>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin with this, the federall reserve decided not to raise interest rates. we'll talk about the decision. >> the argument for not going it is the economy is still fragile in some ways. we don't have full employment yet and we could be doing better. the argument for raising rates is why are we putting the u.s. economy on life support while actually growing potential g.n.p. and the unemployment rate is targeting. >> rose: we look at the g.o.p. debate with jim rutenberg, glenn thrush, rebecca sinderbrand, bob

costa and john heilemann. >> i said, maybe is it perhaps about class, old money vs. new money and trump said he never thought of it that way but he said there is something maybe there. there is something about trump has a brash queens personality and country mix with the bushes. >> rose: we conclude with david oyelowo. he has a new film called "captive." he was dr. martin luther king, jr. in selma. >> she's a meth addict and also made choices who is ostracized herself from her child in the same way he has. they're both broken people and saw something in each other to allow them to have a conversation in which she could read the purpose-driven life to him and make pancakes with him. they had an exchange of a level

of humanity because she also had been to the scrap heap. she had seen there was a killer on the loose and when he broke into her apartment, she thought it was god's way of saying you messed up so much you deserve d >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: american express. >> rose: additional funding provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose.

>> rose: in a highly anticipated decision, the federal reserve kept interest rates unchanged at record low levels. the committee cited global economic uncertainty and recent fragility in financial markets. fed chair janet yellen addressed the decision in a news conference earlier today. >> inflation continued to run at our objective. my colleagues and i continue to expect that the effects of these factors on inflation will be transitory. however, the recent additional decline in oil prices and further appreciation of the dollar mean that it will take a bit more time for these effects to fully dissipate. >> rose: joining us, glen hubbard, dean at columbia business school and top economic

advisor. gillian tett, editor at the "financial times," alan blinder of princeton university. david leonhardt of the "new york times." alan, give me a sense of what happened today and because you have been there what might these deliberations have been like? >> well, i think they were contention in a polite sort of way. everything is very polite at the fed. they don't throw forks and spoons and things like that, but the committee is very divided. from the statement, you can tell pretty clearly that janet yellen was on the doveish side and was, in her own very polite way, not brooking any resistance. there was no little bone thrown to the hawks in this statement at all, and i was frankly quite surprised that the emphasis given to events outside the

country, to wit in china, the fed doesn't usually pin any decision on anything other than things happening in the united states. >> glen, give us the arguments as to whether you raise interest rates or not. >> well, i think the argument for not doing it is the economy still is fragile in some ways. we don't have full employment yet, and we could be doing better. i think the argument for raising rates is why are we putting the u.s. economy on life support with monetary policy when we're actually growing a potential gdp and the unemployment rate is approximating what the feds said its target is. i certainly put myself in the latter camp. i see no argument for not having raised rates. >> rose: and raised rates would do what for the economy? >> first of all, it signals we have begun the process.

i agree with alan by referring to overseas events and not talking as much about domestic developments, i think the fed is confusing markets. >> i think it's extraordinary the fed have come out so clearly and not said we did this because of china but more or less indicated it's basically international events that forced their hand. and remember the fed's mandate is primarily to protect employment and keep inflation low. as alan said, this was a contention decision i'm sure because right now there is a lot of confusion about what the feds tried to do. is it data dependent or time dependent, acting base it basically wants to do something before the end of the year? is it responding to international precious, looking at asset prices or consumer prices. above all, what people must be asking now is how are they going to frame the reference points of

going forward because that's not clear. right now as glen says, there is no clear reason for keeping rates at the current level. we have an energy system situation which would introduce crisis which is no longer happening in america, but there is no obvious immediate incentive to raise rates either. >> i want to say there is a fundamentally important reason being ignored here which is inflation is too low. the fed has been saying for years now it wants a particular measure of inflation to be 2% and, lately, that number has been running closer to half that with no sign of going up. so if you're the central bank and trying to achieve a 2% inflation rate, there is a reason to try to keep stoking the engine right now. >> but one of the questions we have to offer now is if the fed is targeting consumer price

inflation. >> consumer price inflation. we were trying to boost asset prices and hoped that boost the economy. >> i think china is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. i'm not sure they hold off thinking about china. the american economy in many ways is still extremely weak. we got a report from the census department this week showing that median incomes fell last year, which is remarkable. so we have low inflation. we have an officially low unemployment rate but we have a pretty weak economy. i think the ideal economic policy would not just be having the fed do this, it would also be a more active fiscal policy. but since we don't have that, i think it's really hard to ask the fed to raise rates when the economy is still as weak as it is particularly because the fed made only one mistake over the last five years which is it has been too passive, it has been too willing to think the economy is about to get strong and then has come to regrey that.

