More genial collaborators than Frost/Nixon

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By Kelly Jane Torrance

Ron Howard and Peter Morgan might seem to be unlikely collaborators. Mr. Howard, 54, is an all-American icon whose boyish face isn't all that different from the one that graced television screens as Opie in "The Andy Griffith Show" and Richie on "Happy Days." He's better known now, though, as the director of blockbuster films such as "The Da Vinci Code" and "A Beautiful Mind."

Mr. Morgan, 45, is an English screenwriter best known as the chronicler of recent British history in serious films including "The Queen" and "The Deal."

Interviewing them together in a District hotel suite earlier this month, though, one finds them to be two of the most genial collaborators in Hollywood, a pair who can't stop complimenting each other and completing each other's sentences.

"Now we're on the road together like Tweedledee and Tweedledum," Mr. Morgan says, laughing, at one point.

Perhaps those warm feelings are the result of a job well done.

"Frost/Nixon," which Mr. Morgan adapted from his successful stage play, opens in theaters amidst talk it's almost certain to get a best-picture nomination at next year's Oscars. The film follows Mr. Morgan's familiar formula of dramatizing real-life events in such an imaginative and clever way that they're engrossing even to those who know the story, which this time is the famous television interviews David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon that contained a kinda-sorta admission of guilt for the Watergate scandal.

A bevy of big-name directors reportedly were interested in filming the play - Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, George Clooney, Sam Mendes. Mr. Morgan chose Mr. Howard not just because the director committed to filming it right away, something that doesn't often happen in Hollywood.

"First and foremost, I really like his films," Mr. Morgan says. "And in particular, he'd managed to do what I really hoped would happen with this film, take what's apparently adult material and make it reach a really broad audience."

Second, he wanted an American. "As an Englishman, writing about Richard Nixon was already a terrible bit of trespassing," he confesses. "This material could easily descend into partisan attack job or satire. I didn't want it to be either of those."

After securing the highly coveted job, though, the Oscar-winning director was nervous about taking it on. "The frightening thing was that it's so successful onstage that I was initially a little bit intimidated," he says. "Peter's a big-shot screenwriter. All of us with independent companies are trying to work with Peter."

The funny thing is, Mr. Morgan himself was too intimidated to write the play for the longest time. He first had the idea in 1993. "I had a not unsuccessful career in British television, but really, having confidence as a writer didn't happen until I worked with Stephen Frears," he says.

The fact that the "High Fidelity" director wanted to make "The Deal" for British television with next to no pay meant a lot to him. It also led to "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland" and a new genre in which he says people felt he had found his voice. Making a name with those films also gave him the "unparalleled access" he needed to write "Frost/Nixon."

"This time, the access I've had has been breathtaking," he says of his current project, a film about the special relationship between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. "I feel it'd be a sin, if there is such a thing, to decline an opening like this."

Mr. Morgan has virtually created a new genre - the dramatization of history almost before it's history - and he says this highly political work might have come about for a very personal reason. "I can't bear introspection, and I can't bear thinking about what makes me connect with these things," he says before revealing what seems to be the result of long introspection. "A lot of these dramas are connected with 1972, which is the year my father died."

He remembers talking to his father, for example, about Idi Amin, Richard Nixon and Lord Longford, about whom he wrote an HBO film. His father also knew Mr. Frost. "In some way, if I'm writing about material he understood in some shape or form, I'm connecting with him," Mr. Morgan says.

Still, both Mr. Morgan and Mr. Howard answer an immediate resounding "Yes" when asked if it's nerve-racking making films about people who are still alive. (Mr. Howard directed the real-life dramas "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind.") "I always feel badly for them," says Mr. Howard, who adds he is glad his life isn't dramatic enough to be the basis of such a film.

Observers of the child-star-turned-adult-Oscar-winning-director might disagree with that self-assessment.