Rob Reiner has acted in, written, produced, and directed almost every genre of film and TV show, but his wheelhouse is humane, sharply observational, and subtly unconventional comedy. He was deeply involved in at least three classic comedies: his own This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride and Norman Lear's All in the Family, in which Reiner played Michael “Meathead” Stivic, the liberal son-in-law of Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker.
Another side of Reiner, his commitment to social justice and democratic values, is front and center in his latest directorial effort, Shock and Awe. Reiner also stars in the film as real-life Knight Ridder editor John Walcott. Shock and Awe shows how two of Walcott's reporters, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, exposed the lies behind the Bush administration's rush to war with Iraq after 9/11—and how their stories were drowned out by a tsunami of press coverage that unquestioningly amplified the White House's official story. The film is fierce in telling the history of the leadup to war and at capturing the journalists' irreverent patter and the smug prevarications of the Bush administration's cabinet members. I recently talked to Reiner about the real source of fake news, the surprising new urgency that Shock and Awe took on after the 2016 election, and why he wanted to change his name when he was eight years old.
You've taken on an important subject with this film.
The last couple days of shooting were when Donald Trump was elected. It was weird because we were making a movie, basically, to talk about how important it is for a free and independent press to be strong. Like the Tommy Lee Jones character [journalist Joseph L. Galloway] says: “When the government fucks up, the soldiers pay the price.” We wanted to show that, if the press doesn't do their due diligence, you can have dire consequences. We never even thought in terms of what has occurred since, which is the country is potentially in a worse place in terms of whether the democracy even survives. All of a sudden there's a different urgency, a different relevancy to the film.
Most films about the importance of the press are about reporters who change the world by revealing the truth. There are reporters in your film who unearth the truth, but their stories get drowned out by a megaphone of fake news—and the fake news is generated by our own government.
Right. And that's what we have right now. The difference between then and now is the trauma of 9/11. People were frightened, and they didn't want to seem unpatriotic. But now, the real press is being threatened by an administration that's backed up by what's essentially state-run media. And it's not like a small section of the country. We're talking about Fox and Sinclair and Breitbart and Alex Jones reaching about 40 percent of the country that's cemented in this alternate reality, the alternate facts. That's the real fake news. And the people that are working so hard to get to the truth are being called the enemy of the people and the fake news.
You've been a social activist for pretty much your whole adult life, but you haven't made or appeared in a lot of overtly political movies or TV shows.
Well, All in the Family was as political as you can get.
It was. But if you look at your long list of credits, not many of them are that kind of thing.
The only ones are Ghosts of Mississippi, possibly A Few Good Men, and The American President and LBJ.
Right. So I'm wondering what made you decide to go so explicitly political with this film, when that's not generally the direction you've gone in.
The idea for this happened in 2003. I wanted to make a film about how we got into Iraq, because I was of draft age during the Vietnam War and I just couldn't believe that, within my own lifetime, we were going to be going to war again based on lies. I really wanted to make the film because I felt there had been good films about Vietnam, there had been good films about World War II, and there had been a couple of good films about Iraq, but none of them dealt with, to me, the central issue, which was: Why the hell were we there? Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker was really good, and American Sniper, Clint Eastwood's movie. But they didn't address the central question.
When [Bush administration officials] started talking about Iraq very shortly after 9/11, I thought, “Oh my god, what are they doing here?” They started saying there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and I said, “What are you talking about? The guy is an enemy of Bin Laden!” And then they started talking about weapons of mass destruction and aluminum tubes, and it's like, nah, that can't be it. The U.N.'s weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was there, and he was reporting back every couple of weeks and saying, “I didn't find anything.” The only thing they had to go with is that 9/11 had frightened the whole country. It's classic propaganda playbook. You take the public's fear and you say, “This is what's happening and we're going to fix it. We're going to make it right.” That's what authoritarians do all the time. Read the rest in Slant Magazine
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