Many movies have been made over the years about the rise and fall of former President Richard Nixon, but none have presented a view of Nixon during the time after his resignation from office in quite the same light as Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon. Adapted from the British play by Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon chronicles the events leading up to a series of four interviews that British TV host/interviewer David Frost managed to secure with Richard Nixon shortly after he resigned the presidency. Knowing they'd be a worldwide ratings extravaganza, Frost worked to set up the interviews while playing a cat and mouse game with Nixon's closest aides. When the interviews finally took place, the discussions became a high stakes game of chess between both Frost and Nixon to find the truth.

With Frost/Nixon set for release on December 5 during a time of political flux, respected stage and screen actor Frank Langella, who steps into the shoes of Richard Nixon after originating the stage version of the former president years earlier, greeted journalists at the Frost/Nixon press conference in L.A. to talk about how the role affected him, his original view of Richard Nixon back in the '70s, how drastically different (and often illogically) the times have changed with regard to public acceptance of wrongdoing, and his feelings on the recent U.S. Election.

You represented Nixon as the human being he was.

FRANK LANGELLA: I tried to, yes.

Do you come around to the understanding that Nixon is a human being like you and me?

LANGELLA: Well, you have to think that in any character you play. You can’t play a title, you can’t play a position, you know? You can’t play a President. At the moment I’m performing in a play at night and I’m playing Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons who became a saint, and you can’t think of him as a saint, you can think of him as getting up every day the way we all get up every morning. Every one of us got up and showered or shaved or did what we did, we share that commonality. So when I find a character - when I’m asked to play a character I think of him as human first, and then later on I think, ‘Okay, I’m human but I happen to be the President of the United States, or I happen to be Chancellor of England or I happen to be a vampire or I happen to be a TV executive.’

What are your impressions of Nixon back in the seventies?

LANGELLA: I didn’t think very much of him. I was in my early thirties and I was in the early stages of my acting career and I was doing what most young actors do; living a very selfish, self-involved life, looking to get girls.

That can’t be true.

LANGELLA: No, it can’t be. So I didn’t care much about politics when I was in my early thirties. I watched the resignation live and I judged him pretty much the way most people did because of his physical demeanor and because he had such a difficult time communicating to us any of that humanity that I eventually found.

Has that judgment disappeared?

LANGELLA: Oh, yes. It hasn’t disappeared, it’s changed because there’s no question he covered up a crime and there’s no question than he paid for it far more than he needed to. But he deserved what he got because he tried to cover it up. If he had just said to the Justice Department, 'This was a mistake. I didn’t sanction this. If there is a fine and if these gentlemen need to be put into jail, we should pay for this crime,' it would’ve been over. It would have been a blip in his presidency. It’s the cover up that got him.

How is it possible that Bush hasn’t been impeached yet?

LANGELLA: I don’t think you can look at - In the last forty years, the change in what people will accept and what they did accept, you know, I don’t think if Mr. Nixon had done this today it would’ve been regarded with anywhere near the shock and surprise that it was forty years ago, because the standards were, for better or for worse, higher. The press had a bit more honor and distance from politicians. But now we’ve lost the idea of a statesman. The leaders of our countries don’t appear to be statesmen anymore. Certainly in our country there’s a lot about ‘He’s just one of us, she’s just one of us.’ And it all melts down to our politicians appearing on television shows and talk shows and watching themselves be made fun of and making fun of themselves. I prefer when a statesmen is up there, I prefer when he’s slightly distant. And for better or for worse, Nixon, for the most part, kept that image, you know, he kept it. But now, once you let it go, once you open yourself up to it, you’re fair game for anything. And all politicians now are fair game.

When you approach a role like this, what comes first? Is it the physicality? The voice?

LANGELLA: It’s the soul first. It has to be, for me. Other actors come at it a different way, but I sat for hours and hours and hours and hours and stared at him, just stared at his face during the interviews he did with Barbara Walters and Mike Wallace and all the major journalists of the day, and I looked very hard at his eyes. I watched for the flicker, I watched for the moment of doubt, I watched when he was going in for the kill. I watched for the moments where I could find him insecure. And there was a tiny piece of tape that wasn’t shown very often, when Nixon was coming out of some meeting he’d had and he was walking down a path and Ron Ziegler, who was one of his people, was walking behind. And Nixon had just been beaten up terribly by the press and he stopped, and there were no microphones, all you saw was the visual.

