In a double coup of non-obvious casting, Michael Douglas has been cast as President Ronald Reagan and Christophe Waltz as Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in “Reykjavik.” The movie, which will depict the arms summit in the Icelandic capital in October 1986, is to be directed by Mike Newell. Ridley Scott, who had considered directing Kevin Hood’s screenplay, will be one of the producers.
Having played the title character in Rob Reiner’s 1995 “American President,” Douglas has occupied a Hollywood White House before, but he will have to get out more than a bottle of Grecian Formula to play Reagan. Similarly, Tarantino favorite Waltz will need more than a port-wine stain on his forehead. It remains to be seen whether they play the world leaders straight or try to impersonate them.
At the historic conference, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed the elimination of all ballistic missiles held by the two nations and the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons. But Reagan’s controversial proposal of the Strategic Defense Initiative (the “Star Wars” shield) led to a sticking point over one word that broke off the negotiations.
The one word was “laboratories.” According to an account by former ambassador James B. Goodby on the Arms Control Association website, Gorbachev “insisted that all research and testing of space-based ballistic missile systems be restricted to laboratories.
“Reagan did not want to enter into a negotiation that he viewed as amending the [1972 Antiballistic Missile] treaty. He had accepted a ‘broad’ interpretation of the treaty, under which wide latitude was allowed for space-based testing,” Washington, wrote Goodby, read Gorbachev’s proposal as an attack on the Strategic Defense Initiative. “That one word, ‘laboratories,’ obviously rang alarm bells in the minds of those who had been operating under tense conditions for two days.”
Nonetheless, the conference, Gorbachev later wrote, “actually gave an impetus to reduction by reaffirming the vision of a world without nuclear weapons and by paving the way toward concrete agreements on intermediate-range nuclear forces and strategic nuclear weapons.” It duly paved the way for the end of the Cold War, which technically concluded with the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
The $10 million “Reykjavik” is scheduled to begin filming in Germany in March. The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the news of Waltz's casting yesterday, noted in August that Participant Media, the company behind it, “is no stranger to hot-button political topics, having backed the Oscar-winning documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ [about Al Gore’s campaign to heighten awareness about global warming] as well as upcoming films whose subjects range from Abraham Lincoln to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.”
The movies in question are Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which opens on November 9, and Pablo Lorrain’s “No,” a New York Film Festival entry that will open on February 15. The latter is Chile’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.