“I knew those kinds of girls,” Carville retorts. “I grew up necking with them in the back of my daddy’s car.”

That day, Carville was just warming up for a fundraiser arranged by Thomason, where he would deliver one of his vintage speeches about the Republicans throwing doggie doo-doo all over the noble Clinton presidency. By the end of the day, Thornton confessed that he was exhausted from just watching Carville. “He’s a brilliant guy, and he’s so full of piss and vinegar that I made the decision that I wasn’t going to imitate him,” he tells me. “To imitate him, you need Rich Little. The only thing I did take from him is that when he really has something to say, he walks up some stairs and stands on the stage, even if he’s in a one-level room.”

The most expensive movie about a political campaign, Primary Colors, cost $65 million (excluding marketing). It has 97 characters and 130 sets, including a stunning Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, at which Stanton gorges on jelly doughnuts in the wee hours of the morning to calm his nerves. Taking a break from editing, Nichols sits in his comfortable midtown Manhattan office, explaining how he is turning the Primary Colors, satire on it’s head. “It’s a drama because it gets real upsetting towards the end,” he explains. “There are strange emotions when you begin to think, 'Fuck, [the film] is about us, not the [politicians], and what’s happening to us, and do we mean this to be happening to us?'" Nichols says he's trying to get to the nature of presidential infidelity. "For centuries we have said, 'He was a great man. Unfortunately, he couldn't keep his zipper closed,'" Nichols observes. "Nobody has ever yet put the two together and wondered, Does that come with it? What if it's one thing, not two things?' A passion for people is expressed sexually too. We know it from real-life Democrats."

But both Nichols and the actors insist that during the filming, the Clinton connection seldom came up. One day, when a wardrobe assistant told Thompson that her outfit looked as if it could have come from Hillary's closet, Thompson snapped, "I'm not playing Hillary."