‘Mark Felt’ Director on How a ‘Heroic, Almost Selfless Task’ Took Down the Presidency (Video)
TIFF 2017: ”I didn’t even know his name. I knew because that of his anonymity and his smallness, I knew it was a great story,“ Peter Landesman says of Deep Throat informant
We know the name “Deep Throat” as the informant that helped take down President Nixon in the wake of Watergate. But with his new film “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” director Peter Landesman hopes you’ll come to know his real name.
“When I heard it was Mark Felt, I hadn’t any idea who he was. I didn’t even know his name. I knew that because of his anonymity and his smallness, it was a great story,” Landesman told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at the Toronto Film Festival. “The fact that someone this small took down the presidency meant that it was a heroic, almost selfless task. And then the anonymity of it for 30 years meant he did it for the right reasons.”
Liam Neeson portrays Felt, an FBI agent who helped reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in 1974. Actor Tony Goldwyn (who plays FBI Intel chief Ed Miller) says we’ve seen this story from Woodward and Bernstein’s perspective and from Nixon’s, but never from Felt’s.
“To see it through the lens of the FBI, I thought was absolutely fascinating and incredibly dramatic, so I wanted to be a part of it,” Goldwyn said.
Landesman has been working on the script for nearly a decade and almost made the film in 2008, all well before the events of the current White House, but the biopics’s themes are still particularly timely.
“The relevance is supernatural, there’s no question. Human behavior is human behavior. There’s always greed, there’s always corruption, and there’s always integrity and heroism. I think those dynamics always exist,” Landesman said. “I was in search of a hero. I think we’re always in search of heroes, and he was a remarkable character.”
12 Hottest TIFF Movies for Sale, From 'Hostiles' to Tonya Harding Drama (Photos)
Though it's not as robust as the annual Sundance Film Festival market or populous as Cannes' Marche du Film, TIFF is a pedigreed springboard for solid indies. Here are this year's hottest films for sale.
"I, Tonya" [UTA / CAA / Miramax] Arguably the hottest title for sale at TIFF 2017, producer-star dynamo Margot Robbie offers up a drama about U.S. Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding and her notorious involvement in the beating of teammate Nancy Kerrigan before the 1994 Olympics. Buyers are dying to see this one.
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"The Children Act" [CAA / FilmNation] Richard Eyre’s drama has an attractive cast in the firebrand Emma Thompson (who wouldn’t buy this movie simply for the joy of watching her promote it?) and Stanley Tucci, reunited after the recent box office smash “Beauty and the Beast.” The film is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s same-named novel, about a British judge asked to intervene when a minor refuses a blood transfusion over his religious beliefs.
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"The Cured" [WME] High-brow horror is hard to do, but a category critics and select audiences adore for delivering chills without the tackier conventions of the genre. “The Cured” would certainly check that box, thanks to a clever and unsettling premise: A portion of the population became zombies but were cured. They suffer extreme judgment in a recovering society for, well, eating other people.
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"Hostiles" [CAA / WME] Christian Bale reunites with his "Out of the Furnace" director Scott Cooper for this gritty Western -- already putting Bale in the Oscar conversation after an earlier festival debut. Rosamund Pike, Ben Foster and Jesse Plemmons co-star.
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"Submergence" [UTA] Perhaps the dreamiest trio at TIFF, auteur Wim Wenders will offer up a romance between Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy. The former plays a deep-sea researcher, the latter a water engineer, attempting to connect across continents and oceans while a civil war rages.
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"Mom and Dad" [CAA / XYZ] Giving a fabulous middle finger to helicopter parents, Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair star in writer-director Brian Taylor's super-dark comedy about a 24-hour hysteria that sees parents attempt violence against their own children.
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"Papillon" [CAA] Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek star in a remake of the 1973 thriller that starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman -- where two men plot an escape from a prison island.
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"Three Christs" [CAA / Highland Film Group] Jon Avnet sets about the ambitious task of creating both a black comedy and a film that gets mental illness right. Richard Gere stars as a doctor treating three paranoid schizophrenics (Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins, Bradley Whitford) who all believe they are Jesus Christ.
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"My Days of Mercy" [UTA / WME] This politically charged gay love story pits Kate Mara and Ellen Page against each other on two sides of a capital punishment debate. It also brings them together romantically. Trivia: The official TIFF festival guide labels Page a "powerhouse Canadian," which just makes us smile.
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"Eating Animals" [CAA] Natalie Portman produces this well-received doc about the horrors of meat consumption based on a memoir by Jonathan Safran Foer.
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"Marrowbone" [CAA / Lionsgate] Screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez makes his directorial debut in a buzzy, supernatural thriller about four children orphaned by the loss of their mother. The lost brood take refuge in an abandoned house only to find sinister forces lurking there.
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"Woman Walks Ahead" [CAA] Jessica Chastain and Michael Greyeyes lead this substantive drama about New York artist Catherine Weldon, who became the trusted confidante of legendary Sioux chief Sitting Bull.
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Toronto film market has awards bait, high-brow horror and sweaty Charlie Hunnam
Though it's not as robust as the annual Sundance Film Festival market or populous as Cannes' Marche du Film, TIFF is a pedigreed springboard for solid indies. Here are this year's hottest films for sale.
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