The Truman show

PHILIP Seymour Hoffman never dreamed of portraying Truman Capote. And he certainly didn’t have a secret longing to, say, bring the Broadway hit “Tru” to the big screen. For Hoffman, who came of age during the later, drug-and-alcohol-addled years of the writer’s life, Capote was that strange man who occasionally showed up on talk shows, the one who wrote the scary book.

But when Bennett Miller and Dan Futterman, Hoffman’s friends since high school, approached him, he couldn’t just blow them off. Never mind that “Capote” was the first script Futterman, a fellow actor, had ever written, or that Miller was a director with one documentary, albeit well-received, to his credit. They were his friends, and Hoffman trusted them.

So he read Futterman’s screenplay about the writing of “In Cold Blood,” and he was impressed. And extremely nervous. Capote, with all his self-acknowledged brilliance and over-the-top affectations, was an actor’s nightmare. The voice, the walk, the thing with the hands -- one tic too far and you were doing camp. Truman Capote couldn’t even play Truman Capote: When the writer appeared in “Murder by Death,” playing pretty much himself, the critics savaged him.

Of course that film came at a time when Capote had become more literary oddity than avatar. Even “Tru” portrays the writer as an emotional mess, trying to cope with the social banishment caused by the publication of excerpts from his final, unfinished novel. “Capote,” on the other hand, is about a man on his ascent to greatness. The film, which opens in limited release Friday, seems to herald a revived interest in the man’s literary contributions. Another version of the same period, “Have You Heard?,” is in the works at Warner Independent Pictures.

Still, “Capote” seemed to come out of nowhere. So Hoffman hemmed and Hoffman hawed and said he’d think about it. Seriously. He would.

Miller understood. He had essentially ignored Futterman’s project for years -- he finally read the script out of complete obligation and frankly was surprised at how compelling he found it.

But he didn’t think there was much of a chance with Hoffman; though he and the actor were tight, Hoffman was in the midst of a Broadway production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and it was practically killing him, as O’Neill plays tend to do to actors.

Hoffman and his girlfriend had just had a baby. The man had other things on his mind.

But Futterman would not be deterred -- he had spent six years working on the script; it had been a big portion of his courtship of Anya Epstein, a television writer who became his wife. He knew Hoffman would be just perfect.

“So Danny wrote me a letter,” Hoffman says. “This unbelievably beautiful letter. I’m totally scared of doing this because the chance of failure is very high and obvious, but he writes saying what else did we get into this life for except the chance for him and me and Bennett to make a film we cared about, and what did it matter if no one else liked it. So I called Bennett the next day and said yes.

“I really should find that letter,” he adds quietly, staring over the night-dark lawn at the Chateau Marmont, where he is staying while shooting “Mission: Impossible III.” “It would be really nice to look at it now.”

“Now” is the drawn breath in the days before “Capote” premieres. Well-received at the just-wrapped Toronto International Film Festival, the movie remains, nonetheless, a tough sell. Hoffman’s performance will be the biggest draw. The actor disappears into a role that by definition requires him, in each and every scene, to look out of place.

If the thought of seeing someone do a really good Truman Capote might put people in the seats, Hoffman believes what will keep them there is the story, an illumination of the power of hubris, the complexities of friendship and the bargain with the devil many artists make.

“When I started studying him, then became semi-obsessed with him, I saw the parallels,” says Hoffman. “In our ages, that we’re both artists, in the price that’s paid for going after something with complete focus, with blinders on. And the discovery that what you wish for most probably won’t bring you happiness.”

Three who made it happen

In appearance, the only thing the three friends share is a lack of grooming pretension that Capote would certainly have categorized as scruffiness. They show up for separate interviews in jeans with blown-out knees, faded T-shirts and, in Hoffman’s case, an untucked flannel shirt. Between the baseball cap and the glasses, his face is fairly indistinct. Yet even in the candle-flickering dimness of the Chateau’s veranda, people recognize him. Perhaps it’s the voice or the now-famous slouch.

Dark and wiry, Miller has that carefully laid-back intensity of a man born to live in a city loft, while Futterman is boyishly handsome and instantly vaguely familiar: He played Amy Gray’s brother on “Judging Amy” and Will’s love interest in several episodes of “Will & Grace,” among other things.

