He practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap. He feigned – with the help of Meg Ryan – the best screen orgasm ever in When Harry Met Sally. And he got Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise to shout at each other in A Few Good Men. But Rob Reiner[1] has no wish to retread old glories, not when there’s vital work to be done. “I’m 71 now,” he says, “and I just want to do things I want to do.”
This month sees the release of Shock & Awe, his second political drama in a row after LBJ, which starred Woody Harrelson as President Lyndon B Johnson. While that was set in the civil rights era, his latest – which again stars Harrelson and includes a turn from Reiner himself – is in 2003, in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, when news agency Knight Ridder were a lone dissenting journalistic voice in America during the search for weapons of mass destruction.
The Bronx-born Reiner had already lived through the Vietnam war; the Iraq invasion “made no sense to me”, he says. “I just couldn’t believe we were going to war twice based on lies in my lifetime … the rest of the world pretty much knew this was a really ill-advised foreign policy move. Probably in America, it was maybe the worst ever in our history.” Making a film about the lead-up to the Iraq war felt right. “Nobody had really made a movie about how we got there and why we were there.”
With America now under the shadow of the Trump administration, Reiner feels his film resonates with the present. “The press in America