And he was saying something to Ziegler, and Ziegler was trying to explain something to the President, and he took Ziegler and turned him around and pushed him and said, 'Go back and tell those motherf**ckers!' And that stayed in my mind a lot about Nixon and I tried to do it once in the play with the actor playing [Jack] Brennen, but we couldn’t make it work within the course of the play. That little moment of frustration and fury was very important for me in understanding what this man must have felt every day because he really - when he said, 'You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,' he meant it. He really got it from the press. They never let him - he was more made fun of, I think, than any living politician in our country.

Did you focus on other actors who had portrayed Nixon?

LANGELLA: Yeah, I watched everything I could. I watched Tony [Hopkins], I watched Oliver Stone. I watched all of the things I didn’t want to do.

You mention the press is softer now, but it’s not the role of the press to impeach a President.

LANGELLA: Exactly.

Do you think lawmakers today are less likely to face a higher power?

LANGELLA: I think the decades that have past, the last forty some odd years, standards get lower and lower, they don’t get higher and higher. Standards of what is honor, what is the truth, what is shockable and what isn’t shockable, has changed. We accept a kind of behavior now that we wouldn’t have accepted forty or fifty years ago. Politicians lie in our faces, and then a piece of tape is dug out to prove that they lied. You know, they say, 'I went here at a certain time under certain conditions.' And then they show the tape saying, 'Well, you didn’t go there at that time under that condition.' And the politician says, 'Oh, well, I have a lot on my mind. I guess I misspoke.' And we all forgive it, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. Once someone says that, I never trust them again, ever. But it seems as if the press forgives it because it’s expedient.

Nixon comes away looking quite sympathetic in the film. Were you trying to redeem him in some way?

LANGELLA: No, I don’t think on that high a plane. I actually thought, ‘What is the truth of my man? What is he going through?’ I left it to Ron [Howard] and Michael [Sheen] and everybody else to deal with what they needed to do. I was determined that I would not in any way caricature this man or disgrace him or judge him, because once you’re inside a character, you can’t be the one to say how you’re coming across. You’re doing what you believe in. And I was very Zen about that. My guy was doing this, and however he comes out in the film is hopefully a combination of my approach to him and what Ron chose to do. So I never worried about [it].

I never sat in my room thinking I have a chance here to make a statement about a character, about a man, a famous man. I just thought, ‘I have to go in there today and convince this journalist that I was right about something, and then I have to go in today and admit that I made a mistake.’ And the devastating effect of that on him was what I was thinking in that scene where he comes out and sees the dog. That’s when he knows he - he threw his life away, he threw his career away. That’s very moving to me when he says, 'I’m going to have to live with this for the rest of my life.'

I had the feeling he chose to do that.

LANGELLA: Oh, sure. Good for you. He wasn’t trapped, no, no, no.

Did that phone call in the middle of the night ever happen?

LANGELLA: No, that’s total fiction.

But also how he felt the need to lift the burden off himself.

LANGELLA: Yes. And also, I think he was aware of the fact that if there were something theatrical, something juicy, these tapes would sell and he’d make more money. If it was just dry polemics over and over again about, ‘Then I did this, then I did that.’ But I think he knew that he needed to give the American people something, something he’d never given them before.

You played Nixon on stage for two years, what was the challenge of translating him to the big screen?

LANGELLA: Making sure that he was as real as I could. I didn’t have to worry about reaching a thousand people a night. I didn’t have to raise my voice. I could literally just stare at the camera and raise my eyebrow and hopefully make a point.

Warren Beatty was to play the part at one point. What was your feeling when you heard that?

LANGELLA: Good for Warren is what I actually [feel] - and that’s true and people don’t believe me. I thought, ‘You can’t control these things. And if that’s going to be the actor, that’s going to be the actor to play it.’ I didn’t in any way feel angry about it. I accepted it as the nature of my profession.

Did you see "W"?

LANGELLA: No, I can’t wait to see it. I can’t wait - I’m in a play. So as soon as the play closes, I’ll see all the movies this year.

How much did Nixon affect you on a personal level?

