In the summer of 2003, writer and director Douglas McGrath called studio boss Bingham Ray. He told Ray that he wanted to send over a new film script about Truman Capote. It’s a telephone moment McGrath will never forget. “Bingham said that the script was already in front of him,” says McGrath. “I glanced down at my desk where my script was. ‘How can that be,’ I asked him, ‘since it’s still on my desk?’” At this point, there followed what McGrath politely calls “an uncomfortable silence.”
And so it was that two screenwriters had – at the same time – created films about, not only the same person, but about the same event in that person’s life. Both McGrath and writer Dan Futterman had decided that the time was right for a film about the relationship Truman Capote formed with convicted murderer Perry Smith as he researched his literary masterpiece In Cold Blood.
Yet McGrath appears untroubled and gentlemanly about the existence of the other Capote. “There was something about this tiny man that made him big enough for two pictures” he says. “In fact, given the riveting contradictions in Capote’s character, the rich range of people who made up his circle, and the comic and dramatic turns that marked the period, the real wonder is that there were only two scripts.”
The result of McGrath’s work is Infamous, a film that was delayed in order to allow some distance from Capote, made from Futterman’s screenplay. Capote is best remembered for the performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, a class act that gave him an Academy Award. Hoffman was a friend of Futterman, and had agreed to do the film from the beginning, but the team had no finance. McGrath’s problem was the opposite. “We made a deal early on with Warner Independent to make the movie. We had our money but no Truman.” It took a couple of years for both projects to find what they needed and, towards the end of 2004 both films started shooting within months of each other. Despite this, McGrath had to wait to release Infamous. “Warners wanted to hold our picture so the two films didn’t step on each other,” he says.
McGrath’s interest in Truman Capote can be traced back many years. He recalls seeing Capote on television, a few years before his death. Capote was given a glowing introduction on a chat show as one of the greatest writers of his generation. Then he walked out. McGrath was clearly stunned by what he saw. “Capote was in very bad shape, very heavy, perspiring. His head was lolling and over to one side. He had a quality like a slightly drunk frog. I had never seen anyone like him, and I couldn’t reconcile the introduction with the person.” McGrath was an emerging writer at the time, working on comedy at Saturday Night Live. “I distinctly remember thinking ‘what happened to you’ and I started reading his work and books about him.”
The book that McGrath uses as a basis for his script is George Plimpton’s biography of Capote, a complex oral history that uses multiple perspectives from amongst Capote’s friends to establish different points of view about the man. Norman Mailer, Cecil Beaton, Gore Vidal, John Huston, and Kurt Vonnegut are just some of the voices. “It’s a wonderful book,” says McGrath. “It’s a collection of interviews, and that style very much influenced the style of the film. I use interviews with some of the characters talking about Truman throughout the movie.”
After more than a year of research, deconstructing Plimpton’s book and digging up old film footage of Capote, McGrath had a clear idea of where he saw the real story.
“ I wanted to answer the question of what happened to Truman Capote after In Cold Blood. If you look at his life up to then, it was an almost unbroken line up: success, critical acclaim, and all the things that an author would want. He had money, he was well respected, and he had a pretty good personal life.” McGrath pauses slightly for dramatic effect, like a good director. “And then from In Cold Blood onwards, it’s almost an unbroken line downwards. It’s personal humiliation and embarrassment; it’s problems with alcohol. He loses friends and he can’t produce the writing that up to that point he was making at a regular pace.”
McGrath’s research showed him that it was indeed the relationship with convicted murderer Perry Smith (played by Daniel Craig) that answered his question. Capote, who had surrounded his own personal pain and insecurity behind an elaborate façade of self-performance, found in Perry the only person who really understood him. Both men had mothers who had committed suicide and fathers who had abandoned them. McGrath could see the dramatic value of this relationship, especially as Capote was in the process of writing a book about Perry’s role in a brutal murder. “Truman formed a very deep and intensely intimate bond with Perry, and lost that distance that a writer usually has from his subject. He comes to feel so much for Perry that, having to see him hanged so that he can finish his book shattered him completely. It broke him in some way.”
In order to emphasise the change in Capote, McGrath focuses the first part of the film very much on the Manhattan society where Capote played out his part as witty, literary oddball. This was the social world from which he was pulled when commissioned to investigate the murder of a farmer and his family in Kansas for The New Yorker. “He was court jester and confidante to the cream of Manhattan high society,” says McGrath, “and I placed everything in the story within that context. You see how glamorous and exclusive this world is, and we keep that going very deliberately until we get to Kansas.” There’s another of McGrath’s dramatic pauses. “Then there’s a cut and Truman is off the train and on a platform in the country. When the train pulls out, it serves like a wipe because behind is revealed miles and miles of nothing. All you can hear is the sound of the wind.” It’s this transition that marks the start of Capote’s real personal journey in the film.
McGrath chose English actor Toby Jones to be his Capote. “Toby was the first person who was mentioned to me by several people when I finished the script,” recalls McGrath. “He had been in a play in New York, and many people said to me, ‘Oh, it’s too bad you can’t get that guy. He looks a lot like Truman and he’s a great actor.’ But I thought, I’m in show business and I haven’t heard of him. The studio’s never going to let me hire him.”
But after a lengthy search, narrowed down by both the physical requirements of the role and the ability to play light comedy and tragedy convincingly, the studio agreed with McGrath’s choice. “Toby exceeded all my hopes,” says McGrath, “and he looks so much like Capote it’s a little unsettling.” Jones also became a master of Capote’s famous way of speaking, which GoreVidal famously called, “what a Brussels sprout would sound like if a Brussels sprout could talk.”
McGrath and Jones planned the film and Capote’s journey through the story very carefully. “We imagined the film like a funnel,” says McGrath. “At the beginning – at the top of the funnel – it had the most of everything: colour and noise and lots of people, and then we get to Kansas which is half way down the funnel. There are fewer people here, less noise and it’s simpler. But then eventually – and this is what the whole movie is about – we come down to Truman Capote and Perry Smith alone together in a cell. And for the first time in his life, Capote decides to stop performing. All the artifice gets stripped away. He’s no longer the performing seal with his bag of tricks he uses to entertain people. He knows that if Perry is going to talk to him, he’s going to have to leave behind the ornamentation. And that’s the turning point.”
It’s the basis for the most exquisite drama: a writer who wants to create a masterpiece but who, in the process of opening up the soul of a murderer, finds the one person who understands his own being. This was what Douglas McGrath had seen in Capote when he briefly watched his television performance. “I couldn’t look at him and not feel an enormous sense of loss” says McGrath, “I didn’t know what exactly had been lost until I read more about him, but the sense of it was ever-present.”
