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.

•Kunal Pradhan: Was Nixon as strong an adversary as he is made out to be and did you really have to get him to admit his involvement in Watergate?

The actual clash on Watergate was over two days, long not one day as shown in the film. On the first day, as Nixon said, it was a prosecution and defence kind of situation: I was the prosecution and he was the defence. He also said he regarded himself as under oath, as though he was in court. His aides had said we could talk about Vietnam or Cambodia, about foreign policy, but Watergate was too personal. So on the first day he was absolutely defensive.He would not admit anything, he would not even admit mistakes. That was a disaster for him because I knew the Watergate tapes (which revealed Nixon’s role in the cover-up of the break into the Democratic Party offices in Watergate building) better than he did. He needed to come back from that. By the second day, he had that haunted look he had during the actual Watergate crisis. He was late by 17 minutes. I don’t know whether it was he who had relived Watergate between the two days or whether it was his staff who had finally dared to talk to him about it, but he came prepared to admit something. I pushed and pushed; eventually, he did admit to mistakes. Then, I asked him if he would go further than admit mistakes. He asked me how. It was a heart-stopping moment because I sensed he was more vulnerable then he’d ever be again in his life. So, I told him there were three things he had to say: there was wrongdoing on his part that verged on criminality, that he did not maintain his oath of office and that he had put the American people through two years of needless pain. I said he should apologise for that. I told him that this would be difficult for anyone but if he didn’t do it, he would regret it for the rest of his life.

And then for the remaining 20 minutes, he addressed those three points and ended up saying that he had let down the American people, that he had to live with that burden for the rest of his life, etc. By the end of it we were both drained but he had gone so far that his people, my people—everyone—applauded us both. It was very dramatic and exhausting, but incredibly worth doing.

•Monojit Majumdar: Did you expect him to emerge from the interviews in some way rehabilitated?

I think he had hoped that it would exonerate him in some way and of course it didn’t. If you had asked Nixon three months after the interviews whether he regretted having done them, he would have said, yes I do—because he had admitted so much more than he had planned to admit. On the other hand, it was a catharsis for the American people: they had to see Nixon account for himself. Later he may have thought that I dispelled some black clouds over him; he might have thought there was a long-term advantage to having faced his issues in the interviews.

•Charmy Harikrishnan: Did Nixon begin by demanding $600,000 as he did in the film?

No, I don’t think he demanded it, his people did. He had just got $2.3 million for his memoirs, so this was much less. What’s important is that Nixon had no editorial control over the interviews. He couldn’t see the edited programmes until they were broadcast.

•Raj Kamal Jha: Is there something like a David Frost school of interviewing and would there be four-five dos and don’ts that you still go by?

Yes, I think there are: first of all, do your homework. The more you know about something, the more freedom you have to go with whatever subject comes up. Preparation doesn’t shackle you; quite the reverse, it liberates you to go with something that nobody had thought would come up. The second thing is to engage the person personally, establish a relationship with the person. It is something mutual, not necessarily mutual respect, it could be mutual caginess, but you establish a relationship because the person you are interviewing wants to convince you of the rightness of his or her position. There is also the question of body language—you need to take control of the interview physically. You don’t want to be a long way away from the person you interview, you want to be close. Those would be three key things in the David Frost guide to interviewing. The fourth thing is that you need to have been born with an insatiable sense of curiosity.

•Shailaja Bajpai: Do you consider the Nixon interviews the highest point in your career? Can you rate three other interviews that are equally important in terms of impact?

I suppose the Frost-Nixon interviews were a landmark. There are two or three which are equally important. There was an interview I did with General N Schwarzkopf immediately after the first Gulf War when there was a controversy over the fact that President George Bush had stopped American troops on the road to Basra. There was a lot of discussion on whether he should have gone on to Baghdad—his son has since proved that it might not have been a particularly good idea to go on to Baghdad—and Schwarzkopf in the interview with me said that he had recommended the Americans continue on to Basra a day before George Bush made the decision not to go forward. We put out a transcript on a Tuesday night and one newspaper on Wednesday had a headline saying Schwarzkopf disagreed with the President, hyped the thing. That morning Cheney, then Secretary of Defence, attacked Schwarzkopf. People called Schawrzkopf a loose canon, They went berserk.

