Name: The Untold Story Behind Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech | Producer Mark Joseph
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T21:37:06.000Z
Description: Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.”

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.”

“Reagan” is a biographical movie starring Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Jon Voight as KGB agent Viktor Petrovich.

In this episode, Joseph shares why it took nearly 20 years to bring this film to the big screen, and what it was like to film during the height of COVID-era restrictions.

Joseph, who’s also the founder of MJM Entertainment, is the author of “Making Reagan: A Memoir From the Producer of the Reagan Film.”

The movie is based on Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”

That book, Joseph said, helped him understand Reagan and his passionate drive to end what he called the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union.

“There have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books written on Ronald Reagan, but Kengor was the only one who went to the church Reagan grew up in and said: ‘Can I see the sermons that young Ronald Reagan would have heard as a child?’ And the current pastor said they’re in the basement, in the box. Nobody has ever asked to see them before.’ So when he opened the box, he found a lot of anti-communist sermons by the preacher,” Joseph said.

The film received sharply divided reviews: On “Rotten Tomatoes,” 98 percent of the audience gives a positive rating, but only 18 percent of critics’ reviews are positive.

“We have the greatest gap between critics and film goers of any movie ever made in Hollywood history. … I’m really proud of that. I don’t make movies for critics. I make movies for the film goers,” Joseph said.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of  NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Mark Joseph, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Mark Joseph:

Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it took you 20-odd years.

Mr. Joseph:

19, but who’s counting?

To make the Reagan film. That’s a lot of dedication. Is that typical in the industry? You know, what was driving you here?

It can happen in our industry. And people that are far more successful than I, like Steven Spielberg and others, it’s taken them years to make a movie. So it’s not uncommon, but it is a long time. I had a lot fewer gray hairs when I started this movie. But I talk about in the book, what started everything was I was driving in the Midwest with my wife and four children in a minivan, just driving, minding my own business, driving down the highway. And I’m pulled over for speeding.

And the officer said, you are 20 miles over the speed limit and you have to appear in court in person. And I thought, this is crazy. I can’t come back here. And he said, no, you have to appear tomorrow in court. But I looked at the ticket and it said, you must appear in court in Dixon, Illinois. I knew that was Ronald Reagan’s hometown. So I had unknowingly been driving through Ronald Reagan’s hometown. I’m pulled over for speeding and I have a day to kill in that hometown. And so that’s where all this started.

Fascinating. And first of all, I love the film, for full disclosure. Part of the reason we’re doing the interview, and, you know, you captured something in there which I guess I wanted to believe, that it was Reagan’s faith and strong anti-communism that really drove him. I feel like that comes out in the film, but the film has also been criticized saying that’s too simplistic. How do you react to that?

Reagan was a simple man from a simple place in a simple time. And so I would embrace that and say that’s who he was. But at the same time, there were complexities to him as well. The anti-communist part in particular, what really changed the ballgame for me and helped me understand Reagan was to understand where the anti-communist impulses came from.

We based the movie on a book called The Crusader, and that author, Paul Kengor. There have been hundreds and hundreds of books written on Ronald Reagan, but he was the only one who went to the church Reagan grew up in and said, can I see the sermons that young Ronald Reagan would have heard as a child?

And the current Pastor said, they’re in the basement in a box. Nobody has ever asked to see them before. So when he opened the box, he found a lot of anti-communist sermons by the preacher. And so now everything made sense to my mind that this child was almost programmed as a young child to have an impulse to want to oppose communism from his preacher. And then we learned that an anti-communist activist named B.E. Kirchman visited Reagan’s church when he was 17-years-old.

So now all the pieces are fitting together in the puzzle that Reagan’s work in Hollywood—what did he do? Was he a great actor? No. What did he do? He opposed the communist infiltration of Hollywood, came to Washington, D.C., and opposed it. So I could see the arc of his story when I discovered that. And it made a lot of things make sense about who he was and what his job was.

I wonder, maybe it’s just, you know, America and frankly, everywhere in the world, we seem to have this weird love affair with communism. Like what I mean is, I was just thinking about Greg Lukianoff doing a recent commentary about Lenin. Lenin was a uniquely evil, horrible being, but sometimes we think Lenin was actually, you know, just a little bit bad, and it was really Stalin that was the really bad guy.

