The Reykjavik Summit—when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev talked in person in 1986—is not known as an iconic bit of American history. But the face-to-face conversation between the leaders, held over Oct. 11 and 12 in the Icelandic capital, proved to be an important step toward the end of the Cold War.
The summit (or meeting, depending on who you ask) came after “an unexpected invitation from Gorbachev,” says Pete Souza, the former Presidential photographer for Reagan. At the time the Reagan administration refused to call it a summit.
“Before two leaders like that have a summit meeting, there's lots of prep work that goes into it,” recalls Souza. “But this was very last minute. The Reagan administration went to great effort leading up to Reykjavik, to not call it a summit. They’d say, ‘It’s just a meeting, and we’re not characterizing it as a summit.’”
The summit’s purpose was to discuss the arms controls between the two nations, in hopes of bringing an end to the long-lasting threat of nuclear war hanging over both countries, and the world as a whole. Over 30 hours, Reagan and Gorbachev fiercely debated in an effort to bring peace and the end of the Cold War. Now, a new film from writer-director Michael Russell Gunn, The Brink of War, gives this historical moment a worthy spotlight. The film stars Jeff Daniels as Reagan, Jared Harris as Gorbachev, and J.K. Simmons as Secretary of State George Shultz.
For Gunn, the idea for The Brink of War came from a meeting he had with the real George Shultz, to whom the film is dedicated. Shultz told him all about the Reykjavik Summit. “I had never heard of this summit before,” says Gunn, “but once I found out I couldn’t stop thinking of it.”
There was one particular detail from their conversation that made Gunn realize the Reykjavik Summit was a pivotal moment in world history. “Schultz told me he asked Gorbachev years later—and I included this in the movie—what changed to bring an end to the Cold War,” says Gunn. “Gorbachev responded with one word: ‘Reykjavik.’” From that moment, Gunn knew he had a movie.
Shultz detailed a memory to Gunn about how he’d stand outside the meeting room when Gorbachev and Reagan went in, and these two military officers would be standing there, each of them holding a nuclear football. “If things had gone badly, Reagan and Gorbachev could walk out, press the buttons, and end it all,” says Gunn. “The idea of these two military officers with all the power in the world literally in their hands, was an extraordinary memory to share, and an extraordinary thing for us to film.”
Gunn was struck by how generous Shultz was with his time, and he gave the filmmaker something that would allow for an exceptionally realistic approach: the declassified transcripts of the meeting. The transcripts allowed Gunn another first-hand account of the summit, as well as the opportunity to lift dialogue directly from the real conversations into the script. A number of conversations are nearly verbatim to what the transcripts show, though Gunn admits to finessing certain moments for cinematic purposes. “I tried to make it as close as I possibly could,” says Gunn.
The only points Gunn really departed from the transcripts were things they didn’t reveal. “I didn’t have transcripts of what was going on with the advisors, or what was happening with the first ladies,” he says. For that, he researched several books, pointing to Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris and Gorbachev by Willaim Taubman to help gather a fuller sense of the people surrounding the leaders.
Gunn calls himself a lifelong fan of Souza’s photography, and he pulled the original proofs from Souza’s summit photography at the National Security Archives. On a whim, he cold emailed Souza to see if he was available to join them on the film shoot to produce the film’s still photography. To Gunn’s delight, Souza accepted. The veteran photographer provided Gunn great assistance in faithfully recreating the summit, and the photos Souza took have a striking resemblance to the original photos from ‘86.
The summit itself was an incredibly tense showdown that occurred over a brief 30 hours. The discussions of arms controls with a view to bring an end to the Cold War came tantalizingly close to fruition. At one point during the summit, Reagan and Gorbachev were close to agreeing on a deal that would remove every single nuclear missile from the planet, a moment in the transcript that Gunn was particularly stunned by. “Gorbachev proposed eliminating all these different classes of weapons that the Americans weren’t expecting,” recalls Souza. “There was a moment when Reagan and his team thought ‘This can be historic.’ There was a real excitement about it.”
That excitement was all too brief. As a condition of eliminating these weapons, Gorbachev demanded an end to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed “Star Wars,” a missile defense system proposed to protect the United States from attack. “The whole SDI thing doomed that hope. Gorbachev wanted Reagan to not go any further with the SDI. That was the sticking point, and the mood changed to disappointment,” says Souza.
“My main takeaway of President Reagan behind the scenes was he had such an even keeled disposition,” says Souza. “It would take so much to get him angry or pissed off. One of the few times where he got pissed off was at the end of Reykjavik.”
The summit was considered a failure at the time, with no agreement struck at the end. However, it ultimately provided a breakthrough between Reagan and Gorbachev. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed on December 8, 1987, which was an enormous step forward to the end of the Cold War, which ultimately concluded with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. If it wasn’t for the Reykjavik summit, it’s likely that treaty never would have been signed.
Gunn hopes the film can show audiences that if we work with people who disagree with us, we can forge a better future.
“For one, I want the audience to walk out of the cinema with hope. That as divided as we are, it's been worse,” Gunn says. “We were literally about to blow up the world with enemies, and we found a way out of that. The second thing I want people to walk out with is courage. It takes courage to engage with people you disagree with. We've decided that listening means we agree, and that's not true.”
Adds Gunn: “They didn't agree, but they listened to one another, and they found a way to make a better, safer world.”