•Coomi Kapoor: What did you think of the movie Frost/Nixon? Do you think it was an accurate portrayal of you?

Yes and no. Basically, it was very well done film, Ron Howard has directed Apollo 13 and lots of other films and I think he did it very well. Peter Morgan is a very skilled writer; he wrote the script for The Last King of Scotland and for Helen Mirren in The Queen. When they came to me for permission to do the film, they said that they thought it would be better if I did not have editorial control because then people would think it would be an independent film. That meant there would be some fiction in it and 10-12 per cent in it is fiction. Peter Morgan wanted to portray me as the underdog so as to increase the climax at the end when Nixon made a greater mea culpa. One of the things he did in terms of the underdog bit is that he cut out all of my past history. From the film you may have thought that I had done only two Australian interviews before Nixon, when in fact I had done about 4,000 interviews, won two Emmy awards, and other awards in England and in USA. In that sense, the film wasn’t accurate in terms of my past. There was one fictional thing in the film that I thought was brilliant—that was Nixon’s alleged phone call to me on the night before the Watergate questioning, which is a fantastic bit of writing; it never happened but it is really a great study of Nixon. Overall, I was very happy and the reviews were unanimously good in Britain and in USA.

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