But Lenin’s whole approach was to use terror, right, to drive people into submission, right? Like he invented it as a method, right? To basically facilitate, you know, this perpetual revolution, so to speak. I wonder if that’s the reason that people are not wanting to believe that it was maybe part of it was really as simple as him understanding how bad the system was and everything was animated by that.

This man, B.E. Kirchman, was a Soviet refugee who toured America and would give these speeches at different churches and different functions, warning America about this. Yes, there is some kind of an instinct for all people, I think, to flirt with communism and socialism. But ultimately, socialism has to be enforced at the point of a gun at some point. And that’s the problem.

There are various polls that show 40 percent of American young people think socialism is a great idea. Sounds great. Let’s all share. But at some point, you run out of other people’s money, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, and out comes the gun and the bayonet. And that’s what they don’t realize. I told John Voight, who played Victor in our movie, this is going to be the greatest acting stretch of your career for Hollywood’s biggest Right-winger to play a communist. That’s acting, but he took it on.

He told me something I’ve never forgotten: he was in the Soviet Union before, when it was the Soviet Union, and afterwards when it was Russia. He said, I noticed that the people’s eyes were dead in the Soviet Union. When I came back later, their eyes were alive. There’s something about the eyes being the window to the soul. When people have freedom, their eyes come alive. I thought that was fascinating.

So something like the distinction between a totalitarian system and while emerging out of one or trying to emerge. I mean, they weren’t fully successful, clearly, with doing that. But that’s what you’re talking about.

Yes. I understand why young people are attracted to it, but they need to hear the testimony of people who lived through it. If I were in charge of America, I would say that only Cubans and Vietnamese should run for office in America because they understand their parents fled these evil systems. My son and I get our haircuts from a Vietnamese barber, and I always say, please tell my son the story of how you got in that rickety boat and crossed the water and risked your life to get out because you wanted freedom, because my son needs to hear that story.

What about Poles?

Poles too. Well, we’ll make a special exception for Poles.

Well, no, I just, to your point, I just had Robert Kiyosaki on the show, and I somehow didn’t know how deeply anti-communist he was. Right? I was, you know, I wanted to talk to him about this rich, basic, rich dad, poor dad approach, right? That he’s, you know, become very famous. I think he told me he sold 48 million of those books; like, that’s unbelievable, right? But no, it turns out that, again, because of that experience, right? He was actually in Vietnam during the war. He was deeply anti-communist. I wasn’t surprised, right? I wasn’t surprised. That’s part of the lesson in the book too, but I hadn’t really conceived of it that way, if that makes sense.

Right, yes.

Speaking of testimonials, okay, you, I think, interviewed at least 50 people from Reagan’s life for this whole process. What was the thing that you learned that, of course, you established that anti-communism was a central tenet. But what other things did you learn that were perhaps surprising?

Yes, I spent time with about 50 or 55 of those who knew him; Supreme Court justices like Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy. There was Judge William Clark, Edwin Meese, and also the surgeon who operated on him after he was shot, who is still alive, by the way. Just fascinating, fascinating stories. And I would kind of steal little lines from each one and put them into the movie, particularly Judge Clark, who told me during the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan came to him and said, what should I do? Clark told him, do what you do best: tell him the truth. Don’t lie, don’t obfuscate, don’t stall, just tell him the truth. So I stole that line and put it in the movie, little bits and pieces of him like that.

Also, you know, I talked to one of his aides, Peter Hannaford. Frankly, everybody loves Reagan, and so everybody says nice things about him. I said to Peter, you got to help me out here. I’m trying to make a movie about a human being, and he can’t just be perfect. You got to give me something, not dirt, but something.

I asked , what would make him upset? He said, if we overscheduled him, he would have a flash of temper. I said, tell me what happened. So one day we scheduled him, he came and saw the schedule, and he threw his glasses across the table and said, fellas, I cannot do all this in one day. I said, great. Now we have a human being who gets upset just like the rest of us. So those are the kinds of things that really helped us grasp the character.