what you see from janet yellen is trying to avoid the mistake ben bernanke made in 2011 and '12 and afterward. >> i think on the inflation front, i assume a different view than alan. it is true headline inflation is running lower than what the fed would like. the problem is we have dollar influences, other influences, unit labor cost sf getting into the zone the fed is looking for. i don't think the fed is fix the problems david is talking about. the federal reserve is not there to fix problems of low participation rates, stagnant incomes. to the extent those are problems and they, are they're fiscal policy programs. to say we don't have fiscal policy, the feds do, runs the feds risk. >> rose: what about unemployment rate. >> the unemployment violate falling rapidly and in the zone

the fed said it's looking for. there is no argument for keeping rights at zero. keeping mind, raising a rate at 25 basis points is not going to have a material effect. it's more a matter of putting the economy back on a normal course. >> the problem is basically you're creating a problem in the financial system getting hooked on the idea money doesn't really have a price. i lived in japan in the late 1990s and it's a very insidious, subtle thing that this kind of zero-rate policy does to a system and it begins to breed all kinds of bubbles, it distorts the system quite significantly and we're already seeing that. the longer this continues the more difficult the price of the normalization is going to be and the more the markets go through this weight game each month expecting something that doesn't materialize the more complacent they will become. >> rose: what's been the rationale of other bankers around the world.

>> today's decision? >> rose: yes. i can't imagine but i imagine there is a lot of surprise. the reason there shouldn't have been any surprise about this today in particular is that the fed now wants to give forewarnings of its actions hints about whether it's going to move or not move so as not to catch the markets by surprise. and of course we heard nothing, not a peep, not a whimper out of janet yellen for two months about this. if she would have raised interest rates today, there would have been a big shock wave going through the markets in the united states and around the world. so i think most people that understand the fed were not expecting a move today, even if they wanted the fed to move today. >> but we did hear from stan fisher. so there were some more hawkish statviously coming out of the fed. i think the fed is again somewhat confusing the markets and injecting volatility that needn't be there.

>> when you look at what you've written about the productivity paradox -- >> the reality is that right now the fed is like the pilot of a plane with the controls on the dashboard basically going haywire and they simply are not behaving as you would expect and the fed saying we can steer this plane in slowly and gently and coming to land and no one's going to notice and the reality is not only do they have these storms and cross currents but the dials are not behaving normally, and the productivity behavior now is extraordinary. why is that seemingly such a low level of productivity in the u.s. economy giving we're living through a tech boom? maybe the professors have the answer. >> part is measure. i don't think we're actually measuring productivity but we're definitely living through a productivity boom. >> you get some of it through

measurement. >> rose: you can't measure -- no you get some from measuring productivity and missing output coming from new stuff. but that's always been true. just imagine what it would have been like in the days when electricfication was coming to the country. it's always been true that there is been new technology and theda the system lags behind it. i'm not at all convinced that's worse now than it's been in the past. >> rose: this is obviously part of the fed's decision, talking about china. david, what is your assessment about china's handling its crisis? >> not that well. i mean, i think, first of all, it's worth acknowledging the chinese communist party has had a pretty phenomenal 25-year run. imagine back in 1989 forecasting what china has done since then. i'm not at all excusing the human rights abuses but in the form of economic performance and political stability, it's remarkable. this is one of the most serious

challenges they've dealt with. i think there are big excesses there. they're trying to cap with them and deal with them. they have a hard problem, competing interests. i think we're potentially at a pivot point. we've had a series of american presidents who had to deal with an increasingly strong china. i think it's definitely within the realm of possibility the next president will have to grapple with chinese weakness in a way no american president has arguably since george h. w. bush. >> rose: i would like to see the conversation between the president of china and the president of the united states next week. >> i think they will be nervous. >> rose: they will be because of the allegations of cyber. >> absolutely. now the chinese government is not only trying to deal with an extraordinary position where all the money is directing building up industry as fast as you could, investing heavily at the expense of assumers through banks in the chosen economic system, they're now trying to

