Late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., spent his final months privately pressing President Donald Trump and foreign leaders to widen the war against Iran, at one point drawing a rare word of restraint from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to unreleased documentary footage reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The material, drawn from more than 400 hours captured over the past three years by British filmmaker Alex Holder for a project titled "Lindsey's Game," offers a posthumous window into the South Carolina Republican's role at the center of Trump's second-term foreign policy in the weeks before his sudden death on July 11.

The most striking exchange came March 4, days after the U.S. and Israel opened the current campaign against Iran.

Graham, planning a Florida trip to urge Trump to join Israel in striking Hezbollah in Lebanon, put the idea to Netanyahu by phone.

The prime minister, on speakerphone, pushed back.

"We're concentrating right now on Iran," Netanyahu said, according to the footage.

"If we tell Hezbollah that we're going all the way, we threaten them, but if we actually do it, then they have no reason not to go all the way against us."

Graham dropped the plan, replying, "That's actually good counsel."

Elsewhere, Graham is shown reacting to the opening strikes with something close to elation.

"Look what we've done here. I almost cried," he told the film crew, according to Ynet's account of the WSJ footage, later relaying Trump's reaction: "I talked to Trump this morning, he's jacked, he said, 'Best thing I have ever done.' He loves blowing stuff up."

Graham also compared Trump and Netanyahu to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, CNN reported.

In a March call with former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Graham predicted Iranian forces would begin losing control of cities within three to four weeks, a forecast the war has since outrun.

Holder, who previously made a documentary on the Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol, traveled with Graham over multiple years, including to a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aimed at building support for the Iran campaign, and to sessions with Israeli officials and the Mossad, according to reporting summarized by Political Wire.

Some people Graham spoke with by phone were unaware the calls were being recorded.

The material also captures friction.

Graham told Sullivan that Trump's Middle East envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were "too conflicted" to lead Iran diplomacy and that the work had to fall to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, The Times of Israel reported.

And in what Holder described as the film's final interview, at a Columbia, South Carolina, bagel shop weeks before Graham died, the senator voiced frustration after Trump signed a preliminary agreement with Iran in June. "He's letting this thing slip away," Graham said. "I got to go talk to him."

Graham, 71, died July 11 of an aortic dissection after returning from a trip to Ukraine.

Holder is still cutting hundreds of hours of footage and hopes to release the film in the coming months.