“Capote” is as much a story of friendship, its necessity and its treacheries, as it is anything else. Based on the biography by Gerald Clarke, the film chronicles the six years it took to write “In Cold Blood,” a book that almost single-handedly created the genre of journalistic literature.

After reading about the murders of four members of the prosperous farm family in a tiny Kansas town, Capote decided to do a piece for the New Yorker on the impact such a horrific thing would have on small-town life. Knowing that he, as a diminutive and openly gay man, would probably have difficulty fitting in, he enlisted the help of his childhood friend, Harper Lee, played in the film by Catherine Keener. Lee’s masterpiece, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” had not yet been published, but as the daughter of a Southern lawyer, Lee knew something about getting people to talk. With Capote, she conducted the initial interviews that would become the book. Upon arriving in Holcomb, Kan., Capote quickly saw a chance to write a book like no one else had written.

That, even more than the telling of the actual tale, became his goal, and he pursued it with a single-mindedness that became obsession when the two killers were caught and Capote saw in one of them, Perry Smith, a dark mirror image perhaps of himself.

It was not an easy film to sell. Hoffman decided to act as producer through his newly formed production company, which, he says, allowed him to live in almost complete denial that he had agreed to play a role that would, undoubtedly, make him a laughingstock.

“I was very ambivalent,” he says now. “I would say to Bennett, well, maybe it will get made, maybe it won’t. But in life it seems if you don’t close a door, something will be revealed eventually.”

That something came in the form of Bill Vince at Infinity Media Inc., who loved the project and happened to have a contact at United Artists. After months of no-thank-yous, the film was funded.

Ambivalence turned to panic and Hoffman began to prepare, reading everything by and about the writer, listening to tapes provided by Clarke and watching “With Love From Truman,” a documentary by David and Albert Maysles made just after the publication of “In Cold Blood.” “That really helped,” he says. “Especially at the end when he starts showing the letters [from Smith], and you can see that he is really damaged, that this has changed him.”

Other TV appearances were not so helpful, Hoffman says, because they occurred later in Capote’s life, “when he was becoming more and more diseased. I was trying to capture the man at the height of his powers.”

It wasn’t easy. Not at any point. Truman Capote was the embodiment of artistic hubris. He wasn’t just going to write a good book, he was going to write the best, most important book ever.

“That contradiction is the internal drama,” says Hoffman. “Because while he was doing it, while he was basically manipulating people to tell him things, he was genuinely interested. But,” he adds, “when you’re talking to men who have murdered four people, well, that’s when it gets scary. And when it comes time for them to die, there is no way you can detach.”

The often strange relationship between journalist and subject is what drew Futterman to the story. He saw in the relationship between Capote and Smith a way of getting at the duplicity of intimacy, the friendship that is, and isn’t, what it seems.

“In a way it’s the ultimate seduction,” he says. “Both men need something from the other.”

For Miller, the story was a way to examine the dichotomy of personality, which he saw writ large in Capote. “There was a huge difference between the public and private personas,” he says. “On one hand, he’s this sophisticated socialite; on the other, he’s the loneliest person imaginable.”

It was this parcel of contradictions, Hoffman says, that made Capote “a nightmare” to play. The voice, the walk, the posture, the way Capote clutched his manuscript to his chest, those were physical things an actor of Hoffman’s caliber could figure out. But what propelled the man to make the choices he did, that Hoffman would have to know.

“The guy was exhausting,” Hoffman says. “Because every scene was different. He played every angle. He sat there, listening, but all the time thinking of what each person needed to make them open up. So there was never just one way to play each scene.”

Meanwhile, on the set, the three friends learned that talking about making a film together was one thing, actually making it was another.

Futterman, who had spent six years being the driving force behind “Capote,” had to come to grips with the fact that he was not the director. “Bennett allowed me a lot of input,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it was his call. So I would go off and do rewrites while they shot.”

During all those pitch meetings, much of the concern had been whether Miller was up to the challenge. His 1998 documentary “The Cruise” had done well at festivals, but he had never directed actors in anything other than a commercial.

“I’ve been sent tons of scripts,” he says, “especially after ‘Cruise’ came out. But I didn’t want to do a film that wasn’t important. But once I read the script,” he adds, echoing its main character, “I really believed no one could understand it or do it better than me.”

