Movies

Spielberg draws parallels between 'The Post' & news in the age of Trump

Tom Hanks! Meryl Streep! Steven Spielberg! Now together for the first time! Tymon Smith went to New York to ask them about their new film about Katharine Graham, The Washington Post and spilling government secrets

21 January 2018 - 00:00 By tymon smith
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Behind the scenes of 'The Post'. Steven Spielberg works with Tom Hanks as Meryl Streep looks on from the side.
Behind the scenes of 'The Post'. Steven Spielberg works with Tom Hanks as Meryl Streep looks on from the side.
Image: Supplied

As I make my way through the snow on a Saturday morning towards the Mandarin Oriental hotel, it suddenly hits me that I'm actually here, in New York, walking past Central Park and Trump Plaza on my way to interview Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.

I've spent the morning doing research on their new film The Post, the story of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, the paper's publisher Katharine Graham and their fight to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the explosive revelations about the futility of the Vietnam War made by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

I'm nervously trying to remember what I hope will be the best questions anyone has ever asked as I get into the lift headed for the 53rd floor. Three people get in with me and begin a conversation about the much improved new buffet at the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, just a few blocks away.

I keep my head down but when I raise my eyes and look to see who's singing buffet praises I do as slight a double take as I can manage - it's Hugh Jackman, on his way to the 51st floor. Jackman is of course a huge star but in the hierarchy of Hollywood, he's still two floors lower than Spielberg. I pretend not to have noticed who he is as he and his companions leave the lift. I make a mental note to try the buffet at the Rainbow Room.

On the 53rd floor while helping myself to the Mandarin's breakfast buffet selection I look out the window and marvel at the snow falling down on Trump's building below. It seems too perfectly ironic that interviews for a film about the struggles of the media to fight back against an antagonistic government 46 years ago, should be held in spitting distance of a building owned by a president who revels in dismissing established and reputable news agencies as "fake news".

This is a junket for journalists from foreign countries and as they begin to arrive the hyper-efficient women in charge get down to the business of dispatching us with military precision - placing us "on deck" for the respective interviewees and communicating with each other through their walkie-talkie headsets.

Five minutes later I'm being introduced to Streep who plays Katharine Graham in the film. Graham was a remarkable woman, raised in Washington DC high society, the daughter of the family who owned the newspaper. She married Philip Graham, a clerk to a Supreme Court justice, who became publisher of the newspaper before he killed himself with a shotgun in 1963. Katharine, who had never been a journalist, was left to take the reins of a Fortune 500 media conglomerate in what was very much an all boys club. Her memoir, Personal History, has been described as one of the greatest autobiographies ever written and won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. She died in 2001 at the age of 84.

WATCH | The trailer for The Post

It seems apt that for Streep's first film with Spielberg, the three-time Oscar-winner - arguably one of the greatest actors of her generation - should choose to play the part of an equally formidable American woman. However, Streep admits that she hadn't read Graham's memoir before she was approached to do the film.

But her friend Nora Ephron, "one of the smartest people I knew", had often told her "Meryl, this is the one autobiography you have to read because it's the best book I've ever read."

"[Ephron] wasn't given to hyperbole and when I finally read it I saw why, because it's such a layered look at a particular time and it's very honest but it's also just beautifully written."

Streep pauses for a moment. "Not only did [Graham] run a Fortune 500 company ... she absolutely felt unable to do the job and unable to fulfil it. She was a mother of four who had stayed at home until this moment was delivered to her. So I thought it was an amazing sort of look at a moment and a time when women were just beginning to move out of the home and into the world and the public sphere and she was emblematic of that change."

The Post, written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, is a newspaper drama focused not on reporters but on management. It's very much the story of Graham, insecure and struggling to make herself heard in a man's world, taking a stand and doing the right thing in the face of enormous pressures from her Washington insider friends, the Nixon government and her shareholders.

It's that fight within Graham that attracted Streep to the film. "Even if you're born into great privilege, you're a victim of that particular privilege, and how you break out of the mould into which you're born and the context of your times, and how you stay alive to the possibilities of what that might be, really interested me."

As the signal is given that our three minutes are nearly up, Streep reflects: "You know the saying, some people are born great, some have greatness thrust upon them and some achieve greatness? She did all three." And with that our time is up and I'm off to "wait on deck" for Spielberg.

Spielberg is a short man, bearded, smiling, wrapped in a scarf which covers his distinctly festive sweater. I ask him whether the timeliness of the story was a factor in his decision to take time off from his other massive project, Ready Player One, and turn The Post from script to finished project in a matter of a few months.

The added urgency of media and journalism today being attacked and labelled fake all the time is straight out of the history of Richard Nixon
Steven Spielberg on the parallels between 'The Post' and news in the age of Trump

It wasn't the timeliness "but the timelessness of [the story of] a woman coming into her own", he replies, adding: "The added urgency of media and journalism today being attacked and labelled fake all the time is straight out of the history of Richard Nixon."

Any film about The Washington Post and the Nixon administration has to work in the shadow of Alan J. Pakula's 1976 account of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's investigation into Watergate, All the President's Men. However, while that film included Bradlee (played with memorable gruffness by Jason Robards), Spielberg points out that "Kathy Graham is hardly mentioned... and I was very happy that she got her day in the court of public opinion through this movie."

While this is the fifth film that the director has worked on with Hanks, it's the first time he's worked with Streep and the first time that she and Hanks have appeared together. "The most interesting part of making this movie was watching Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep... go to town and just act together. I would sit back watching the monitor and watching them and saying [to myself], 'What a lucky guy I am. This is happening on my watch in my movie today.'"

WATCH | Sunday Time's Tymon Smith chats about The Post with Streep, Hanks and Spielberg

The Sunday Times had an exclusive interview with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks who star in the new film “The Post”, as well as its director, Steven Spielberg. The film will be in cinemas January 26 2018.

A few minutes later in another room and Hanks, smiling, is congratulating me on getting "the black-on-blue memo. Excellent. It's become my uniform." I ask him how it felt to play Bradlee, whom he knew, in the light of the previous performance of his late friend Jason Robards. "It was petrifying. It was horrifying," says Hanks with a cheeky grin.

Robards's performance "was a degree of perfect, perfect casting", Hanks says, but he knew his own interpretation "couldn't have anything to do with Jason and I could only focus on a version of Ben that was going to sort of match my countenance".

As for working with Streep, Hanks admits: "We had five scenes together, one of them's not in the final film, but the four that are in the film - I lost sleep the night before we were going to shoot those scenes." He needn't have worried though. "Meryl Streep does it just like anybody else... It's all the same sort of hurly-burly in order to land on what we're going to put on film but, at the same time, she does it like nobody else on earth... she's Meryl Streep for God's sake."

That's the end of my 10 minutes of face-to-faces with fame and so I take the lift back down to the real world with its snow, tourists, ostentatious Trump buildings and fake news headlines howling about the president's latest tweets. As Spielberg pointed out, perhaps there's something slightly mystical in the fact that "the pendulum has swung from 1971 - seven, one - to 2017 - one, seven - which made me feel that we needed to tell the story right now".

'The Post' opens in cinemas on Friday January 26.


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