. Stone commissioned the first draft of the film's screenplay in the fall of 1993.
Rivele and Wilkinson delivered the first draft of their script on
June 17,
1994, the anniversary of the Watergate break-in.
Stone loved the script but felt that the third act and the ending needed more work.
They wrote another draft and delivered it on August 9th, the 20th anniversary of Nixon's resignation.
Pre-production
Stone immersed himself in research with the help of Hamburg.
With Hamburg and actors Hopkins and James Woods, Stone flew to
Washington, D.C. and interviewed the surviving members of Nixon's inner circle: lawyer
Leonard Garment and Attorney General
Elliot Richardson. He also interviewed
Robert McNamara, a former Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The director also hired
Alexander Butterfield, a key figure in the Watergate scandal who handled the flow of paper to the President, as a consultant to make sure that the Oval Office was realistically depicted
, former deputy White House counsel
John Sears, and
John Dean, who made sure that every aspect of the script was accurate and wrote a few uncredited scenes for the film.
Butterfield also appears in a few scenes as a White House staffer. To research their roles, Powers Boothe, David Hyde Pierce and Paul Sorvino talked to their real-life counterparts, but J.T. Walsh decided not to contact
John Ehrlichman because he had threatened to sue after reading an early version of the script and was not happy with how he was portrayed.
Hopkins watched a lot of documentary footage on Nixon. At night, he would go to sleep with the Nixon footage playing, letting it seep into his subconscious.
Hopkins said, "It's taking in all this information and if you're relaxed enough, it begins to take you over."
Stone originally had a three-picture deal with New Regency Films which included
JFK,
Heaven and Earth, and
Natural Born Killers. After the success of
Killers, Arnon Milchan, head of New Regency, signed Stone for three more motion pictures.
Stone could make any film up to a budget of $42.5 million.
When Stone told Milchan that he wanted to make
Nixon, Milchan, who was not keen on the idea, told the director that he would only give him $35 million, thinking that this would cause Stone to abandon the project.
Stone took the project to Hungarian financier
Andrew Vajna who had co-financing deal with
Disney.
Vajna's company, Cinergi Films, were willing to finance the $38 million film. This angered Milchan who claimed that
Nixon was his film because of his three-picture deal with Stone and he threatened to sue. He withdrew after Stone paid him an undisclosed amount.
Stone was finalizing the film's budget a week before shooting was to begin.
He made a deal with Cinergi and
Disney's
Hollywood Pictures in order to supply the $43 million budget.
To cut costs, Stone leased the White House sets from
Rob Reiner's film,
The American President.
Principal photography
The film began shooting on
May 1,
1995 but there was a week of pre-shooting at the end of April to film scenes that would be used as part of a mock documentary about Nixon's career.
Early on during principal photography, Hopkins was intimidated by the amount of dialogue he had to learn, that was being added and changed all the time
as he recalled, "There were moments when I wanted to get out, when I wanted to just do a nice
Knots Landing or something".
Sorvino told him that his accent was all wrong.
Sorvino claims that he told Hopkins that he thought "there was room for improvement" and that he would be willing to help him.
Woods says that Sorvino told Hopkins that he was "doing the whole thing wrong" and that he was an "expert" who could help him.
Woods recalls that Sorvino took Hopkins to lunch and then he quit that afternoon.
Hopkins told Stone that he wanted to quit the production but the director managed to convince him to stay.
According to the actors, this was all good-natured joking. Woods said, "I'd always tell him how great he was in
Psycho. I'd call him Lady Perkins all the time instead of Sir Anthony Hopkins".
In Spring of 1994,
Time magazine reported that an early draft of the screenplay linked Nixon to the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy.
The facts contained in the script were based on research from various sources, including documents, transcripts and hours of footage from the Nixon White House. Dean said about the film's accuracy: "In the larger picture, it reflected accurately what happened".
