Romney also seemed eager to put much less frivolous points on the record. He spoke dismissively about his visit to the White House shortly after the 2012 election — the cursory meeting in which the former combatants are supposed to play gracious, take pictures together and make noises about issues on which they might work together in the future. “It was intended to check a box,” Romney said of the president’s invitation. He was not offered any follow-up, which was typical, Romney said, according to what he heard from some of his executive friends. “No one gets the impression that what they are saying is being incorporated,” he told me. “I won’t mention who it was, but I met with one of the nation’s top Republican leaders, and he said, ‘You know the strange thing is that the president seems to answer to only two people — Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama.’ ”

Romney derided Obama for his continual complaints about Republican intransigence. “That’s the nature of democracy,” he said, shaking his head with an exaggerated grimace. He contrasted this with the exemplary bipartisan record of, for instance, himself. When he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney reminded me, he always worked with the state’s liberal stalwart, Ted Kennedy. “Ted Kennedy would do the work,” Romney said, in contrast to the state’s other longtime senator. “John Kerry was always in front of the camera but not out doing the hard work.” He called Hillary Clinton an “enabler” of Obama’s foreign policy and said he was concerned by the isolationist inclination of likely Republican presidential candidates like Rand Paul. Romney told me that he was more passionate about foreign affairs than he showed in the 2012 campaign, which was largely given over to domestic affairs. It went without saying that this probably wouldn’t be the case in 2016.

“Mitt,” which was released in January, portrayed the candidate as a family man — vulnerable, funny and cognizant of the absurdity of his undertaking. “One of the big frustrations a lot of us had on the campaign is that people weren’t seeing the guy we all know in private,” said Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate in 2012, offering a familiar complaint. “The ‘Mitt’ documentary was a very good picture of that guy.” I asked Ryan if the film’s warm portrayal might argue for a looser, less scripted approach to campaigns. “The pressure you get from the consultant class to conform to the norm and do these stock standard things drives me nuts, personally,” he said.

When I asked Romney the same question, however, he said the exact opposite. “There will be no free time in the back of the plane where you’d just go back and shoot the breeze with the media,” he told me. He would do this occasionally, but his aides argued against it. “They were always afraid that, you know, I’d make some little joke or someone would ask some question that couldn’t be answered — you know, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ ” Romney told me that during the campaign, the F.B.I. informed him that a foreign government — he wouldn’t say which — was reading his emails. This was another reminder that there could be no safe zone, no such thing as an unplugged candidate. “The era of spontaneity in politics is over,” he declared, as I immediately wondered when it had started.

“I was talking to one of my political advisers,” Romney continued, “and I said: ‘If I had to do this again, I’d insist that you literally had a camera on me at all times” — essentially employing his own tracker, as opposition researchers call them. “I want to be reminded that this is not off the cuff.” This, as he saw it, was what got him in trouble at that Boca Raton fund-raiser, when Romney told the crowd he was writing off the 47 percent of the electorate that supported Obama (a.k.a. “those people”; “victims” who take no “personal responsibility”). Romney told me that the statement came out wrong, because it was an attempt to placate a rambling supporter who was saying that Obama voters were essentially deadbeats.

“My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man,” Romney said. “If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.” I had never heard Romney say that he was prompted into the “47 percent” line by a ranting supporter. It was also impossible to ignore the phrase “If I had to do this again.”

Romney’s camera-at-all-times plan, however, reflected his own limitations as a candidate. By the same token, it was quite an indictment that “Mitt” — made by a little-known filmmaker on a shoestring — created a more palatable rendering of Romney than his campaign, which spent hundreds of millions on genius operatives and image makers. Romney, for his part, seemed to understand this. No matter how content he appeared, when the conversation turned to his disappointment in losing, his voice dropped. “It really kills me,” he said. “It really kills me.” He became inaudible, and it seemed as if he might tear up.