Although it ended up becoming an Oscar-winning film, Capote started out the way many independent films do: Someone gets an idea, writes a script, and then gathers his/her friends together to make a movie.
First-time screenwriter Dan Futterman started that traditional process with a couple of distinct advantages: He chose a compelling subject matter (Truman Capote’s relationship with murderer Perry Smith while writing his classic In Cold Blood) and the friends he gathered to make the movie included his talented long-time pals director Bennett Miller and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Where did the idea to write Capote come from?
DAN: I got interested in Truman Capote in sort of an oblique way, and it was almost incidental that it ended up being specifically about Truman Capote.
There was a book that my Mom, who's a shrink, gave me called The Journalist and The Murderer, by Janet Malcolm. It's about a case in California where a doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald was eventually convicted of killing his wife and children. Joe McGinniss was writing a book about him and eventually, when the book came out -- it was called Fatal Vision -- Jeffrey MacDonald sued Joe McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract.
Malcolm’s book is sort of a meditation on how could this happen? How could a convicted triple murderer sue the writer who's writing about his life? How could he convince himself that the writer was going to write something good about him? It dealt with the fact that the journalist is posing as a friend to get the subject to talk, and that the subject has hopes that he's going to be portrayed in a good light, and that the journalist is always playing off of that desire. The relationship is premised on a basic lie that's it's a natural relationship. It's not. It's a transactional relationship.
That seemed interesting to me, and had there not been a TV movie made about that incident, I might have written about that.
Some years later I picked it up again and read it -- it's a pretty short book and I recommend it -- and just on the heals of reading that I read Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote, called Capote, and there are two or three chapters that deal with the period in his life where he was writing In Cold Blood and his relationship with Perry Smith.
I wanted to write about that kind of relationship and deal with those kinds of questions. The fact that it was Truman Capote was an extremely lucky accident, because he's fascinating in so many ways and he's so verbal and also was a man who was struggling with some real demons, I think. That made the work I was doing that much more interesting and deeper.
Up until that point, you’d made your living as an actor. Where did the impulse to tackle a screenplay come from?
DAN: I'd written, as you do, bad poetry in high school and college. And I had written a short story or two. I'd always admired playwrights and screenwriters; it seemed to me like a real trick to get a story told primarily through dialogue.
I thought about writing this as a play, initially, and then for some reason a screenplay felt more liberating. The play, I think, would have felt a little bit closed down and would really center too much on the discussions in the jail cell.
I always thought I wanted to write a screenplay, but I never wanted to do it just theoretically. I wanted to do it with a specific idea in mind that would really become something of an obsession, which is what this became. I almost felt like I would have been terribly disappointed with myself had I not done it. And feeling like I had to write this, or had to try to write this, was not a feeling I'd had before.
You had the distinct advantage, as a beginning writer, of being married to a working writer. How did she help you in this process?
DAN: Although it doesn't seem like there's a lot of plot in the movie -- it's about a guy writing a book about an event that already happened -- but it is quite plotty when you get down to it. And she was clear and strict with me, saying "If there are any scenes where people are just talking about something that you think is going to be interesting, cut it, because if it's not moving the plot forward it doesn't belong in the script." That was important to learn. And it was something that I had never considered.
I did an outline, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five pages with a paragraph for each scene, with dialogue suggestions. The script came out probably 80% tied to that outline.
Did you change the script after showing it to people?
DAN: Not right at the beginning. It kind of was what it was. It was long, almost 130 pages, a lot of dialogue, but you got a very strong sense of what the movie might be from it.
We let it sit for a while. I know Bennett did a lot of thinking about it, as did Phil. And when we finally were getting to the point where it looked like we were actually going to get some financing for this, we got to work.
Did you take any classes or read any books on screenwriting before you sat down and wrote the outline?
DAN: No, I didn't take any classes. I read the Robert McKee book (Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting) that I guess everybody reads, and I found that pretty helpful ---his clarity about story. I think that was an important lesson for me to learn over and over again, that story is primary. Clever dialogue is not what it's about. It's got to ride on the story, and then you can hang stuff off of that.
Then it was just a matter of trial and error. And the lucky fact of having a subject who has been quoted as having said a lot of funny things, of which I put as many as possible into the screenplay.
What were the upside and the downside of writing about a real person?
DAN: I always hated that moment in school when the teacher, I think inevitably a somewhat lazy teacher, would give the assignment, "Write a story about whatever you want," and I would just panic. My mind would just be a complete blank. But if I got a very specific assignment to write "Why does this character have to confront this thing in this story in Chapter Three," then I was off and running.
Rules are good for me. In that way, I think writing about a real person, knowing basically what the rules are -- you can take a little bit of license, but try to stick to the facts as much as humanly possible -- that felt liberating to me. It has a way of focusing my imagination, I guess, instead of feeling like anything goes and then I'm screwed.
I recently have had correspondence with Wallace Shawn, who is William Shawn's son. He and his brother are not terribly happy about the way William Shawn is portrayed in the film.
I knew that Capote had three different editors involved in the book. One was William Shawn of The New Yorker, one was Bennett Cerf at Random House, and then when Cerf retired, a guy named Joe Fox took over. That just seemed too confusing to present in a movie. We needed one editor and I choose that to be William Shawn, and he would do everything that all the other guys did as well. That upset Wallace and I feel badly about it. If I were able to go back, I would try to solve it.
What you encounter is that, even if the people have died, there is a moral debt owed to them in terms of trying to adhere as strictly as possible to the truth. It's something I tried to be very conscious of, but in this particular case, I think I came up short.
Did you ever consider just fictionalizing the character's name, since he was already a composite of three people?
