<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  By winter&amp;#039;s end Beau Willimon will have been labeled a cynic multiple times. It&amp;#039;s inevitable: His debut film, The Ides of March, for which he received an Oscar nod last year, was about a presidential hopeful, played by George Clooney, whose sheen of populist goodness obscures the human casualties of his ambition, and the 35-year-old screenwriter&amp;#039;s latest project, the Netflix series House of Cards (produced by David Fincher, who also directed some episodes), centers on a scheming, Machiavellian congressman played by Kevin Spacey. &amp;quot;You can call them cynical, but I think they&amp;#039;re just realistic,&amp;quot; Willimon says of his stories, before arguing that his take on the world is actually a sort of idealism. &amp;quot;Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to,&amp;quot; he says. The former navy brat wasn&amp;#039;t always politically minded. He was a Columbia undergrad and an aspiring painter when a friend, &amp;quot;political wonderboy&amp;quot; Jay Carson (Howard Dean&amp;#039;s spokesman in the 2004 presidential election and Hillary Clinton&amp;#039;s in 2008), hired him to work on campaigns in 1998. It wasn&amp;#039;t until 2004, when Willimon served as head of Iowa press events for Dean, that he was inspired to write Farragut North, the play that eventually became The Ides of March. &amp;quot;Like any young person who gets into a political campaign, I joined out of a highfalutin desire to change the world. But you start to see the sort of tactics people use. You start to see politics not only in the macro but in the micro of the campaign itself. Some people get turned off by this side of it. Other people are drawn to it.&amp;quot;  Willimon counts himself among the latter. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like a high-stakes chess game.&amp;quot; He spent the two years after finishing Farragut North fielding rejection letters from theaters before putting the script in a drawer, only to have a new agent insist on sending it around L.A. as a writing sample. &amp;quot;Then one of those Hollywood moments happened: We got a call saying, &amp;#039;We&amp;#039;d like to turn this into a movie with Clooney and DiCaprio producing.&amp;#039; Suddenly that whole town starts paying attention to you.&amp;quot; Willimon had never intended for his follow-up project to be another political drama, but a call from David Fincher can quickly make you forget your fear of being pigeonholed. House of Cards, which stars Robin Wright and Kate Mara alongside Spacey, is a reimagining of a critically acclaimed 1990 BBC miniseries. Fincher and Willimon originally planned to make it with a network like HBO or AMC. &amp;quot;But Netflix presented us with two things no one else could: two seasons guaranteed up front, and complete creative control,&amp;quot; says Willimon, who hired his buddy Carson as a script consultant &amp;quot;to make sure we didn&amp;#039;t completely embarrass ourselves&amp;quot; with regard to Washington minutiae. &amp;quot;There are no script notes from executives. We have final cut. I mean, David is the one cutting the sizzle reel, taking the photos for the marketing campaign. We&amp;#039;re very much our own little film studio.&amp;quot; The result is a dark, suspenseful tale about an irresistible antihero in the vein of the current television characters Willimon admires: Mad Men&amp;#039;s Don Draper, Breaking Bad&amp;#039;s Walter White. &amp;quot;But the main character in House of Cards, Francis Underwood, isn&amp;#039;t linear like Walter White in terms of the descent of his morality,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;With Francis you have someone who surprises you with moments of humanity, because he is amoral to begin with, and unabashedly so. He&amp;#039;s someone who starts out on the sociopathic end of the spectrum.&amp;quot; In other words, someone Willimon wouldn&amp;#039;t mind voting for. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/reviews/a990/beau-willimon-house-of-cards-interview/>