open it up, make it consumer driven, create capital markets to all the other things countries have done before. but they're trying to do that at the same time they're trying to deal with political tension and perhaps what's most dangerous of all is people are losing faith in the ability of the bureaucrats to control things but don't have faith market forms are free enough to allocate money -- >> i think that's the key. the chinese financial system is not a modern system. state credit will get you so far but we're hitting a wall. you can say open up but political power at the local level in china comes from control of credit and political figures don't willingly give up the source of their powers. i'm skeptical china can modernize its financial system very fast. >> rose: what other things might the fed consider doing now and what is, alan, the fed's analysis of our economy? >> i think the analysis is not far from where glen started, that we're getting close to the full employment zone, although

janet yellen and others on the fed would say we're not really quite there yet, there is some further distance to go, a. b, try as we may, we've not been able to lift the inflation rate and that means for one thing nobody should be worried about an acceleration of inflation and the fed is still worried about inflation running too low. i think another thought which none of us have mentioned yet, but let me mention it, is somebody there, and i think janet yellen will be one but not alone, has got to be remembering the year 1996 when professional opinion was strongly congealed on the notion that we're at full employment and couldn't move the unemployment rate even a notch lower, and alan greenspan was totally unconvinced by this, believing that we could, and we did. the fed did not raise interest rates. and the economy grew very strongly for another three, four

years, and the unemployment rate of 1.1 went down to 3.9. now, do we know that we're on the verge of something like that now? no, certainly not. but suppose you put some probability weight, suppose that's a 20% chance, do you want to squelch that? i think at least some people on the fed are thinking about that. all that said, gillian and the others are right, interest rates can't stay near zero forever, they've got to come up, so you're talking about arguments over months, not years, and when interest rates are going to go up. >> rose: let me understand, at markets. glen mentioned labor force

participation. the u-6 that includes partially employment and people who want to work longer hours and things like that, and i want to emphasize the inflation rate. if the inflation rate moves up, she'll take that as a big signal. >> what are we going to learn over the next six or 12 weeks? we're not seeing much movement in the labor force participation rate. the federal has not affected that. we will see unemployment climb a bit, but what exactly is the fed waiting to learn to normalize? >> i think it's, look, we have been worried too much about inflation in the last five years. it's been a mistake. inflation is near zero. >> to the surprise of most economists? >> certainly. >> rose: that inflation has not reason? >> absolute astonishment. and the huge surprise to have the hawks. all the people who say they should have been raising are all the people who said they should have raised before and they didn't. so i think it's less they look for new he have had.

if you're seeing if we're going to eron the side, let's eron the side of not squelching what might be a economic recovery that actually could bring more benefits to people. >> i think if i could add one more thing that i think at least some people in the fed are thinking about but they will never ever ever speak about which is the united states congress in and particularly the house of representatives may be on the verge of kicking the economy in the teeth again over the budget and the national debt ceiling. they will know a lot more about that in the middle of december than they know in the middle of september. now i want to repeat, they will never talk about that. that sort of thrust the fed into something very, very political, but they watch to see what the politicians do. >> the fed is basically held hostage to the completely unfathomable chinese economy and even more unfathomable u.s. congress. it's a vair hard decision.

what kind of data will you use? it's not data in any equation -- no one created an algorithm for that yet. >> rose: janet yellen, what's your assessment of how she's handled her role as chief of the fed? >> i think she's an excellent fed chairman. >> rose: even though she didn't go the way you wanted to go. >> no. people can have professional disagreements. i think she is an excellent economists and has done well at managing consensus in the fed. >> as a new yorker i appreciate her brooklyn accent in the dialogue. we need more. she seems to be off to a very good start. >> rose: when will we see -- this is in the world of prophecy -- 4% american growth rate? >> i think 4% american growth rate would be an aspiration for our country, requiring enormous productivity growth.

