How Cold War Trauma And ‘70s Cinema Inspired Reagan-Gorbachev Drama ‘The Brink Of War’

WNM | Aug 14, 2026 at 2:00 AM

Michael Russell Gunn vividly remembers the look on his parents’ faces when the Berlin Wall finally fell in November 1989.
The pair came extremely close to reaching a deal that would have completely rid the world of nuclear weapons after just two days of deliberations, but talks collapsed at the last minute.
Wanting to capture that sense of distance between the journalists and a watershed moment in history, he and Górka utilized long lenses and smash zooms as a way to recall the political and paranoid thrillers of the 1970s (think Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men).