It’s a major part of a politician’s job to face the press – to step in front of a sea of faces, microphones, cameras and dictaphones and see off a stream of weighty questions. And American politician Gary Hart had some especially tricky ones to handle in the wake of the sex scandal that cost him his run for the Presidential nominations in 1988. It’s a story that’s been dramatised by director Jason Reitman in The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as the disgraced candidate at its centre. Here’s an exclusive image from the film, as seen in the new issue of Empire, showing Jackman’s Hart fielding journalists’ questions.
When it came to shooting the press conferences, Reitman crafted an immersive, naturalistic atmosphere for Jackman to respond to in the moment. “He would constantly have people come and interrupt me,” Jackman tells Empire. “I didn’t know who was going to ask the questions or in what order. Jason came over and said, ‘You can point to anybody in that room of a hundred and ask them to ask the questions.’ So I did – I asked extras who ended up being in the film with spoken lines. And every take felt very real.”
Read much more about The Front Runner in Empire’s January 2019 issue, on sale now and available online here{
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