If Tuesday’s election didn’t sate your thirst for back-stabbing politics and blatant public deceit, then the cineplex has just the thing for you this weekend: Fair Game. With the gritty, hyperkinetic sensibility that he demonstrated in The Bourne Identity, director Doug Liman’s film re-creates L’Affaire Valerie Plame and hearkens back to great 70s political thrillers such as Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and All The President’s Men. Part political exposé, part spy thriller, Fair Game aims to remind you that the government once used trumped-up claims of nuclear Armageddon to justify a protracted and destructive ground war in the Middle East—in case you forgot. Liman’s father was chief counsel for the Senate during the Iran-Contra scandal, and he uses his intimate understanding of America’s intelligence network to paint a detailed picture of how the C.I.A. really works.

But what was Liman’s real secret weapon? The real Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. agent whose politically motivated unmasking could be traced all the way back to the White House. VF Daily caught up with Ms. Plame by phone to find out what it’s like to have one’s own public ordeal dramatized for public consumption—and to see how well her C.I.A. training holds up under the brutal, relentless questioning of a film blogger.John Lopez: What I like about Fair Game is that it starts off like a *Bourne-*style thriller, but then also shows the workaday world of C.I.A. operatives, like yourself, which is something we don’t get to see too often.

Valerie Plame: It’s much more grounded in reality. It’s all about human relationships. Joe [Wilson, Plame’s husband] and I were both consultants on the film, and the writers—Jez and John-Henry Butterworth—worked really hard to absorb everything out there. Of course, it’s an hour-and-45-minute movie, not a documentary, but I think it’s really powerful, and I’m really proud.

What’s it like to relive everything, except with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts in your places?

Surreal! How lucky are we to have Naomi Watts and Sean Penn playing us? We’ve seen the final cut now a couple times, and the scenes with the marriage fraying at the edges are still very difficult to watch. However, our hope was that no matter your political persuasion, you’re taken with the idea that it’s important to hold power in check. These are issues we’ve been grappling with since the Constitution was written: how you hold your government to account for its words and deeds. It’s all about power and the abuse of power.

What’s really interesting is how you show that abuse of power working not through secret cabal-like meetings, but through the mundane corridors of bureaucracy.

Well, I wouldn’t call Cheney’s view of the world with his 1 percent doctrine mundane in any way. The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers. Why did we go to war with Iraq? The American people were told there was an imminent nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein, that was the core of the argument, “we don’t want to see the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud.” Now here we are. My husband was just in Baghdad on business maybe three weeks ago, and he was slack-jawed at the destruction. The civil society has been completely destroyed, and we know from those recent Wikileaks that the numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties are far higher than any official source has given us. But I see your point, because there wasn’t just one evil genius rubbing his hands like in a Bond movie.