An Interview With 'Reagan' Producer Mark Joseph (Part Three of Three)

This is the third part of a three-part interview with Mark Joseph, producer of “Reagan,” the 2024 biopic starring Dennis Quaid. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

What would you most like viewers who do not have first-hand knowledge of Reagan to take away from the movie?

That Ronald Reagan wasn’t born Ronald Reagan. By that I mean the historical figure people know didn’t simply appear one day at age 69 and become president. He was shaped over decades — by Dixon, by his parents, by his faith, by Hollywood, by the Depression, by World War II, by communism and by failure. For younger viewers especially, I hope they come away curious. Don’t just take our movie’s word for it. Watch his speeches. Read the people who loved him and the people who disagreed with him. And understand that history isn’t inevitable. The Cold War ending the way it did wasn’t inevitable. Individuals matter. Ideas matter. I also hope we can get back to the idea that disagreement doesn't mean we have to hate each other. The idea that every day has a six p.m., as he used to say. We can fight and argue, but at 6 PM we're friends again. 

How did researching Reagan’s era affect how you view the modern political world, if in fact it did?

It reminded me that our current political climate isn’t normal and doesn’t have to be permanent. We had a time in our era where our president and Speaker of the House didn't meet for an entire year. That's not the way it should be in my opinion. The 1980s were hardly some wonderful era where everybody agreed. Reagan and Tip O’Neill disagreed profoundly. The political fights were real and sometimes brutal. But there remained an understanding that your political opponent didn’t have to be your mortal enemy. Today we’ve confused disagreement with hatred. Reagan could attack an idea without necessarily treating the person holding it as evil. That’s a skill we’ve largely lost. There are bad actors in our world who would love to destroy us, but if they can get us to destroy each other, that makes their job a lot easier. We have to remember that. Your domestic enemy is not even close to being as evil as some of our mortal enemies are. At the end of the day, we're still Americans, and we have to protect the incredible system of government our ancestors gave us. 

The scenes between Reagan and Tip O’Neill were telling in that while the two were at loggerheads politically, they connected personally; something we see very little of in today’s political world. Why do you believe that is, and are there any signs of the divide narrowing? 

Those scenes have turned out to be some of the most important in the movie because audiences recognize immediately what they’re seeing — and what they’re missing. Reagan and O’Neill weren’t pretending to disagree. They really disagreed. But they understood that politics was the arena they fought in; it wasn’t the entirety of their lives. There’s that wonderful episode after Reagan was shot when O’Neill came to see him in the hospital. Here were two of the most powerful political adversaries in America, and suddenly the politics disappeared and they were simply two human beings together. I think we’ve lost some of that because politics has become entertainment, identity and, increasingly, a 24-hour business model. There’s money and attention in keeping everybody angry. Are there signs of it changing? I hope so. One reason I think people responded so emotionally to those scenes is that they want it to change. People are exhausted by being told they have to hate half the country. You don’t have to surrender your principles to be decent to somebody who disagrees with you. Reagan understood that distinction. And our actors did as well. Dennis is an independent who leans right, and Dan Lauria, our Tip O'Neill actor, is an old-fashioned Democrat. They did media together, but those differences didn't separate them. They're both great actors and great Americans. 

A fellow RedState writer asks: what was your motivation, and why a biopic on Reagan at this time in history?

The funny answer is that when you spend 20 years making a movie, you lose the right to claim you brilliantly timed its release. We certainly didn’t plan for “Reagan” or the Director's Cut now to arrive at this particular political moment. COVID delayed us, the war in Ukraine delayed us, the actors’ strike complicated things, and the movie took a long and strange road to theaters. My motivation was much simpler: I thought this was one of the great American stories that hadn’t been properly told on film. Reagan’s life has everything you want in a movie — an alcoholic father, a small-town childhood, Hollywood, a failed marriage, political reinvention, an assassination attempt, a love story, the presidency, and a confrontation with a nuclear superpower. If you made all of that up, somebody would tell you the script was unbelievable. But perhaps the timing ultimately worked in our favor. We released a movie about optimism at a fairly pessimistic moment. We released a movie about friendship across political lines when Americans barely speak to one another across political lines. And we released a movie about a president who believed America wasn’t finished. Maybe that’s why the movie connected the way it did. Reagan used to talk about the “DP” — the divine plan. After twenty years trying to make this movie, I’m probably wise enough not to argue with the timing.

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