Nothing But The Truth Movie
*** PRELIMINARY PRODUCTION NOTES ***
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
Running Time: 107 minutes
MPAA Rating: “R” for language, some sexual material and a scene of violence
Directed by
Rod Lurie
Written by
Rod Lurie
Starring
Alan Alda
Kate Beckinsale
Angela Bassett
Matt Dillon
Vera Farmiga
David Schwimmer
Noah Wyle
Press Contact:
Stacey Leinson
310-689-1453
sleinson@yarifilmgroup.com
***Press materials are available at www.yfgpublicity.com***
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
Writer-director Rod Lurie’s new film is the story of Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale), a young reporter on the national desk of the Capitol Sun-Times, a major Washington, D.C. daily. Rachel writes an explosive story that reveals the identity of covert CIA agent Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga) that, once published, causes all hell to break loose and the government to demand the identity of Rachel’s source.
With the support of her editor, Bonnie (Angela Bassett), her paper’s in-house attorney (Noah Wyle) and her husband, Ray (David Schwimmer), Rebecca defies the charismatic, career-minded special prosecutor, Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon). When Rachel also declines to reveal her source to U.S. District Court Judge Hall (Floyd Abrams), he cites her with contempt of court and throws her in jail, pointing out that Rachel alone holds the keys to her cell and that time in the D.C. Detention Center may help her come to realize this.
The story follows the hardships Rachel experiences behind bars as well as the legal struggle played out by her attorney, Albert Burnside (Alan Alda), as he pleads her case on First Amendment grounds -- a case he argues all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. Everyone is rabid to know: Who is the source and why is Rebecca so committed to sacrificing so much to protect it?
As with Lurie’s filmmaking breakout THE CONTENDER, for which Joan Allen and Jeff Bridges were both nominated for Academy Awards®, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH is set in Washington, D.C., staged at the harrowing intersection of governmental power and personal integrity and told from a distinctly feminine perspective.
While THE CONTENDER focused on one ground-breaking female Senator’s fight to maintain her dignity as she weathers a partisan dirty trick on her way to assume the office of Vice President, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH portrays two very different, very strong Washington women as they fight to protect what they hold most dear.
TRUTH’s Rachel Armstrong fights to protect her source, her integrity and her career. And after being exposed as a covert CIA operative, Erica Van Doren fights to protect her reputation within the agency and the sanctity of her other life as a caring suburban mother.
Written and directed by Rod Lurie, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH is a Yari Film Group release. The film is produced by Bob Yari, Marc Frydman and Lurie, with James Spies serving as executive producer. Alik Sakharov is the director of photography; Eloise Stammerjohn is production designer; Lynn Falconer is costume designer and Sarah Boyd is the editor. The film was shot on location in Memphis, Tennessee.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH is a fiction film: writer-director Rachel Armstrong and Erica Van Doren are writer/director Rod Lurie’s creation. As with Lurie’s earlier film, THE CONTENDER, the plot here is inspired by a real-life Washington scandal.
As the acclaim that greeted THE CONTENDER made clear, Lurie is particularly good at dramatizing the perilous emotional minefield in which the intimately private is forced out into the caustically public, a spectacle from which we, as voracious consumers of news, can’t seem to avert our eyes. But much more than in THE CONTENDER, Lurie here looks at just how that spectacle is made—the sometimes ugly nature of reporting the news.
Following a short, kinetic scene depicting an attempt on the life of the President of the United States, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH begins in the brightly lit newsroom of the Capitol Sun Times, where the daily editorial meeting is taking place behind the glass walls of a crowded conference room. As the meeting concludes and staff begins to file out into the bullpen, editor Bonnie Benjamin asks reporter Rachel Armstrong to stay behind; the paper’s in-house attorney, Avril Aaronson, and Bonnie’s deputy editor (played by Lurie), remain as well.
Moviegoers who enjoy films about journalists might be reminded here of the wide-open, brightly lit newsroom Alan J. Pakula created for his classic ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN; indeed, Lurie very much had that movie, and that set, on his mind when he and his crew gently infiltrated the Memphis newsroom of a real newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, in the middle of October to shoot a number of key scenes for NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, and he told as much to the paper’s chief movie writer John Beifus.
As Beifus reported in his page-one story that ran the day after filming there began, the crew built “an entire glass-walled editorial room…at the east end of the floor, so that scenes with Beckinsale, Basset and Lurie would provide a view of the activity in the newsroom outside…the literal transparency of the office – as well as the bright light – are intended to reflect the film’s themes.
“‘Everything is out in the open, everything is under the light,’ Lurie told Beifus.
* * *
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH reminds its audience that investigative print journalism has an important advantage over its broadcast competition: the luxury of time. Stories like the one Armstrong has worked (and like Watergate) take time to research and flesh out, clarify and hone. This allows print reporters to be pro-active seekers of truth, while their brothers and sisters in television news are largely re-active, as they must always race to cover events as they happen. The New York Times discovers and methodically verifies certain things out about John McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist and about how that relationship at one point worried his campaign staff, while MSNBC instantly offers analysis of how those revelations might impact his bid for office and then analyzes and even criticizes how and why the Times broke the story when it did.
We live today in a world where television news breaks all around us in all kinds of public and private places, something acknowledged and exploited by Lurie in both THE CONTENDER and NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. In the earlier film, C-SPAN serves as a kind of deus ex machina that each side uses to humiliate the other.
Television news certainly retains its power in NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. As Rachel Armstrong enters the newsroom of the Capitol Sun Times the day her story is published she sees its substance regurgitated by MSNBC’s anchor and legal expert Dan Abrams (who is also the son of famed First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams and who plays Judge Hall in the film).
Among the first things Armstrong notices in the D.C. lockup is that the inmates watch a lot of Jerry Springer, meaning she will never be able to see news accounts of her own case (newspapers are not provided). Once Armstrong’s case goes “cold” in terms of attention from the press, and as the Sun Times’ attorney fees and court-imposed penalties mount, Armstrong’s editor appeals to her to do an interview with Molly Meyers, a Barbara Walters-like broadcast journalist.
A former print journalist himself, Lurie here takes a crack at how television can distort the news when he has Rachel agree to the interview but insist that it happen live, so that Meyers can’t “edit” her “into a doddering idiot.” In one of the film’s most surprising juxtapositions, Lurie cuts the hypnotic video close-ups of the contentious live interview against footage of Armstrong’s fellow inmates as they watch it. The drama is at least as good as anything on Jerry Springer.
* * *
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH’S Rachel Armstrong is clearly a hero: she goes to jail for a very long time in order to defend a central principal of her profession, protecting not only her integrity but also that of all journalists. But that doesn’t mean Lurie gives the sometimes messy business of reporting the truth a moral whitewash; indeed, careful viewers of NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH may notice how Lurie and his cinematographer Alik Sakharov articulate the more savage side of investigative journalism by contrasting natural and artificial light. We see this early on as Rachel moves from the artificial fluorescent light of scene two’s newsroom into the stinging afternoon light of scene three’s soccer field, light against which Rachel Armstrong shields her eyes and into which Erica Van Doren squints as she hears for the first time that her cover has been blown.
At this point the stage direction of Lurie’s script – direction meant not only for the actress playing Van Doren but also to Sakharov and his team – becomes extraordinarily precise: “Now, take a good look into Erica’s eyes. There is just a slight movement, a slight tell that a nerve has been hit,” he writes. It is at this point that NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH becomes a movie whose signature shot is the extreme close-up.
As Lurie’s narrative continues, public exposure continues to intrude upon and erode the heretofore intimately private like something out of genre film: Van Doren returns from her morning run to find her picture on page one of the copy of the Sun-Times sitting squarely in her driveway, from which the camera pans to a line of television vans moving deliberately down her peaceful street like a school of hungry sharks. When she arrives at the local library for her weekly date to read to children there, a zombie-like pack of media surround her until she barely escapes into the building’s glass double doors.