LANGELLA: A lot. A lot, and characters don’t affect me. I’m a professional actor. I’m not one of those actors who says I - I read an interview once where a young actor said, 'I played Hamlet and I couldn’t get rid of him for two years,' and I thought, 'Well, you played him wrong. You should be rid of him before you go out for dinner.' And most of the time I am... I went to his house, the little house where he was born, and I sat on his bed in this tiny little room, which was less than half the size of this room. The ceiling was two inches shorter than me, so I had to stand like this in this little tiny space. And if you do that and you sit in the place where the President of the United States grew up and lived in with three brothers - tiny little house, tiny little windows - you get a sense of those formative years and how his character was formed in those important, early years.

Lincoln came from similar modest roots and he went on to be a great President.

LANGELLA: Yes, I know.

And you were saying how it affected you.

LANGELLA: Oh, yes. Well, I was getting to the end of what it did to me. And I agree with you, life is choice. Life is choice, and Lincoln made one choice and Richard Nixon made another... I really do believe you take the inner journey more than any other journey. So to answer your question in a long-winded way, what Richard Nixon did for me was made me think very hard about any choices I made in my life that could have been self-destructive that I could have possibly avoided: marriages and relationships and work choices and it sort of helped me to resolve the fact that I wouldn’t allow the worst in nature to affect my actions, which you’re not always able to do when you’re young, because when you’re young so many other fires are burning inside you.

There are so many things you want to do, your ambitions, your sex drive, your relationships to a wife or to a boss. You have all these churning ideas and you’re not always responsible to yourself about how you behave. And it taught me, by watching him and living him, 'My God,' I used to say, 'You could’ve avoided this so easily.' And I would think about all the things I could’ve avoided. And then I also think your path is your path and you can only get there the way you get there. You can get there at forty, you can get there at eighty, you can get there at ten, you know.

What about accolades? Do Oscars and Tonys matter?

LANGELLA: They are wonderful to have and get, and whenever I have one or get one, I like it. And I see no reason to be disingenuous and to say, ‘Oh, gee, you know, it’s silly.' If such a thing happens to me, I will be thrilled and honored.

Do you look forward to that long march to February?

LANGELLA: Well, no, the march isn’t a lot of fun because the march is full of pitfalls and stuff. And you can’t allow yourself to be living that march. It’s part of the game, but the next thing for me is two very interesting parts in two very interesting films that I can’t talk about because they’re not yet set. But they’re both fascinating roles. And as long as I keep my head down and remember that I’m sitting here because of my work and nothing else, not because of my awards or the possibilities of one, then I can keep pretty steady about it. But I would be an idiot to say it doesn’t matter. Of course it matters.

Can you talk about Obama’s win?

LANGELLA: I left the theater and I drove up to 105th Street and Broadway, which you wouldn’t know in this city, but it’s very large Hispanic/black neighborhood where a friend of mine owns a restaurant. And I watched Obama’s acceptance speech in a room with maybe 300-400 black people and Spanish people, and one of Obama’s headquarters was right across the street. And the streets were mobbed, and people were screaming and crying and laughing. You didn’t know anybody and everybody came up and kissed you and hugged you and there was an extraordinary sense that we were all one color, one group of human beings. It was really beautiful. And the next few days in New York I noticed there was such happiness. People were waving from taxis and truck drivers were talking. And it seemed as if an enormous barrier had been broken. And I’d like to think that it isn’t temporary. I’d like to think that this very interesting and somewhat miracle personality has come along at just the right time.

You said before there’s a difference in how statesmen behave today. How do you feel about Obama?

LANGELLA: He’s not going to care about my advice, but I wish he would pull back from the current trend of going on talks shows and doing jokes and Saturday Night Live and appearing with - I wish he would pull back and keep a bit more enigmatic privacy. But I think his - I’m sure you all feel this too, there’s something in this man, there’s a core of steel and distance in him that makes you think no matter how much he’s clever enough to go on these shows, there’s always a part of him that’s very held back and I’m very attracted to that, I am.

Did you shed a tear when he won?

LANGELLA: No, but I was very happy.

What is the mission in your life?

LANGELLA: To stay alive. Yes, just to stay alive. To stay alive and to be - I wouldn’t have said this maybe 15 or 20 years ago, to be as loving a person as I can, because when you get up in these years you realize there are two things: love and work. That’s it. Everything else is...

Interesting you say that because toward the end of the film Nixon says, 'I admire that you love and are able to be loved.'

LANGELLA: Yes, he does. Does he say? No, he says, I guess what he says is, 'I’m better off in the intellectual life. I’m better just in my room studying my books.' But he doesn’t say ‘love’ to Frost. I think he says, 'You’re popular. You know, I never could do that. People like you.'