No, it’s not that reporter’s story

The first thing writer-director Rod Lurie wants you to know about his new film “Nothing but the Truth” is that it wasn’t inspired by Judith Miller.

In fact, he’s tired of denying that it has to do with the former New York Times reporter based in Washington, D.C., who was jailed for contempt of court in July 2005 for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating a leak naming Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent. (Miller hadn’t written an article revealing Plame but was supposedly in possession of relevant information regarding the leak.)

Why the comparisons?

Because Lurie’s estimated $11.5-million indie movie -- which opens Friday at the Crest in Westwood for an awards-qualifying run and is being distributed by Yari Film Group -- revolves around a Washington, D.C., investigative reporter (Kate Beckinsale) who goes to jail for refusing to give up her source for her story exposing the name of a covert CIA agent.

The stories may be cut from the same cloth, but Lurie insists Miller didn’t influence his creation.

“Kate Beckinsale’s character is absolutely not Judith Miller,” says Lurie in his cozy office in a venerable building on Hollywood Boulevard. (Beckinsale, though, did have lunch with Miller and shadowed reporters at the L.A. Times.)

“I will tell you what person actually inspired her behavior -- Susan McDougal.”

McDougal served time in prison as a result of the Whitewater controversy, when she refused to answer three questions for a grand jury about whether President Bill Clinton had lied during his testimony in the Whitewater trial.

“Susan McDougal really stood her ground in a way I thought was extremely heroic,” Lurie says. “It is as if Susan McDougal was in Judith Miller’s shoes. I was intrigued by a CIA agent [character], but I didn’t know a thing about Valerie Plame. I haven’t read her book. All I know about her is that she’s an attractive woman.”

Truth be told, says Lurie -- a former reporter himself -- he had long wanted to do a story about a journalist going to jail over 1st Amendment rights, adding that he had written an episode on that very subject for his 2005-06 ABC series “Commander in Chief,” starring Geena Davis as America’s first female president.

“It was a show about a journalist who writes a book about Geena Davis’ character and goes to jail because he won’t reveal his source,” Lurie says. The twist was the president didn’t want any journalist serving jail time during her term, so she was going to pardon the writer.

“We were literally filming it -- we had shot two or three scenes -- when I got fired” from the show, he says. “They fired me, and in comes [producer] Steven Bochco. Steven took a flamethrower to every idea that I had had, more or less.” The episode wasn’t completed.

With “Nothing but the Truth,” Lurie revisits the idea in the form of the character Rachel Armstrong, played by Beckinsale.

Armstrong may win a moral victory in the film, but Lurie explains he didn’t want to turn her into a martyr.

As a mother, Armstrong seems cold when she decides to separate herself from her young son by telling her husband not to bring the boy to visit her in prison. And as a journalist, her objectivity is called into question.

“She’s an interesting character because she’s obviously heroic but also replete with flaws,” he says. “Those flaws don’t become apparent until a little bit later [after you’ve seen the film], when you are lying in bed and you think, ‘Wait a second! Did she actually say in the beginning of the film she’s going to bring the administration down? Is that lack of objectivity exactly what a reporter never brings to the table?’

“People look at the end of the film and real questions about her start to pop up -- some positive and some negative. But what she has is a tremendous amount of moral courage.”

The reporter in “Nothing but the Truth” is not the first strong female character Lurie has written, of course; there was “Commander in Chief” as well as 2000’s “The Contender,” his award-winning political drama revolving around a female choice (Joan Allen) for vice president.

Why so many? Lurie says his daughter, Paige, now 16, spurred him on.

“I met Joan Allen at an L.A. Film Critics Awards’ dinner and I said, ‘I want to write a movie for you,’ ” Lurie recalls. “I got inspired and turned on my computer. But I didn’t know what to write.”

Paige, then 6, came to the rescue. “She said, ‘Daddy, how come no women run for president? . . . Maybe one day I can be the president.’ ”

Lurie says he decided right then to start writing movies about women breaking barriers.

“The truth is that when a man has a child and it’s a girl and he doesn’t change as a man, he’s not much of a man,” Lurie says.

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susan.king@latimes.com