The new movie “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” stars Liam Neeson as the FBI Associate Director revealed as Deep Throat, the most celebrated anonymous whistleblower in U.S. political history who helped orchestrate President Nixon’s downfall by leaking information on the Watergate scandal.

But the movie’s director, Peter Landesman, tells MarketWatch that he was keen for the film to challenge a key tenet of Watergate history, namely that Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were central to President Nixon’s resignation.

The Woodward and Bernstein/ Deep Throat story was most famously chronicled in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 Oscar-winning drama “All the President’s Men,” starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

“Mark Felt,” which also stars Diane Lane, Tony Goldwyn and Tom Sizemore and is co-produced by Ridley Scott, contains scenes in which Felt leaks information about the Watergate break-in to a Time magazine journalist and doesn’t even feature Carl Bernstein as a character.

“I think the mythology that Watergate is about Woodward and Bernstein is not the whole picture,” says Landesman. “It’s not even a big piece of the whole picture. The system that brought down a corrupt presidency involved dozens and dozens of hardworking people. Felt was the only one who had his hands on the absolute truth of what was happening and he was doling it out to at least 3, maybe even 4 or 5 journalists, including Woodward and the Washington Post.”

“The biggest mythology that’s being pierced is the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the sole recipients [of information] which is not all true. Felt was puppeteering a number of people to help him to do the job,” Landesman says.

So why, when it comes to Watergate, has so much attention been lavished on Woodward and Bernstein? “I think those guys got out of the gate first with a book and then a movie starring at that time the biggest movie star in the world and maybe even the second-biggest movie star in the world [Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman]”, says Landesman, himself a former journalist for the New York Times.

“Once that film hit the movie theaters, that became the knowable history of Watergate,” he adds. “The truth is it’s much more complex and it’s much broader, the context is much deeper but largely they beat everybody to the punch.”

Landesman is delighted that the release of “Mark Felt” — a movie which contains lines such as “The President has no authority over the FBI” — coincides with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey as part of a broader probe into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s a supernatural coincidence but it tells me that human behavior never really changes,” Landesman says. “There will always be corruption at the top, there will always be someone willing to sacrifice themselves and tell the truth to fix the corruption. It just so happens that these particular circumstances are similar.”

“What it says to me is that the system works. The institutions of the system have not changed from 1972. The rules work and the constitution works. If you’re gonna do illegal s**t, you’re not going to get away with it,” he says. “I think Nixon was a professional politician and actually quite smart — in many ways he was a successful president. Donald Trump strikes me as a naked emperor. I don’t think he ever had clothes.”

Felt retired from the FBI in 1973 and finally admitted to being Deep Throat in a 2005 Vanity Fair interview. In 1980, he was convicted of authorizing break-ins during the Nixon administration’s search for suspected members of the Weather Underground but was pardoned by Ronald Reagan. He died in 2008.

“I’ve always thought of Mark Felt as apolitical, above politics,” says Landesman. “He’s trained to be objective. I feel the same way. I’m a registered Democrat but have in the past voted for Republicans.”

Landesman, whose previous movies “Parkland” and “Concussion” deal with the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and brain damage in football players, respectively, adds: ”Mark Felt is the answer to the greatest political question of our time, if not all time, in the United States.”

“But what’s interesting about him is actually how unknown and unknowable he was. People were expecting Deep Throat to be somebody big and I think it was an anti-climax when he confessed,” he says.