Douglas McGrath Explains the Origin of His Fascination with Truman Capote: McGrath says it all sprang from watching Capote on The Dick Cavett Show. “I will tell you the thing that brought me to it is my first year out of college I worked at Saturday Night Live. I used to get home quite late and not that the show was funny the year that I worked there, but I didn’t feel like watching comedy on TV at that hour so I often watched Dick Cavett, which was amusing but I wouldn’t call it comedy. Truman was a guest one night and I’d never seen him before. Dick Cavett introduced him as a ‘master stylist’ and one of the great writers of his generation. This was my first year – I was just becoming a writer – and I thought, ‘Wow, I’d like to improve my style. What’s he like?’ He came out – and this was only a few years before he died - and he was in very bad shape, very heavy, perspiring. You know, right before you come on there’s a person stopping the perspiring and he was evidently perspiring. His head was lolling and over to the side. He didn’t seem good at all. I couldn’t reconcile that introduction with that person.
He talked quite bitterly about Tennessee Williams who had just died, sympathetically of Tennessee Wiliams but quite bitterly about the press and how cruel the press had been to him, and how America doesn’t appreciate its artists. I found him fascinating and appalling and strangely sympathetic. I felt protective of him in some way. I just remember very distinctly thinking, ‘What happened to you?’ If you’re this master stylist and this is what you seem like, something must have gone wrong. I started reading his work and started reading about him, and I came to feel that what went wrong went wrong in Kansas.”
Sympathizing with Capote: In order to get into character, Jones found it necessary to sympathize with Truman Capote. “I suppose with melodrama you don’t have to sympathize with the character, but I suppose in something like this it’s very hard acting a character where you’re having to retrace these decisions that he makes without in some way sympathizing with him. It seems to me he’s faced in this story with kind of almost a mythic problem, which is the masterpiece that he so clearly wants to write, that he’s driven to write. He knows enough about himself as a writer to know that the best ending for that is the thing that will kill the thing that seems to be on the brink of giving his life some meaning, or a new meaning. That tradeoff seems to me to be a terrible, terrible, and slightly unavoidable problem for him. It’s very easy to feel sympathy for that kind of dilemma.
Just to play a character like that, you have to look at all the contradictions within their life, within anyone’s life, to begin to feel sympathy for them. As you see, he was portrayed often as a clown. He’s often laughed at and laughed about when he appeared on the shows. As an actor, you’re looking for chinks in the persona and I found him remarkably easy to find, actually. Once I started examining his writing and examining the writing about him, I found this whole idea – this very composed person with witty putdowns and the costume and the voice and the whole very ‘done’ personality highly unconvincing. I think it’s jeopardized in our film. Our film’s about the jeopardy that mask is put under. You can see it crack because he attempts to not be sympathetic to someone.”
Jones’ Initial Reaction to the Script: “Just delight, proper excitement, mixed with terror,” recalls Jones. “He was so remote from me in so many ways. That sense of not really understanding his cultural significance in the same way that they do [in America], obviously. There is that sense of a huge job that I was about to undertake, which is also terrifying. Also as soon as he opens his mouth on film you go, ‘Oh God, what is that? What is that voice all about?’ And obviously as an actor your instinct is that this is a very performed personality, a very composite person. He very carefully studied certain things to appear a certain way. Obviously with this amazing script that read like a thriller and was about the breakdown of that mask, I was just very aware of a long uphill struggle that is exactly what you want as an actor. The thrill of transforming is the basic instinct of the actor.”
Page 2: Sandra Bullock, the Voice, and Comparing Capotes
