Naomi Watts, star of the new political thriller Fair Game, says that for her, it was about getting the spy to talk. Jim Berk, chief executive officer of Participant Media, one of the film’s production companies, says that for him, it’s about pulling everyone into the conversation. But I think it’s about more than either of them is copping to.
Fair Game tells the riveting true story of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent who specialized in weapons of mass destruction, whose life fell apart when her identity was revealed to the media by sources close to then-U.S.-President George W. Bush. It’s widely believed that Plame was outed to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, a former adviser to several administrations, because he’d written a piece for The New York Times that suggested that the White House exaggerated the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Tarred as traitors, Plame and Wilson lost their jobs and nearly lost their marriage.
On the page, Plame is a crackling character, sexy, steely, supercompetent. Her plot does plenty of thickening, and there were numerous research materials for Watts to study. Still, Watts knew she had to meet the source. “For every character, I need to figure out who she is, what she’s been through, how she handles conflict and disaster,” she said. “When the character is a real person it’s even more important to do her justice. And after all the injustice Valerie suffered, this was especially important.”
But Plame is “not someone who gives it all away quickly,” Watts said. “That’s part of her training and who she is. I’m slow to get to know, too. I’m not someone who walks into a room and says, ‘This is who I am, and I believe this and I want that.’ ”
So their relationship evolved by inches – first a few phone calls and e-mails, then a couple of “careful and polite” dinners in New York restaurants. At one point, Plame, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., a 12-hour trip from the shoot – too far for Watts, who was nursing Samuel, the son she’d had just two months earlier with her partner, actor Liev Schreiber (their other son, Alexander, is a year older) – suggested they meet halfway, in the Chicago airport. “I was like, ‘Who meets in the airport?’ ” Watts said, laughing. “Oh right, spies do.”
But finally, on their third dinner, Watts ordered “a nice bottle of wine,” took a deep breath and pulled out a list of questions “that were very personal and confronting,” she said. “Valerie was like, ‘Wow, okay.’ But she came to understand that an artist’s process is not all about fact-finding. It’s about, ‘How did you meet?’ and ‘Who wears the pants?’ Things that are hard for anyone to answer.”
The friendship stuck. Watts and Plame walked the red carpet together at the Cannes International Film Festival, and keep in regular touch “about lots of different things, especially our kids,” Watts said. “The political events that took place are a major part of the film, yes, but I was blown away by how Valerie dealt with everything – her home [she also has two children], her career, her public life. She took on the biggest possible fight you can imagine, and moved through it with such dignity and strength and courage.”
For Berk, too, the movie is only the beginning. All of Participant’s fiction films and documentaries – including Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth, Charlie Wilson’s War and the current Waiting for Superman – are accompanied on its website by an action plan, ways for viewers to learn and do more. For Fair Game, the plan has three facets.