i don't think it's impossible at all. we should have seen it in this recovery for sure. >> rose: alan? i think the answer is what glen said. unless and until we get productivity rising at 2% plus, which is the his torque norm over a long, long period, but a number we haven't seen in a long time, 4% is way out of reach. >> rose: do you agree? i agree, exactly. >> rose: even though jeb bush is promising 4%? >> well, i think what jeb bush is saying is we need to have a conversation about both, we should have been growing 4% in the recovery and, frankly, if we had better tax and regulatory policy, much faster growth is possible. >> rose: thank you. thank you. >> rose: we'll be right back. stay with us. >> rose: we begin this evening with analysis of last night's second g.o.p. presidential primary debate. for three hours, 11 candidates sparred on a wide range of issues at the ronald reagan

presidential library in simi valley, california. the topics were immigration, iran nuclear deal and appointments the supreme court. carly fiorina and marco rubio earned praise. all took jabs at donald trump saying he is unqualified for the job. the most memorable moments of the debate. >> his visceral response to attack people on their appearance -- short, fat, tall, ugly -- my goodness, that happened in junior high. are we not above that? would we not be worried to have someone like that in charge of the nuclear arsenal? >> mr. trump? i never attacked him on his looks and believe me there is plenty of subject party there. >> the united states military was not built to conduct pinprick attacks. if the military is going to engaged by the commander-in-chief it should only be engaged with an endeavor

to win and we should not be issuing force when men and women aren't put in a position to win. >> i think men and women all over the country hear clearly what mr. trump says. (applause) >> i think she's got a beautiful face and i think she's a beautiful woman. and your brother's administration gave us barack obama because it was such a disaster those last three months that abraham lincoln couldn't have been elected. >> you know what? as it relates to my brother, there is one thing i know for sure, he kept the faith. >> george w. bush appointed john robertson. let me give you the consequences of that. if instead the president bushes had appointed edith joins and mike ludig, which is who i would have appointed, obamacare

would have been struck down and the marriage laws would be on the books. >> rose: john heilemann, bob costa, rebecca sinderbrand and glenn thrush. here in new york, jim rutenberg of the "new york times." pleased to have each and every one of them to talk about this debate last night for three hours! everybody seems to agree that carly fiorina did a good job. but let's just begin and get each person's response to the debate and talk about some of the individual aspects of it and the nature of the debate in which candidates are attacking each other throughout the three hours. john heilemann, give me the bottom line on last night's debate. >> charlie, i think the theme was the establishment strikes back. cnn orchestrated a debate in which they wanted there to be conflict. they got conflict. it was a little bit of an epic film, you know. donald trump pointed out this

morning gone with the wind only ran 3 thundershowers and 2 *6 minutes, so it was about that long. some candidates were hardly heard . from trump was at the center of most of the conflict i just described. i think there is no doubt carly fiorina was the one candidate who broke through. she had the highest expectations. she had the most to gain and she performed. the question is how much she's going to rise in the polls. but that she is going to rise, there is no doubt, and she proved she has a place on that main stage. then the question is for the rest of these candidates, the ones who did well, how much will that actually register in terms of moving votes and opinions, and for donald trump and ben carson the two frontrunners neither of whom had by conventional standards particularly strong performances whether that will matter to the people who support them. >> jim? i agree. but what i found striking is what this did is set the stage for a gigantic debate within the

republican party of its direction. we talk about establishment and outsider vs. insider. in my time i haven't seen the republican party have debates over national security this way or social issues. what i found striking when you ant internal struggle in this party when you have the two frontrunners accounting for 50% of the polls high fiving over their opposition to the iraq war. >> rose: rebecca? i'd absolutely agree. it was fascinating to watch on the stage for the first time, i thought, candidates seem to kind of figure out how to take on donald trump just a bit. how to handle him. you know, definitely cnn wanted to speaker debatesnfrom the candidates. some of the candidates had to deal with donald trump last time around. as the debate moved into policy areas and a little bit away from the personality.

there is been a little bit of drift at times. he found footing. clearly he didn't lose himself on stage but the other candidates found their place. >> rose: including ben carson? carson was interesting. it's one of the things where after the last debate we looked at kind of the social status at the post and were kind of astonished by what we saw. you know, ben carson attracting three, four times as much attention on social media as donald trump. and we felt as if we were watching a different debate than anybody else. he seemed quiet and overshadowed. we can have our assessment of how we think ben carson did but clearly something he's saying and doing is resonating with voters beyond the cosmetic optics of what he looks or sounds like on that stage. >> is it simply in part the outsider status and there is a kind of anti-politician mood? >> absolutely no doubt about

that. i think, you know, the other thing about you had these fresh faces, within the republican party it's been interesting to see the divide in the polls when we ask democrats in the most recent "washington post" abc poll you know how important is it to have someone who doesn't have government experience, how much do you want a fresh face of someone with experience. didn't care so much about answer from democrats, if they thought it was a good thing, but the majority of them said it will be good to have someone who has some government experience. republicans overwhelmingly rejected that. they wanted to see someone new and someone who had no ties to washington having been part of the establishment and have plenty of options. >> rose: what is donald trump's reaction to the debate other than telling cnn in a tweet, he just announced that in the history of cnn, last night's debate was the highest rated ever, will they send me flowers and a thank you note. >> well, that's pretty typical. you know, he hasn't been too terribly contrite.