By the way, you can see this in the campaign. You see one or two examples of that little flash of temper in San Diego on the last day of the 1980 campaign. He’s being heckled, and he finally turns to the guy and says, ah, shut up. It’s like, okay, that’s a human like the rest of us. He’s not Mr. Perfect. That’s what makes the movie exciting—that he has the same foibles that we all have, but he overcame those. My original director for the film was the director of Rocky, John Avildsen.

John passed away at 81 years of age before we began, but he used to tell me, don’t forget that Rocky is not about boxing; it just happens to be his job. It’s really about the story of a man overcoming the odds. And he said, that’s what our movie Reagan has to be about—not about politics; that’s his job. But it’s really the story of a man who doesn’t reach his destiny until 69 years of age. And he has lots of failures along the way. He’s not a great actor; he’s not a great radio broadcaster, but that was all preparation for becoming president.

So back to the beginning, why did it take 20 years? I mean, it sounds like you lost an important director, and that must have played a huge role.

Yes, we had a lot of setbacks. So just to go through the list, our director passed away at age 81. So we found a new director to take his place, Sean McNamara. He did a terrific job. COVID really slowed us down.

Tell me, so let’s stop there for a sec. Tell me a bit about the reality of trying to film during COVID.

We were the only major motion picture that was crazy enough to film during COVID. And my co-producer, John Sullivan, came to me and said, I need a decision from you. Should we wait until it’s over or just shoot? And I thought about it for a second. I had friends dying on me. I thought, if I died almost making this movie after 18 years, I’d be pretty pathetic. So I thought, you know, let’s just go. I don’t know what that means exactly. It’s sort of like driving in a snowstorm and you can only see about two feet in front of you. But I just gave the go order.

And so we began right in the middle of all of it. I asked the governor of Oklahoma, will you shut us down? He said, no, I won’t shut you down, I promise. But the federal government did. We had to operate by CDC guidelines. So twice we had to shut down for ten days each time. You know, there are a lot of people to this day that think that I saw him like this the whole time, so I don’t know what they look like really because we had masks all the time.

When I arrived on the set, I said, can I go to a restaurant?” and our medical person said, absolutely not. I said, can I go to Walmart? She said, that’s the most dangerous place in the entire city. I said, how am I going to eat?” She just kind of stared at me and said, we’ll deliver groceries to your front door every morning. So it was really, really difficult. But we got through it.

I would also say, the actor strike shut us down for 108 days. We also had issues because we had people doing special effects overseas. And so when the war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, we had to stop all companies working with those companies. So then we had to start all over again. And then just having investors who would cancel or various setbacks along the way just made it a very, very tough experience.

Mr. Jekielek:

But you wouldn’t even notice that there are any COVID restrictions in the film somehow. Somehow you very cunningly avoided that.

It was very tough. And, you know, we would have people on set whose job was to report back to officials, hey, are they keeping all the rules or not? And so, you know, if a mask would slip off your nose, you would literally have somebody in your face saying, get that mask over your nose. I mean, it was just really tough.

But I have to give Dennis Quaid the credit. He just really worked his heart out. And, you know, he’d be watching videos on YouTube of Reagan just before the scene began. But there was one time you know we really wanted to avoid doing an SNL [Saturday Night Live] impression of Reagan because there had been a lot of fun comedic versions of Reagan over the years; Johnny Carson, yes, so many others.

In fact, Dennis’s brother Randy did a Reagan impersonation for SNL one time. I remember one time coming up to Dennis between scenes and I said, just be Dennis Quaid; don’t try too hard to be Ronald Reagan. You already have a lot in common with Reagan. And I thought he did.

You know, by the way, of those impressions, I keep thinking of Robin Williams live at the Met. There was this— that’s right, that’s what I remember. But yes, it was also such a lie, actually, right? Because they kind of made him out to be this kind of idiot.

My favorite one was SNL. If you notice that one, I think it was Hartman who played a version of Reagan that was very interesting, because everyone else would do the silly version. He’d be taking pictures of the kids and signing autographs. As soon as the kids left the room, all of a sudden Reagan would pull down a map of Nicaragua. And he would turn into this, we’re going to invade here and go here. And so that was the one that was the exception, almost as the opposite. That there was a cold warrior behind the facade.