DAN: It didn't occur to me at the time that any of the things I had him doing could possibly be upsetting to anybody, but that was my own take and I see now why his sons are upset. Looking back now, I would try to find a way to fix it.
Did you do any readings or workshop the script?
DAN: We did a table reading in New York with Phil and some actor friends of ours, just a few weeks before rehearsals started. The reading highlighted the problems that we had been kind of skating over, scenes where we thought, "Oh, I'll fix it later." It focused our minds on actually fixing the problems.
Did you have much rehearsal?
DAN: We had a decent amount of rehearsal and I loved it. It was a terrific experience.
Bennett and I had an important talk about how, mechanically, we were going to run rehearsals. The decision was that he, because he was directing the movie, he needed to develop rapport, relationship, trust with the actors without me around.
We were all up in Winnipeg and in the morning I would go sit with whomever was going to rehearse that day with Bennett and they would read through the scenes. We'd talk about any questions, and then I'd take off and go up to this little room I had and do re-writing from the day before that needed to be done, tweaks, whatever. Then I'd come back at the end of the day and we'd read it again. I think it worked enormously well. I think the actors came to really trust Bennett and it was just a better use of my time instead of just sitting and poking my nose into rehearsals, which would only have been disruptive.
Did any significant changes take place in editing?
DAN: There was a lot of streamlining of the movie.
The first version that I saw was probably 20 minutes longer than the finished version. I'd never been through the process of seeing a movie that was so fat in that way. Bennett was feeling quite good about it and I think he could see where the target was. At that point I couldn't and it felt fat, it felt not terribly funny, sluggish, and I got kind of terrified at that point.
It was just through months of carving it and carving it and carving it that it got to the place where it didn’t have anything extra in it -- and it only got to that place after a laborious process. Bennett and Chris Tellefsen, the editor, knew where they were headed, but it was a little bit difficult for me to see, so to my mind that transformation was enormous, although I don't think it was a tremendous surprise to them.
I saw, finally, a version that I felt really happy with. There was no sound work done on it, there were a couple of little things that needed to be fixed, and I thought, "I'm going to stop watching it now and I'm going to wait to see it all the way through with everything set, color-corrected and all the sound work done." I did that at the Telluride Film Festival, where it was properly projected and there was an audience, and that was a pretty thrilling moment.
What's the best advice you're ever received about writing?
DAN: I think it's got to be what I learned from my wife, that it's all about plot. It has got to move. You have to move through the scenes from one to the other. It's got to feel inexorable that this scene follows upon that scene.
There's no point to moving around capriciously. You're only going to get lost and you're going to lose the audience. As many screenplays as I may write, I don't think I'll change my point of view about that.
What was the experience like to be nominated for an Academy Award?
DAN: I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way, but because the season is so long -- we'd been to Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festivals, and then we opened -- and the movie had gotten a great deal of good response, even before it opened, so we knew we had something that people were responding to.
And then sometime in January they announce what's going to be nominated, and by that point you've been through so many different awards announcements -- the critics’ awards that have been handed out or nominees have been announced, Independent Spirit awards nominees were announced by then -- there starts to be a little list that people are saying, "These are the contenders."
Unfortunately, it kind of ruins the experience, because I think that you start to develop expectations, because people are saying, "Oh, look, it's a real possibility," while all along you've been thinking, "Oh, come on, don't be ridiculous." It can't help but eat at you and so you think, "Well, that would be great, wouldn't it?" The fear of being disappointed almost replaces what should be simply shock and elation. And that's unfortunate.
However, having said that, the biggest reaction I had was looking at the list of people I'd been nominated with. I'd never understood before when people said that something like that could be humbling, but, at that point, I got it. And it was largely because Tony Kushner's name was on it, someone whose play I had been in -- Angels In America -- and someone whom I've admired for as long as I've been aware of his writing. To be included in a list with him was simply incredible.
So I had all those emotions at the same time.
It's a heady time, it’s fun. There was no expectation on my part that I would win, because Brokeback Mountain was such a big event. Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana wrote a great script and I think people felt that he was due and the script was great. So it was kind of a fun way to go into the Oscar season, which was that I had no expectations of winning but I was just going to enjoy it.
Any advice to someone starting a low-budget script?
DAN: I know that the premise of this book is about writing stuff that will fit into a certain budget, but I don't know that I would give that advice off the bat. I mean, look, obviously if you're writing scenes where spaceships get blown up, you know where you are. If you're even slightly aware that big things cost money, then you're not going to write things like that.
But to be thinking in that way, I feel, can also get you thinking like, "Well, how will critics respond to this? How will producers respond to this? How will ...?" And you cannot have that in your head while you're writing. You simply have to be thinking, "Do I like this? Do I believe it? Is it interesting to me? When I go back and read it, if I can be as objective as possible, is it exciting to me to read?"
If you're honest with yourself and have some sort of decent barometer for how things are playing, then you can't help but have the right reaction to it. That's the most important thing, to write something that is successful on the page. That sort of second-guessing, I think, is going to be defeatist.
You already have enough voices in your head – and the superego perched on your shoulder, saying, "That's terrible, that's not good enough" -- so the fewer voices you can add to that chorus, the better.
Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!
"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control."
Roger Corman, Producer
★★★★★
It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!
Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos
John Sayles: Writing to your resources
Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes
John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots
Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals
George Romero: Casting
Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection
Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity
David Lynch: Kill your darlings
Ron Howard: Pre-production planning
John Carpenter: Going low-tech
Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking
And more!
Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!
It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!
Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.
"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond
John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.
The book covers (among other topics):
Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature
Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period
George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous
Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget
Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget
Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror
Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget
Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting
L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting
Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced!