A: Art doesn't have to preach. But I think you have to be very obtuse to come out of there that we feel this is necessary.

Q: If Mckay in the course of the film having been introduced to political chicanery, going through all the whoring and what not you had him go through had say lost.

A: He didn't doe a lot of whoring. He loses himself in the feedback. That's important. It goes against the back room image most people have of politics. This is what happens in real life. Most of our politicians are not evil. In fact, Bill McKay might become an effective senator with a good liberal voting record...But in fact I think it is very clear he loses something as a human being.

Q: All this is painfully obvious. But what exactly is he as a human being. He seems like a nice fellow. His wife comes across as a very unsavory character but she throws the most serious doubt on his character in the whole film when she says. You could win if you take it seriously. We don't know enough about him to know how that registers.

A: That may be a valid criticism. Look, you say "in the context of easy ironies that the film presents, in which all men are power-hungry or venal on a solely personal level," ...in a sense, all political people are on a personal level, but I think we show relatively idealistic people in this film.

Q: But not in the political arena...I'm not disturbed that you paint people in politics that way, but I think there may be a level beyond that, where a candidate may recognize the system cynically for what it is, but use it as a tool.

A: That would be great, but that's another film, that's Ted Kennedy. That's also McKay a little further along, or Marvin Lucas.

Q: Right, I think he's the hero of the film.

A: You say: "I presume that attitude the filmmakers wanted to express was 'this is the way the system works, and if we want to change it from within, we'll have to temper our idealism.' That's total bullshit. All the film is saying is this is the atmosphere, these are the pressures.

Q: Art is reportage.

A: Yes, it certainly is. We did try to avoid a lot of cliches. We spent an awful lot of time just on the crowds, the overwhelming feedback. Just the fact that we choose to show this shows we think this is important.

Q: Then an important question is "who are you addressing this film to?"

A: Not necessarily, not if you don't necessarily think a film is a political act. I hope everybody sees this. Everybody could have learned something from it. The film is a human act. There are, of couse, compromises, simply on the level that the word "fuck" isn't used so we wouldn't get a R rating.

You say we're never sure why McKay goes along with it. You may be right about that, but we do try to hint at those reasons. If you just sit there, you'll see a human being who is struggling...he does not have as concrete an ideology as a student, even as a Harvard student. McKay's downfall is he thinks he can do things his own way. One of the marvelous things about Lucas is Lucas knows he can't, but dangles this in front of him. Then McKay becomes trapped. If he loses, he won't only lose, he'll be humiliated.

Politicans are amazingly weak people. They can't say no to anybody. So they get surrounded by people like Marvin Lucas who baby them and manipulate them along. And very few of them are ideological, though they may give a series of ideological speeches. They are the kind of people who are very sensitive to how they are coming across.