November
29
Oscar Watch: Frost/Nixon's Morgan and Howard
As Frost/Nixon played well to the Academy crowd last week, producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard have started their award season rounds.
Here's their chat with Peter Bart both in print and on Shootout:
As Patrick Goldstein rightly points out, Frost/Nixon is first and foremost the creation of writer Peter Morgan, who adapted his own play. Morgan tells Goldstein why he's attracted to these power duels between younger and older, more powerful figures--as in The Queen and The Last King of Scotland. Morgan is well on his way to his second Oscar nomination.
At the Frost/Nixon premiere, we asked Morgan if he plans to complete the trilogy begun by The Deal (Tony Blair vs. Gordon Brown) and continued by The Queen (Blair vs. Queen Elizabeth). Next he was supposed to write The Special Relationship (Blair vs. George W. Bush). But he's writing about Blair and Bill Clinton, Morgan says. Michael Sheen, who plays David Frost to Frank Langella's Nixon both on stage and screen, is set to return as Blair. In the meantime Sheen stars in Morgan's very British story about a famed soccer coach in The Damned United, directed by Tom Hooper (John Adams). UPDATE: Morgan is also writing the thriller Hereafter for DreamWorks, with Clint Eastwood in talks to direct.
At the Frost/Nixon premiere after-party, Howard was in good spirits. Not only is he in the Oscar hunt for this movie (along with Morgan and Langella), but he's pleased with how the sequel turned out to The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, which he recently screened for Sony. He admits that he had more freedom on Angels and Demons, and was less constrained by the religious material that had to be handled so somberly on the first one. Hanks could have more attitude. This one is more of a rollicking fun adventure, Howard says.
Here's the Angels and Demons trailer:
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