Because it took some time. But, you know, I think it was Kyron Skinner who definitively showed that, in fact, he was the author of a lot of the policy.

Yes. One of his aides, Dick Allen, told me that around 1978 they toured the wall in West Berlin. And Reagan said to his aides, we’ve got to find a way to bring this down. And, you know, they and we all at the time thought, well, isn’t that nice? And I would like, you know, I’d like to ask Santa Claus for this for Christmas. And even when he said, tear down this wall in 1987, I remember watching him, and I wasn’t a critic, but I saw that and said, well, isn’t that a nice thought? It’s not going to happen in our lifetime. But he believed it. The rest of us all thought maybe he was a crazy old man, but I think he really believed that it could be achieved.

Well, you know, there’s, I don’t know if it’s famous, but there’s the whole, apparently they tried to remove that line from the speech multiple times, right?

We have it in the movie. The State Department folks, with people like Trump and Reagan with all their statements, they don’t like that kind of stuff, the State Department. So they tried to take it out. I met with George Shultz twice, and definitely, he was trying to get it out. And he begged President Reagan, please don’t say this. This is not helpful to us.

But Reagan felt like it was important. And these younger aides kind of egged him on. And so he kept it in the speech. Of course, it’s a central moment in the film and a central moment in history, actually. Yes, I think in our film, Gorbachev is watching that scene, and he sort of, in real life, I heard from somebody that worked with him that he was sort of, oh, there he goes again, that crazy Reagan. He’s sort of making fun of it, but I think it had an impact on the leadership.

There was a Russian general who got drunk, and as they were drinking, in their drunken state, he said, Reagan was the first person who told us what we already knew about ourselves, that we were an evil empire. But I think it’s a psychological blow that somebody would say that to you, because all the diplomatic niceties would keep people from being honest. And Reagan calling them the evil empire was a psychological blow to their psyches.

Fascinating. Well, you know, I’m just going to look up the name. Yes, Viktor Petrovich was the name of the John Voight character, right? That’s right. So let’s talk about Viktor Petrovich a little bit, this character John Voight plays that is sort of looking at Reagan as this threat and explaining why he’s a threat to the Soviet Union. Is there any truth to this character?

No, that’s the character that we created, but it’s a composite based on the fact that we know that agents followed him. We know that the Soviet newspaper Izvestia first covered him in 1947 when he was testifying before Congress. So we kind of took that basic nugget that they had begun following him. I was inspired by two movies in that sense.

One was, if you remember in the Rocky movie, there’s a scene where Rocky is challenging the heavyweight champion of the world at the time. The champ is worried about business deals, and he’s not taking boxing seriously; he’s making the deals. There’s one guy in his camp who’s watching TV and watching Rocky Balboa train, punching a bunch of meat. He says, champ, you got to look at this guy. Nobody’s paying attention except for that one guy who sees the threat that Rocky poses to the champ.

Also, there’s the movie Blow Out with John Travolta. The idea that one person sees the threat, but the entire group doesn’t. That was kind of our conceit with Victor, that he’s that character who spotted the danger of Reagan years before. When he comes in on election day and tells Brezhnev, Reagan is going to be elected, he says, I’ve been warning you guys about this man for 40 years, and nobody would listen to me. That was always the fun character.

But the first 10 minutes of the film, I could take credit for it, but I actually had a dream, and I dreamed those first 10 minutes. I don’t remember my dreams in the morning, so as I was having this odd dream, I said to myself, if I don’t wake up, I will never remember this in the morning. So I woke myself up and wrote it all down, went back to sleep, and that became the first 10 minutes with the KGB agent and everything.

Fascinating, so it’s fun to see the dream in reality. This was how many years in?

I had just hired my writer. I would very apologetically call my writer and say, listen, I’m so sorry to tell you this, but what do you think of this idea with the KGB agent? Luckily, he said, that’s great, I’m going to run with it. He ran with that, but yes, we wanted to create that kind of fun idea that one guy saw the threat; the rest just thought he was a stupid actor. All those years, he was kind of warning the group, but they didn’t pay any attention to him.

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