Anatomy of a face-off

They eyed each other like boxers at a weigh-in. Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) peeked through the curtains of the Western White House to size up his interviewer. David Frost (Michael Sheen) walked up to Nixon, cautiously appraising the former president before they battled in their landmark televised interviews.

Ron Howard may already have made a big fisticuffs film -- 2005’s “Cinderella Man” -- but the boxing metaphors abound in Dec. 5’s “Frost/Nixon,” the director’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s celebrated play about the 1977 conversations between the British talk show host and the exiled president.

In Howard and Morgan’s telling, Nixon and Frost both have their corner men: advisors to prepare them for and coach them through the contentious interviews. Nixon says it will be a “no-holds-barred” fight and describes the showdown as a “duel.” Frost agrees. “Only one of us can win,” he says. The only thing missing is a ring announcer.

“There’s a connection between these two. They don’t hate each other. But they have to beat each other,” Howard said during a break in “Frost/Nixon’s” filming in September 2007, when the production enjoyed unprecedented access to Nixon’s former coastal beachfront hideaway, also known as Casa Pacifica, in San Clemente. “And that’s what gives it its dramatic shape.”

When “Frost/Nixon” opened on the London stage in September 2006, it was lauded by critics and revered by theater patrons. Loosely adapted from Frost’s memoir “Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews,” screenwriter Morgan’s (“The Queen”) play split its time between the actual interviews -- in which Nixon infamously declared himself above the law -- and the personal and professional wagers staked in staging them.

Both men were looking for redemption. Frost, a former satirist who had once been an esteemed journalist, saw his career floundering; where he formerly chatted up prime ministers, Frost was reduced to low-rent reality programs including “David Frost Presents the International Guinness Book of World Records.”

Frost was losing his American and Australian television shows and had to come up with the money ($2 million) for the Nixon interviews and had to find his own advertisers and syndicate the talks to television stations.

Nixon, of course, had lost far more. After his post-Watergate resignation in 1974, he fled the White House by helicopter, settling in San Clemente seclusion. President Ford had pardoned him, leaving Nixon to begin the hard work of rehabilitating his ruined image.

As Morgan’s play held, both men saw in the other a way to get back into the ring. While dismissed by some in the American media as a celebrity hack stooping to checkbook journalism, Frost did get the forever-dissembling Nixon to make a startling admission. Specifically, Nixon said to Frost on doing something illicit, “When the president does it . . . that means that it is not illegal.”

In a way, the debates -- and, by extension, the play -- were Nixon’s trial.

Hollywood, not surprisingly, took notice of the London theatrical phenomenon, and Howard immediately traveled across the Atlantic to see what the fuss was about. As soon as he left London’s Donmar Warehouse theater, Howard called producing partner Brian Grazer to say he wanted to make “Frost/Nixon” his next movie.

Before long, he was in San Clemente with his cameras.

Inspiration via location

Filmmakers are forever fabricating historical reality through money-saving cheats: building the Afghan refugee camps for “Charlie Wilson’s War” not far from Los Angeles, shooting “There Will Be Blood’s” California oil fields in Texas.

Howard saw things differently when he began “Frost/Nixon.”

When the “Beautiful Mind” director had a chance to film at the Western White House, Howard was determined to get there, even if it meant overhauling his production budget to afford it.

The current owners of Nixon’s former beachfront estate say no movie had ever filmed there. “We had to jump through many, many hoops to get in here,” says “Frost/Nixon” production designer Michael Corenblith. Once Howard’s team entered the gated compound, though, the verisimilitude seemed worth the trouble.

When Sheen’s Frost and Langella’s Nixon greeted each other during filming last year, they walked across the same Mexican tiles the real men trod upon more than 30 years earlier. And when Langella steered Sheen into Nixon’s former study, it was the identical room in which the president negotiated with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev during the Cold War.

The attention to detail didn’t stop in San Clemente. “Frost/Nixon” also filmed in the Monarch Bay home where the more than 20 hours of conversation between the TV interviewer and the president were actually conducted.

“That was where I first got the frisson of being in the same place,” says Sheen, who along with Langella created the “Frost/Nixon” roles on a London stage, later reprising them in New York. “Playing Frost had been a part of my life for a year and a half, and I had never seen” the place where the interviews were held, he says.

For all the authenticity, though, the “Frost/Nixon” movie is much like the “Frost/Nixon” play: a speculative reinterpretation of an actual event, slices of real dialogue mixed with invented conversations, all aimed at unearthing larger ideas about power, vanity, reputation -- and truth.

Even though a politician sits at the center of the story, “Frost/Nixon” is less interested in government than psychology.

“These are two lone wolves,” Howard says of Frost and Nixon. “It’s this crucial moment in both of these characters’ lives -- and it’s a very revealing period because it highlights their strengths and weaknesses.”

A change in the lineup?

While Howard and Sheen might have been in for the film adaptation, the future was murkier for Langella. Howard and Grazer seriously considered replacing the “Dracula” veteran in the movie with Warren Beatty.

Langella describes what must have been a painful situation rather dispassionately. “I am not a kid. I accept what is,” he says. “The role was mine to do in London. It was mine to do in New York. And I knew it might not have been mine in the future. I understood that they wanted a star of international stature.”

Universal Studios President Ron Meyer even called Langella to tell him Beatty had the role. The “Reds” star and filmmaker, who has a history of seemingly limitless stalling before committing to a part, proved too potentially problematic for Howard and Grazer. They soon reconsidered Langella.

“Frank actually called and said, ‘Do I need to audition?’ ” Howard says. “I told him, ‘You are auditioning every night onstage.’ ” Langella not only won the film role but also a Tony award for his stage performance.

While Morgan’s screenplay diverged in places from his play -- primarily because he was now able to show off-screen events only alluded to onstage -- the heart of the story remained the same.

All the better for Howard, who was directing actors who had been playing the roles for months on end; Sheen and Langella took just four days off from their Broadway “Frost/Nixon” close to the start of filming.

But Howard was not interested in restaging a theater piece. “I felt the biggest thing that I could do was to really develop a deeper sense of the relationship between the principals and their teams -- their corner men, to use Peter Morgan’s boxing analogy -- which is something the play didn’t really have time to develop,” Howard says.

So rather than use Frost advisor James Reston Jr. and Nixon loyalist Jack Brennan as narrators (as they essentially were in the play), they became larger characters in Howard’s movie -- Reston played by Sam Rockwell, Brennan by Kevin Bacon. The rest of the film’s cast includes Toby Jones as Nixon’s agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, and Rebecca Hall as Frost’s leggy girlfriend, Caroline Cushing.

“Ultimately, I hope it brings into focus an interesting point about modern society. It used to be that powerful figures could operate with impunity,” Howard said. “The movie is saying that’s not acceptable -- that the truth is important.”

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john.horn@latimes.com