i think one of the interesting dynamics there was the side by side comparison with jeb bush and donald trump. i can watch that for even four hours. it's, you know, the teachers pet sort of taking on the captain of the high school team who has been torturing him. for the first two hours to have the debate, jeb really tried to attack trump, i think to very little effect, and he sort of caught his footing at the end of the debate and then there was this incredibly weird moment where trump extends his hand and instead of giving trump a handshake, it looked like bush took a what can at him. >> rose: go to the central question other than carly fiorina, i think one of the central questions is does this in a sense mean the beginning of a different place for donald trump? >> we've got to wait for the poll on this. john said i think the only certainty here is i think carly fiorina will spike.

it will be if people who support trump view this as the establishment taking a what can at him. i think the question is how much of the support for trump is really for trump as opposed to none of the above. i think the polling over the next couple of days has been fascinating. >> john talk to me about jeb bush. >> i think jeb bush no doubt last night was a -- gave a better performance than in cleveland a month ago. a big part of what's going on in the bush campaign is an attempt to keep its donors, keep its supporters in a place where they do not panic. we are seeing by contrast right now scott walker's world mass the defections, mass panic, people who believe walker is in inexorable and unfixable tail spin. what bush wants to do is avoid the outcome. he has a lot more money in the bank than scott walker and can afford more fragility but this performance was designed to say

jeb bush is ready to fight, that jeb bush is not going to go mildly or meekly. >> rose: you know the republican party, robert. you cover them. what do you think? >> i have been covering trump since january pretty closely and my sense is we're watching an evolution of trump as a candidate. we're seeing him settling into the frontrunner role. i spoke to him for ten minutes after the debate near his suv as he was leaving the debate site and he said he came to this debate prepared. he was preparing on carly fiorina's business record, ready to talk about bush's gubernatorial record. you see him sensing that nomination is reason sight. he is becoming more subdued with his tone, still has that brawler swagger but is becoming a different kind of candidate than in july. >> rose: what kind of position do you assume he will take and when will they come? >> trump and his campaign manage told me the next step for trump is releasing his tax plan,

that's going to come in the next few weeks ahead of the next debate hosted by cnbc. he's going to attack wall street and continue the populous message on economics. >> rose: is that a receptive method in that party? >> it's changing the party. if you look at governor bush's tax plan, he, too, is taking a more populous move when it comes to the head fund managers. bush like most republicans wants to lower corporate tax rate and trump would like to do the same. the trump effect is trickling down to policy plans of candidates and you see bush adjusting and many others. >> rose: rebecca, chris christie. >> coming into last night, there were a lot of people who were saying, who had already written chris christie off and he had to have a great debate and he had a pretty good debate. he did not disappear on stage. plenty of candidates did going into last night, felt like scott

walker around chri -- and chrisn similar positions. people are talking about chris christie's performance and scott walker. >> rose: was this a good debate to have where the whole intent is to get the candidates talking to each other and fighting with each other? >> you know, you struggle to think how you can handle 11 candidates at once and three hours, i have to say, and this is coming from someone who used to work on the depates in the past with cnn. you try to get in as many questions as you can. by the end, jeb bush may be the only person who found his stride in the third hour. i think everyone from heilemannn

do the democrats debate? >> democrats start to debate next month. >> rose: october 13th, i think. >> right, another cnn debate, this one moderated by anderson cooper. the looming question is whether the debate will be the current field or whether there will be another addition as we discussed on the show the other night, whether joe biden will have decided to get into the race. that debate will look really different if joe biden is in it versus not, and that's a moment of suspense. but a huge moment in general for the party because it will be the first democratic debate. it comes at a moment when bernie sanders on the cover of "time magazine" is soaring, where hillary clinton had been slipping in a steady downward