The intrusion of the coarsely public into the intimately private is not limited to Farmiga’s character and Beckinsale’s Rachel Armstrong is thrust into her own kind of horror film: Her first encounter with Special Prosecutor Dubois is precipitated by a startling knock at her car’s passenger-side window a split second after she drops her young son off at school, while a menacing knock on the door of her home in the middle of the night signals the arrival of a subpoena. And in jail, it’s only a matter of time until Rachel comes face to face with much more than the mere threat of violence.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Rod Lurie (Writer/Director) wrote and directed the widely praised Academy Award® and Golden Globe Award nominated political thriller THE CONTENDER starring Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, Gary Oldman and Christian Slater. The film was also honored by the Broadcast Film Critics with the first-ever Alan J. Pakula Award. More recently, Lurie directed the military prison thriller THE LAST CASTLE, which starred Robert Redford, James Gandolfini and Mark Ruffalo, and RESURRECTING THE CHAMP, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett.
Lurie created and served as an executive producer on ABC’s highly acclaimed hit series, Commander in Chief. Imaging a world in which the President of the United States is a woman, the popular series stars Geena Davis and Donald Sutherland. Lurie also executive produced the ABC one-hour FBI drama, Line of Fire, starring Anson Mount, Leslie Hope and David Paymer.
In 1998, Lurie made his film writing and directing debut with the dramatic short Four Second Delay, which won the Best Short Film award at the Atlanta Film Festival and the Crested Butte Reel Fest. The short also won the Prix du Jury at the Festival of American Cinema in Deauville, France. In 2000, he made his first feature film DETERRENCE, a drama about America coming to the brink of nuclear war, starring Kevin Pollak and Timothy Hutton, and in 2003 his short film, The Nazi, was in the Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Lurie completed a career in the military and enjoyed success as a film critic and entertainment reporter. Lurie graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1984 and went on to serve for four years as a Combat Arms officer in the U.S. Army. He broke into journalism as an entertainment reporter for the New York Daily News, and was a film critic and interviewer for Channel 12 in Fairfield, Connecticut, as well as a frequent contributor to Premiere, Movieline and Entertainment Weekly.
After moving to Los Angeles, Lurie worked as a film critic, investigative reporter and contributing editor to Los Angeles magazine from 1990-1995. As an investigative reporter in the entertainment industry, Lurie’s discovery of unethical and illegal practices of tabloid newspapers gained him national exposure on programs such as 60 Minutes, Entertainment Tonight, The Larry King Show, Nightline, Geraldo and The Jane Whitney Show.
From 1995 to 1999, Lurie was the film critic for 790 AM KABC Radio in Los Angeles, where his top-rated movie review show entertained Southern California moviegoers every Saturday. His on-air guests included Tom Hanks, James Woods, Billy Bob Thornton, Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Landau, James Cameron and Mel Gibson.
In addition, in 1995 Lurie authored the book Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
Alik Sakharov (Cinematographer) is clearly a favorite in the HBO “family,” having photographed 38 episodes of their signature, award-winning series The Sopranos. Sakharov has also served as cinematographer for such HBO hit series as Rome and Sex and the City. His feature film credits include LULU ON THE BRIDGE for writer-director Paul Auster; the feature film version of the Broadway smash LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! for director Joe Mantello; THE REPAIR SHOP for director Phillip Noyce and the Oscar®-nominated documentary AYN RAND: A SENSE OF LIFE.
Eloise Stammerjohn (Production Designer) has worked with Rod Lurie on a number of projects, most notably on his ABC series Commander in Chief starring Geena Davis and, as a set decorator, on two of his features THE CONTENDER and THE LAST CASTLE. Her other feature credits as an art director and production designer include John Sayles’ most recent film HONEYDRIPPER, the independent drama FAREWELL TO HARRY, and the independent romantic comedy FALLING FOR GRACE starring Gayle Harold and Fay Ann Lee.
* * *
Visit Yari Film Group
Nothing But The Truth Movie
The Actors and Actresses of Nothing But The Truth Nothing But The Truth Movie Photos Movie Synopsis Watch The Film
search engine optimization by Adtastic Hosting/Web-Sem