In 1978, nine years before his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Ronald Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall for the first time. He turned to his aides and said: "We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” recounted Reagan aide Richard Allen to producer Mark Joseph.

To the political establishment, it sounded like a delusion.

Joseph said: “They and we all at the time thought…it's not going to happen in our lifetime, but he believed it. The rest of us all thought maybe he was a crazy old man, but I think he really believed that it could be achieved.”

That belief faced fierce internal resistance. Secretary of State George Shultz reportedly pleaded with Reagan to delete the iconic line, fearing it would sabotage diplomacy. Reagan refused, with the support of younger aides who sensed the power of these words.

The impact was more than diplomatic—it was psychological. Joseph recounts a story of a drunk Russian general who admitted: "Reagan was the first person who told us what we already knew about ourselves, that we were an evil empire."

I sat down with Mark Joseph to discuss the almost 20-year journey to bring the “Reagan” biopic to the big screen.