Was Strathairn disappointed the film doesn’t include much on Murrow’s personal life? Strathairn said, “That would have been a different movie because his trajectory, his life, his journey from North Carolina to New York was quite an amazing journey. So it would have been a different picture.
There are certain things in his life that I was glad to become aware of, to try and get a sense of where the integrity was grounded, where the courage came from, where his sense of professionalism came from. How did he come to speak that way having come from North Carolina to the lumber fields in the Northwest to England? It was a vast amount of stuff. It would have been much, more difficult to honor him as responsibly as this picture did. Essentially it was an ensemble piece and he’s inside this event and a biopic would have put him outside of everything, although I think he merits that kind of respect.”
David Strathairn on the Fine Line Between Doing an Impression and Creating a Character: “It was probably mimicry for the most part, just to find the way he sat in the chair. Curiously enough, I seem to only recall once or twice seeing him take a puff on a cigarette. Smoke went in and didn’t come out right away. That I had to imagine, but the cigarette was always there. He never went to it [like] you think a smoker might. It was like a pen in your pocket and occasionally you use it. It was kind of like that.
He wrote as an essayist almost as a historian would. Unlike the copy today which is so quick, you could almost say his sentence structure was Faulknarian in a way compared to how terse and quick – I don’t know the exact grammatical term to describe it – but it’s not nearly as fluid or involved. Sentences aren’t as long as they were. He was very literate. He was a speech and drama major at Washington State University so I think he carried that education with him.
I might be speaking out of school here, but public speaking and that kind of writing do not go hand and hand today. Rarely do you hear an anchor newsman who, let alone given the time to speak like that, will sound like that. Lou Anderson, who was his speech teacher at Washington State University, recognized something in him and she always said he was her masterpiece. He always remembered her as one of the most important women in his life. She honed something.
I’m sure it was an innate ability to tell a long story, which he learned in the lumber fields in the Northwest and coming from a great tradition probably of storytellers in North Carolina in the tobacco fields. That’s how people [got] their information. He probably enjoyed a nice long-winded story, and he could apply his intellect to his profession thereafter.
That’s the wonderful thing about the film. You hear the way these people talked much faster, with a different rhythm and vernacular structure to their sentences. He read all his copy. He had written it down; he was the one typing it out so his relationship with the camera was kind of perfunctory. But he always wanted to make sure he said exactly what he meant to say, so it was there so he could read it. He was a radio man, I think, all the way to the end.”
Page 2 David Strathairn on Journalists, the Look of "Good Night, and Good Luck," and Smoking
