'Mark Felt' Director on FBI Heroes & Watergate's Shadow
The standard Watergate narrative goes like this: Two young Washington Post reporters take down the president of the United States with the help of a wacko government source code-named Deep Throat who likes to meet secretly in underground parking garages.
Wrong, says former journalist Peter Landesman, the writer and director of Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, a powerful new film about the secret FBI source who led Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to the larger story of President Richard M. Nixon’s dirty tricks behind the Watergate break-in.
“It’s one of the greatest films of all time,” grants Landesman, speaking of , the 1976 film based on the Woodward and Bernstein book of the same name. “And it’s an important book. It’s just not the whole truth.” Landesman’s film, the third he has written and directed (including 2015’s ), aims to set the record straight, and it provides Liam Neeson with his best role to date. Neeson plays FBI lifer Felt, the bureau’s then–second in command, the talked with him about that and much more.