way for the past several months. so a big moment for hillary clinton, bernie sanders. >> rose: anybody else have an idea about biden? anybody heard any intelligence that might reflect on how he's going about making this decision or is it simply within his own head and his own heart? >> i've spoken to some democrats on capitol hill as i have been reporting out this possible government shutdown and my sense is they believe the vice president can wait. they'd like to see him, his friends on the debate stage, but they also know he's also watching secretary clinton, seeing how her campaign unfolds and much would rather play the role of savior down the line than somebody who rushes in. >> rose: that's an interesting deal. when you talk ability these debates what issues were merging because as i was watching last night and doing multi-tasking at the time, i don't see great differences here. they're all against iran nuclear deal, they're all unanimous in their criticism of the

president. they have some differences on immigration. the planned parenthood, for the most part, they have the same point of view, correct? >> yeah, though i did see some -- >> rose: a little bit of opening there. >> i also thought there were a couple of places where i thought it was interesting again on national security, on the iraq war, on interventionists, militaristic positions. so i thought that was very interesting. i also thought there was some difference on whether a county clerk can say no to a marriage license. so i thought there was some -- >> rose: jeb bush vs. trump and what else? >> and i guess walker was in that, too. so when i grew up as a reporter, the republican party was in lock step, so i saw a little more kind of difference on that stage than i'm used to seeing from back in the days of bush 43. >> charlie, i thought one of the real interesting differences was

bobby jindal seizing the tea party banner and calling for a government shutdown based on planned parenthood vs. lindsey graham who says you will lose an election, that's one of the more interesting exchanges. they all agree on planned parenthood but that showed the schism between the two wings to have the party and approaches to governing. >> rose: that really is, it seems to me, glenn, the emerging division tore the division that's been there but more glaring because of trump and carson and fiorina is because of establishment and insurgent. that seems to be the distinction within the party. >> and the emergence of trump actually blurs that. >> rose: exactly. to a certain extent he exists in a no mans land between the two wings. he's not standing on top of the hill saying shut down the government either. it would be interesting to know when and if a government shutdown takes place, exactly

what kind of position that puts trump in. >> rose: is the interest in trump and bush what trump did about gambling in florida one which is likely to hurt one or the other. >> just shows you jeb bush has with his super pacs, $100 million and a lot of research out on trump, none of it seems to have stuck. we saw a lot of stories about that today. trump denied it. seems like the fact checking class sided with jeb bush on that. that was a little bit of shot across the bow and we'll see more than that. >> there may be something deeper than with the bush and trump rivalry. i asked trump about this. i said is it maybe perhaps about class, old money vs. new money? trump told me he never thought of it that way. he said there is something maybe there. there is a sense that trump has a brash queens personality and does not mix with the bunkport

bushes. >> rose: john kasich, he probably helped himself a little, if anything? >> i don't think he had the same night as in the first debate. he fade add little bit. some people in the political class say maybe he won't wear that well. i don't think he hurt himself, but the first debate, he really had to stand out and did not last night. >> rose: how about rand paul? boy! i put him in the sinking dinghy next to scott wker. >> cautionary case study in the trump phenomenon, somebody bent on attacking trump to propel his campaign but derailed by the sheer force of trump's counterpunch. >> what we like to think about as the rick perry memorial strategy. (laughter) >> rose: in memory of the late. thank you all. what a great session. thank you very much.

>> thanks, charlie. you. s a lot. >> rose: we'll be right back. stay with us. >> rose: david oyelowo is here. he received great critical praise for his portrayal of dr. martin luther king, jr. in "selma." his new film is "captive" alongside kate merra. he place convict anybody colonels who killed a judge and others and held a woman captive inside her apartment for hours. >> holmy. ey, baby girl. i love you. , too. (honking) >> i lost everything. my husband's dead. they said i was an unfit mother. have you heard of this book, help me? >> ashley, the lady dropped this

off for you. >> i had to break out. breaking story right now, police looking for this man. >> the murder suspect brian nichols. >> all the choppers up now. i will have to kill you. need to see my daughter. you're not going anywhere. what are you doing? >> the book. give it to me.