Stone addressed the criticism of fictional material in the film, saying, "The material we invented was not done haphazardly or whimsically, it was based on research and interpretation".
John Taylor, head of the Nixon Presidential Library, leaked a copy of the script to
Richard Helms, former Director of the
CIA, who threatened to sue the production.
In response, Stone cut out all scenes with Helms from the theatrical print and claimed that he did for "artistic reasons" only to reinstate this footage on the home video release.
During the post-production phase, Stone had his editors in three different rooms with the scenes from the film revolving from one room to another, "depending on how successful they were".
If one editor wasn't successful with a scene then it went to another. Stone said that it was "the most intense post- I've ever done, even more intense than
JFK" because they were screening the film three times a week, making changes in 48-72 hours, rescreening the film and then making another 48 hours of changes.
Reaction
In its opening weekend,
Nixon grossed a total of $2.2 million in 514 theaters. As of
December 19,
2006, the film has grossed a total of $13.6 million in the United States and Canada, well below its $44 million budget.
The film received generally positive reviews from critics and holds a 75% rating at
Rotten Tomatoes.
[www.rottentomatoes.com/m/nixon/]
Two days before the film was released in theaters, the
Richard Nixon Library and birthplace in
Yorba Linda, California issued a statement on behalf of the Nixon family, calling parts of the film "reprehensible" and that it was designed to "defame and degrade President and Mrs. Nixon's memories in the mind of the American public".
This statement was based on a published copy of the script.
The statement also criticized Stone's depiction of Nixon's private life, that of his childhood, and his part in planning the assassination of
Fidel Castro. Stone responded that his "purpose in making the film,
Nixon was neither malicious nor defamatory", and was an attempt to gain "a fuller understanding of the life and career of Richard Nixon — the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies, and the legacy he left his nation and the world".
's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, wrote a letter to Nixon's daughters saying that Stone had "committed a grave disservice to your family, to the Presidency, and to American history".
Stone does not see his film as the definitive statement on Nixon but as "a basis to start reading, to start investigating on your own".
Some critics took Stone to task for portraying Nixon as an alcoholic, though Stone says that was based on information from books by
Stephen Ambrose,
Fawn Brodie, and
Tom Wicker.
Film critic
Roger Ebert praised the film for how it took "on the resonance of classic tragedy. Tragedy requires the fall of a hero, and one of the achievements of
Nixon is to show that greatness was within his reach".
Ebert also placed the film on his list of the top ten films of the year.
Janet Maslin from
The New York Times praised Anthony Hopkins' performance and "his character's embattled outlook and stiff, hunched body language with amazing skill".
However, Mick LaSalle in the
San Francisco Chronicle, felt that "the problem here isn't accuracy. It's absurdity. Hopkins' exaggerated portrayal of Nixon is the linchpin of a film that in its conception and presentation consistently veers into camp".
Richard Corliss, in his review for
Time, also had a problem with Hopkins' portrayal: "Hopkins, though, is a failure. He finds neither the timber of Nixon's plummy baritone, with its wonderfully false attempts at intimacy, nor the stature of a career climber who, with raw hands, scaled the mountain and was still not high or big enough".
It was nominated for four
Academy Awards for
Best Actor in a Leading Role (Anthony Hopkins),
Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Joan Allen),
Best Music, Original Dramatic Score and
Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
Entertainment Weekly ranked
Nixon #40 on their "50 Best Biopics Ever" list
and one of the 25 "Powerful Political Thrillers".
DVD
A
director's cut was released on
DVD with 28 minutes of previously deleted scenes restored. Much of the added time consists of two scenes: one in which Nixon meets with
Central Intelligence Agency director
Richard Helms (played by
Sam Waterston) and another on
Tricia Nixon's wedding day, where J. Edgar Hoover persuades Nixon to install the taping system in the
Oval Office. The film was re-released on DVD and
Blu-ray disc on
August 19,
2008 with the first
anamorphic widescreen version of the film.