On Thursday morning, this reaction resulted in Bush ringing up Schwarzkopf to say he had seen the interview and thought it was excellent. That was headline news on Friday. Later the same day, Schwarzkopf apologised to Bush for embarrassing him and that made the headlines on Saturday morning. So we had made the headlines for four consecutive days!

Another important interview was the one with Cardinal Heenan, the head of Roman Catholics in Britain. In 1967, the Pope brought out his new pronouncement on a birth control pill. The Pope said the pill was still forbidden. I spoke to Cardinal Heenan and he said that while it was very important to obey the Pope, personal conscience was the final arbiter. I asked him if a young couple went to him for confession and said they had examined their conscience and they had decided that they were going to continue using the pill, what would he have said to them? He replied, ‘I would say, ‘God bless you’ and not refuse them the sacraments’. In that one minute, he held the Roman Catholic Church together.

•Kunal Pradhan: What has brought you to India?

We have been putting together for Al-Jazeera English, a weekly show which is called Frost Over the World. We have been doing a programme about India and the elections and a bit about India in general. The programme is basically about the elections. For people overseas like me, it is so impressive. I actually find it genuinely inspiring. It is a stunning example of democracy in action and I congratulate you. I want to come back and do some longer interviews for this programme.

•Seema Chishti: You have interviewed presidents and people in important positions. Is there a trade-off between access and doing a tough interview?

No, I don’t think there is. If you interview somebody many times you do get to know them—it would be absurd if you didn’t. I interviewed Tony Blair while he was Prime Minister 30 times. Interviews last at least half-an-hour so you do get to know your guests, but that doesn’t inhibit you. In fact, it almost helps because you know each other well, so there isn’t any awkwardness. But I often have to remind people before an interview that it is professional engagement and whatever they say will be heard by journalists, the audience, etc. I am often the devil’s advocate. If the interviewee likes his interviewer and thinks that the interviewer is fair—even Nixon described the interviews as tough but fair—it makes for a good interview. Since you know each other quite well, the interviewee does not expect tough questions but your knowledge of the person helps to get the full facts. Sometimes the interviewee forgets the professional nature of the engagement and will say things he might not have wanted to say in public. Some of them answer the question and then add, ‘Well, David, just between you and I,’ in front of an audience of 400 people!

•Neha Sinha: Indians can’t watch Al-Jazeera English. In India and Pakistan we can’t watch each other’s news channels. What do you think it would mean if we were allowed to watch news from around the world?

You have a vigorous media here; Al-Jazeera English brings a unique sort of South-oriented international view of the world and adds tremendously to the panoply of views. That can be really valuable and in terms of changing things—TV news can change things by ventilating the truth. The more the merrier—that’s my feeling.

•Aanchal Bansal: What is it like working with Al-Jazeera after having been a brand at BBC for so long?

The reason I was excited by Al-Jazeera was that it was going to be a channel with a new South-oriented point of view. It is part of the same group as Al-Jazeera Arabic, but has no links besides that, so there are no Arabic sub-titles, etc. When you watch Al-Jazeera you are getting an international channel. There are over 50 nationalities working at Al-Jazeera English, which is good. We have 1,200 people and 69 bureaus around the world.

For me the great thing is that it is doing something differently, in the sense that it had started out in 50 countries, now it is there in about 100. It started with 80 million households, now it has gone to 150 million households. And it is growing. The media in Britain and America, oddly enough, don’t cover South America or Africa very well. We cover these parts of the world which are otherwise ignored.

(Transcribed by Debesh Banerjee)