now i know why you were placed on this planet. make the most of what you have been given. >> i haven't been given anything. >> you have been given time. 're going to hear bad things about me. whatever happens -- >> life without purpose. do you forgive me? i don't know, but maybe god can. >> rose: oyelowo is also nominated for an emmy in his role in the hbo film "nightingale." welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: quite a move from dr. martin luther king to brian

nichols. >> it is. >> rose: was this a conscious choice so you wanted to do something different to show the wide range of your own appetite as well as skills? >> playing different kinds of roles for me is always conscious, but especially having played a role like dr. king, and i had the best time playing him. it was a huge honor. it is something i am very glad to be associated with for the rest of my life. but what you don't want is to be associated purely with the one character for the rest of your career and, so, therefore, the way to do that is to, like with nightingale or indeed with captive is leave the audience guessing as to what you will do next. >> rose: but this is a cold killer. >> yeah. >> rose: what is it you want to make sure you got about brian nichols? >> well, it was a fine line here because you want both things -- the cold killer, but also the

human being. no one of us is just the one thing. and when you look at the headlines, when you look at that day on march 11th of 2005 and you watch the footage of him on the news, he is a monster, he is a man on a tear, killing people on that morning. >> rose: for no apparent reason. i didn't understand the reason i had not read the book because the woman who kate merro plays has been on talk shows and wrote a book. >> when you investigate, it's a number of things. he claimed to have not done the rape he was on trial for. >> rose: did he have reason to claim that, do we know? >> outside of the fact he felt he was innocent, you know, i don't know. it was his girlfriend as well whom he had raped so it was, i guess, his word against hers. but, you know, he truly believed that he hadn't done it, and he was looking down the barrel of

up to 25 years in prison. he had newly found out he had a new son and that played on his mind. but i met his mother about three weeks ago and she asked him why he did what he did, and he said he had had an incident in jail awaiting trial where he was in a cell along with a lot of other black prisoners and they were all shackled and an incident broke out and they were all pepper sprayed and he said, in that moment, he felt what it must have felt like to be on a slave ship. and she says she thinks that's the moment when something in him snapped and he remained, i think, in this state until encountering ashley smith who somehow through her humanity and plea not to be killed reawakened the humanity in him. >> rose: you even began to see it in small acts. >> right. >> rose: here's a scene. this is when she convinces him to let her use testify bathroom

alone. here it is. >> i've got to use the bathroom. go for it. you use the bathroom. everybody's got to use the bathroom. use it. hey! what are you doing? >> i can't go with the door open. >> i'll turn around. can't go with you standing there. >> i don't trust you. i won't be able to trust you. so what are we going to do is i'm going to shut the door and you're going to talk. hey! hold on. that's it. i'm going to mexico. going to get in the truck, go to mexico. we're going to rob a bank. you understand? where are we going? >> mexico. (gasps) >> rose: he's high on meth at that time. >> he is.

he's taken a drug he's never taken before. ashley smith herself says she cannot quite quantify why she gave him the drug. he was asking for weed, something to calm him down after this crazy day, and she gave him meth which she happened to have in the house which is an upper. you give a guy who killed four people meth, that's not going to go well. >> rose: you have no insight into that. she's vulnerable. >> she's vulnerable but they're a mirror for each other. she's a meth addict. she's made choices that has ostracized herself from her child in the same way he has. they're both broken people and i think they both saw something in each other that gave them pause to allow them to have a conversation in which she could read the purpose-driven life to him, she could end up making pancakes for him. they had this exchange that i think the level of humanity -- because she had also been reel tbaitd to the scrap heap.

she said to me, when brian nichols broke into her apartment that day because she had watched the news and seen there was this killer on the loose, when he broke into her apartment, she felt it was god's way of saying to her you messed up so much you deserve death. so that's the place she had gone to in her head about herself. so -- and, of course, brian nichols as his humanity was awakened by the lady saying don't kill me, he came to terms with the fact four people were dead as a result of what he had done. the trickiest thing for me was to in no way excuse brian for what he did, but in order for him to be someone who let her go and gave himself up, there is some humanity left in him. >> rose: he gave himself up when surrounded. >> but he let her go before he was surrounded. you know, she was the one who, you know, went to the police and said this is where he is.

