NEW YORK, Aug. 14 (UPI) — The Newsroom and American Rust alum Jeff Daniels says The Brink of War, his new Cold War-era nail-biter, which tells an extraordinary true story, has themes that resonate today.
“The world is still a dangerous place,” Daniels, 71, told UPI in a Zoom interview Wednesday.
“There are nuclear weapons out there. More countries have them than had them, say, back in 1986. More countries want them and the world seems to be on a path towards setting up mutually assured destruction, again, whether you have star wars shields or not.”
Written and directed by Michael Russell Gunn, the film follows U.S. President Ronald Reagan (Daniels) as he meets with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris) in Reykjavik to discuss nuclear arms de-escalation.
“Here’s an example of two great leaders. On that weekend, they were great leaders trying to come together, overcome their division, their differences and find a way to make the world a better place for everyone — not just you and your country, no matter what that country might be,” Daniels said.
“We can learn from history and if we have the leaders around the world who are willing to think like that, maybe we can have another, meeting like the one they had in Reykjavik in 1986. That would make the world a safer place.”
Chernobyl and Mad Men actor Harris, 63, agreed.
“The desire for something like this is to remind people what statesmen look like,” he said.
“You know what leadership looks like. Here are two people who, in Reagan’s case, had fought a battle against communism devoutly all his life and here he is sitting across the table with his arch-enemy, trying to find common ground to make the world a better place,” Harris added.
The film shows the leaders exhibiting patience and restraint in moments when the stakes could not have been any higher.
“We got to take a lot of time and play those pauses and that was a wonderful part of shooting us — allowing us to just kind of read each other and I enjoyed that part,” Daniels said.
The actors also deftly manage to balance the humanity of these men, while also offering a glimpse of the intestinal fortitude it takes to make decisions that impact millions of people.
Daniels credited the script for the characters’ depth.
“You certainly are given those negotiating scenes,” he added.
“In Reagan’s case, what would the president do? And there’s a maturity to how he handles it and then there are times when he’s alone in the residence by himself and that’s where you can kind of humanize him,” Daniels explained.
“Sometimes they mix. Reagan’s sense of humor would kind of humanize him and kind of take some of the air out of the tension and the negotiating. But you get to do both. The script allowed us to do both of those things — sometimes in the same scene.”
Harris said scenes he had with Branka Katic, who plays Gorbachev’s wife Raisa, demonstrated the personal side of the Russian leader.
“Michael focused on their relationships with their partners. That’s immediately a very relatable thing for audiences and then that also allows you to be more performative in the negotiation scenes because you’ve had the opportunity to open the window on a different part of the character in the other scenes,” Harris noted.
“Gorbachev, certainly the impression that I got from Michael’s script, was that there’s a sort of journey that you take with a character towards somebody who initially seems very stoic, is not giving anything away, is quite presentational in the beginning,” he added.
“But, towards the end, he starts to lose his control, if you like, and there’s a certain desperation to the way that he’s trying to appeal to Reagan, to see his point of view. There’s a small journey there in the character that Michael’s built into the script.”
The film opens Friday in theaters.