Which would have meant pretty much nothing in terms of financing if Hoffman, whose reputation grows stronger with every film he makes, hadn’t had utter, and almost odd, confidence that his friend was right.

“I have known Bennett a long time,” Hoffman says with a guarded smile. “I know a lot about him and he knows a lot about me, and I never doubted he would make the best film possible.”

Yet when asked what was the hardest thing about making “Capote,” Miller says immediately: “Working with Phil.”

“Phil is just brutal on himself,” the director says. “He was unforgiving, challenging, unrelenting. Everything had to be just right.”

Hoffman worried about the voice, about how he was standing, about how Capote would react in any given circumstance. Most of the party scenes he ad-libbed in hopes of becoming the man rather than playing him. He would tell Miller he was going to play a scene one way and then, when the camera rolled, play it the opposite way.

“Shooting Phil is a bit like doing a wildlife documentary,” Miller says. “Other actors, they hit their marks, they know to find the light. Phil is not interested in finding the light. Phil plays away from the camera.”

As Capote is forced to face his own naked ambition and his complicity in the deaths of the murderers, it got very raw. “There were days when Phil would finish and no one could meet his eye,” says Miller. “He’d walk off the set and everyone would just move away like a bunch of birds on a beach when you walk through them.”

Burned out

Truman Capote is not the most difficult role Philip Seymour Hoffman has done to date. That honor, he says, goes to Jamie Tyrone, the drunken wastrel son in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” for which Hoffman received a Tony nomination in 2003. “When I finished that, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.’ ”

O’Neill?

“No, acting,” he says with a laugh. “I was burned out, in a very satisfying way but still.... “

Capote comes a close second. “A film like that takes it out of you. You have to have that thing. You have to find it and keep it and walk it out of the trailer and across the parking lot and it has to last 12 hours. I wondered, at a certain point, if I was fit enough.”

Not physically, he explains, but artistically. As he speaks, it becomes even clearer that despite a few demographic parallels, Philip Seymour Hoffman is very different from Truman Capote. The hubris that allowed Capote, with his fey Southern ways, to storm the citadel of New York society, to pry details and secrets from small-town Kansans and murderers, to say he was going to reinvent journalism and then actually do it, is not evident in a man who shifts uncomfortably in his seat when a fan stops by.

“I like to fly below the radar,” Hoffman says. “And here is this guy who is completely open, completely bold, who has this very strange sort of machismo.... So I had to find a different entry, a different level to find him.”

What he found was the fear and uncertainty that almost always lurk beneath bravado. “He had to announce who he was so there would be no question in anyone’s mind, including his,” says Hoffman.

“But in the end, it was never enough. He wrote the book, it made him famous and rich and the talk of the town, but still it wasn’t enough. He was someone who could not get enough love, who had to be smothered by love from everyone all the time.”

But he also found ambition, a certainty of purpose that allowed Capote to manipulate anyone he felt it was necessary to manipulate in order for his book to emerge. Especially Perry Smith, whom he befriended, or baited, depending on who’s talking, to whom he offered solace and even legal help while he was trying to get Smith to confess, in exquisite detail, what had happened that night in the Clutter house.

This is what kept the three friends excited during the pitch meetings and the filming and the editing and now the publicity: At the heart of the story lie questions about the nature and worth of art itself. Is it OK to lie to a killer in pursuit of a book that will influence the world? Which forces are necessary to achieve great things and which are simply self-aggrandizement? What cost does such a book wrest from the subjects, from the writer? Is it worth it?

“When I was playing him,” Hoffman says, “I had to believe that it was worth it -- that he was doing what he was doing for the greater good. But maybe there were two crimes committed in this: the murders and what Capote did.”

Although the film’s ending makes something of a final judgment on the effect “In Cold Blood” had on its author, it refuses to portray Capote as either angel or devil. Because there is no one answer.

Like Futterman said in his letter, this is why some people, torn between fear and ambition, consign themselves to the artistic life, with all its potential for failure and, perhaps even more dangerous, great success.

Capote chose as the title of his final, unfinished book “Answered Prayers,” part of a quote from St. Therese, who said: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

“It’s something worth talking about, isn’t it?” says Hoffman. “And what people come away with, what they think of him, will reveal more about them than Capote. Which is really classic Capote,” he adds, settling back into the flickering shadows. “Getting people to reveal themselves without knowing it.”