Beau Willimon

0:22Oh, thank you so much. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Your film was amazing. I guess it's kind of your film. Well, I wrote the play Fair Get North eight years ago that the movie was based on, and then I wrote the first few drafts of the screenplay. And when George Decide wanted to direct the film, then he and his writing partner Grant Hestloff took my work and did some work on it. And what you see on screen is a combination of my work in theirs. Yeah, how different was it for you to write for the screen as opposed to the stage? Well, I'd written for the screen before. This is the first thing I've actually gotten up on the screen. And it's definitely a different process. Screen time moves a lot faster than stage time. You're dealing with a lot more characters, a lot more locations. You often have to up the stakes because on stage it's much more of a verbal medium,

1:12and on screen it's much more visual. And that means that people expect more story because it just moves faster. But I saw all of those as opportunities. We were able to maintain the core of story of the play, a story about hubris and desire and ambition, and that remained faithful throughout. So we got to include people like George Clooney as Mike Morris and I think open up the texture of a campaign and really convey that adrenaline rush and accelerated madness that is a campaign in ways that you can never achieve on stage. And that was really exciting. And now you said it was based on the 04 campaign of Howard Dean. I know he didn't have people. I didn't say that. Oh, I've read it. You've read it. So that's not true?

1:57Well, I wouldn't say it's based on it. The story is entirely fictional. I did happen to work for Howard Dean's Presidential Campaign in 04, but I've also worked for Chuck Schumer's 1998 Senate Campaign, Hillary's 2000 Senate Campaign, Bill Bradley's 2000 Presidential Campaign. And I drew from all of those experiences to create the fictional world of Farigee and Ides of March. So none of the characters you see are based on any one particular person, and certainly none of the events are based on specific things that I was stealing from life. What I did is I created characters that were in amalgamation of all the sorts of hundreds of people I met on those various campaigns and then created a story that I felt best, told their story and the sort of experiences that they go through.

2:45Yeah, this is the career now for you. From politics to stage writing to now. Well, no, my political background was not a career ever. It's not where I started and then I moved to writing. I had been a writer since college and went to grad school for writing, and that was my vocation. Whenever I worked on a political campaign, it was because I have a lot of friends in the political world, and if I had time on my hands would say, hey, do you want to come work on this campaign? If it was a candidate I believed in, I would. But it was always more of a hobby or an interest and never a vocation. I wouldn't want a career in politics. I'm happy in the land of make-believe. But I do care about political change, so when I did have opportunities to contribute in my own small way, I would volunteer or work on staff.

3:31Are you glad the film came out now while we're going through this whole Republican debate season? It's interesting because the play came out and we did the first production play in 2008, right during the midst of the Obama McCain race. In fact, we had a production on the night of the election, and I was flabbergasted that anyone actually showed up to see the play. They should have been at home watching the election returns. We were reading off election returns at intermission and after the curtain call, in fact, when we read off that Ohio had went to Obama after the curtain call, the whole theater erupted in spontaneous applause, much louder than there was for the play. But what was interesting is that in that time of extreme optimism and hopefulness,

4:16people were still coming out in droves sold out night after night to see a story. It sheds light on the more cynical and jaded side of politics. The play came out during that time. The movie came out two years later when, of course, much of what was going on in Washington had gone back to business as usual. And I think that the story at the core of both the movie and the play, I would hope is timeless, that it doesn't have to exist in any particular political moment. But obviously, what's going on right now in terms of the Republican primary process and what a slug out that's been, it certainly places the movie in a certain context that feels very poignant.

5:02Yeah. When you say I'm called five questions, five quick questions, one word answers. Oh, wow. Okay. Filmer stage. Stage. Leonard McCartney. Leonard. Who's a rising star in the Democratic Party? Cory Booker. Romney or Gingrich. Gingrich. Really? The Ides of March in one word. Desire. Nice. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Gingrich did not expect that out of here. He's far more entertaining. Yeah. I'll give you that.