>> rose: he knew she might do that. >> he knew she would, he realized he had come to the end of the line. >> rose: was there any question up to that point in the movie when we knew he was going to give himself up? might you have thought in the character you were playing, he could just say it's over, i've called my son, i'm going to go out and n the only way i know because under no circumstances do i want to be back in prison and he ended up with three life sentences, and you can't reach him, and his son can't reach him until he's 18. >> right. i think, up until the last moment, i'm sure, there were thoughts of shall i commit suicide by cop, you because he could have -- >> rose: that makes sense. h he can walk out there, you know, pretend to have -- and he had three or four guns with him and he knows he would have been taken out. but he didn't do that. when this story broke, you

know -- >> rose: about ten years ago. it was ten years ago. march 11 of 2005. the cops around the case refused to believe that brian and ashley didn't know each other because they were just flabbergasted. there is no way these two people can have this time together, these seven hours, and not end up dead and he, you know, let himself let her go. but that's why we wanted to make the movie, what happened in those seven hours to make them turn this corner. >> rose: was this an easy choice for you? >> no, a very difficult choice for me because i know what it costs me to play a role. you know, it's like daniel lewis, i aspire to -- you know the kind of immersion that means you have to give yourself over to the characters you have to not judge the character, you have to place yourself in their mindset and understand why they do what they do, and as a person

i find what he did reprehensible, so it's going to cost you to be in that head space every day, but i was so inspired by what went on to happen with ashley smith after this event. that's what made he feel like i wanted to lend myself to it. >> rose: what happened to her. she never touched that drug again. he -- >> rose: a pivotal moment in which he begs and threatens her, if you don't take this after i've taken it so i'll know there was nothing bad about this and she says no because she realizes she's going back to the worst place she's been. >> she actually said, if i'm going to meet my maker, i don't want to meet him with meth in my system. she also said she felt like god took over brian nichols body and said are you going to choose life or are you going to choose death? that's a question to ask yourself. >> rose: the book "the purpose-driven life," some have called this a christian movie.

does that mean anything to you other than the fact he's a prominent christian with a huge following and wrote this book that sold 40 million copies? >> yeah. i mean, i understand it because we're always looking for ways to categorize things so we can understand them. it's an action movie, a romantic and faith-based movie. that's not what drew me to it and that also is not what i hope ultimately it is going to be purely understood to be because i think faith-based movies largely seem to be made for a niche audience, primarily for christians, and they can be quite heavy-handed in terms of the preachy nature of them. >> rose: and they make a lot of money. >> well, they make a lot of money but they make it with a niche audience. >> rose: exactly. and for me as a person, i want to reach as broad an audience as i can with anything i do, especially a story like this which i think is so life affirming and redemptive and it's not about one person having the altogether leading another

person to salvation, it's two broken people and that i think is a major difference. >> rose: and then there is nightingale. >> yes. >> rose: how did that happen? a good question. i mean, the script came along and i read it and i just didn't quite understand what i was reading. one guy in a house on his own for the entire movie and it starts with him having killed his mom. you know, how are you going to -- who's going to stick around with this guy? but i just found the writing so audacious. you know, this guy suffers from disassociative identity disorder, so there are different characters, different authors within him bouncing around. >> rose: this came before king? >> this did. >> rose: who is peter? peter -- >> rose: other than the fact he killed his mother. >> peter snowden is a recluse, a guy who used to be in the military suffering from p.t.s.d., also weighted down by unrequited love by an army buddy

he convinced himself he's just friends with but is clearly in love with. he lives with his mom, in his '30s and had a heavy handed upbringing. there is so much about him and here he is in one house dealing with the terrible thing he's done. >> rose: didn't you say something where you said he would be a great james bond? >> what i said is that i think he would be great in a role like james bond and i feel like all the noise around him, just a leading man in the vein of jason borne, all bond, mission impossible, i think the audience is basically telling our industry what it wants to see and our industry is saying that it has to be a white, good looking guy, time and again. and, you know, television is

showing us that -- >> rose: it doesn't have to be. >> it doesn't have to be and the audience are basically going to stop watching if you don't give them what they want because it's a different perspective and reflective of the world we live in. i think for me i have a very real agenda of people of color being at the center of their own stories as well. so often we're on the periphery of stories, and that, you know, images are political, and you have to be part of the solution, otherwise you're part of the problem. >> rose: pleasure to have you here. >> thank you. , see you next time.r joining for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications

captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

report," with tyler mathisen and sue herera. >> the committee judged it appropriate to wait for more evidence. >> and wait it did, the federal reserve says now is not the right time to raise interest rates. but with the economy strengthening, what held them ba back? >> confused response. stocks that rose, then fell, then rose, and fell again as the market tried to figure out what the fed decision means for the economy and your money. >> and tuning in, a little known company makes a big acquisition to become a real player in the fast-changing u.s. cable business. all that and more tonight on nightly business report for thursday, september 17th. good evening, everyone. and welcome i'm