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The world premiere of “the thinking person’s Rocky” will open The Times bfi 52nd London Film Festival this year, the event organisers announced yesterday.

Frost/Nixon is set in the summer of 1977, when more than 45 million Americans, a record for a news programme, watched transfixed as David Frost, a Briton best known as a chat show host, wrung an extraordinary confession from their disgraced former President, Richard Nixon.

At the climax of a series of increasingly bruising interviews Nixon admitted for the first time the extent of his guilt over the Watergate scandal, saying: “I let the American people down. And I’ll have to carry that burden the rest of my life.”

The drama made riveting television, and then, as reimagined by Peter Morgan, the screenwriter of The Queen, a gripping, Tony award-winning stage play starring Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon.

Now Ron Howard, the director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, has adapted it for the big screen with UK producers Working Title, pairing the same two actors with a stellar supporting cast including Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Matthew Macfadyen. Speaking to The Times he described the central relationship in the story as “a duel between two powerful lone wolves”.

“Peter Morgan calls it a thinking person’s Rocky and I agree with him.”

The stage play of Frost/Nixon opened at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, London, in August 2006 before transferring to the West End and later Broadway. Howard said that he read the script early on in the initial run. When he discovered that a frantic bidding war for the film rights was already under way, “I jumped on a plane to London with my wife and went to see it.” What he found was “one of the best theatre experiences of my life”.

Like many Americans, he had powerful memories of the original interviews but he was also struck by Morgan’s presentation of the story behind the scoop. The play depicts Frost and Nixon as adversaries but also kindred spirits: Nixon is licking his wounds after political and personal catastrophe, Frost has lost his American and Australian television shows and his jet-setting moment in the sun seems to be fading.

Both of them are self-made men riddled with insecurities and tormented by vast ambition.

Frost gambles everything and wins, raising $600,000 to tempt the wounded Nixon into giving him an exclusive interview and then finding the ammunition to prompt the historic confession.

“I loved the audacity of the story,” Howard said. “This famous British guy being turned down by the US networks and then cobbling together his own network to clobber the Americans with their own stick. It’s just this tremendous act of entrepreneurial courage.”

He met Frost, now Sir David, several times during the process. This was a particular treat as “I never rated highly enough for him to interview me”. Critics adored the performances but some complained that Morgan had oversimplified the story, playing fast and loose with the interview transcripts and suggesting that the interviews sealed Nixon’s ignominy in the minds of the American people.

For many political observers the interviews could be regarded equally as the cathartic moment at which Nixon began his journey back to partial political respectability, which led ultimately to a positive reevaluation of his achievements in foreign policy and at home.

Both Morgan and Howard empha-sise that Frost/Nixon is an impression of what happened in and around the interviews, not a docudrama.

The original play was also a powerful statement about the emergence of television as a critical factor in modern politics, a message that is likely to be notably resonant on October 15, three weeks before the election of a new US president.

Sandra Hebron, the festival’s artistic director, said that Frost/Nixon was engrossing and brilliantly performed, adding: “It’s a film with strong London links and a perfect opener for this year’s festival.”

The festival will be on from October 15 to 30.

To see highlights of last year’s festival click here

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