John Jay Gives Us More Than Bad Food

It may be tough to imagine, but there are some people sitting in Butler who aren't pulling all-nighters for their CC mid-terms. A closer look might reveal someone churning out an Oscar-nominated script. Or at least, it would have seven years ago when Dan Futterman, CC '89, sat down to write the preliminary scenes of what would become Capote. The film, nominated for five Oscars, is an in-depth portrait of In Cold Blood author Truman Capote and his relationship with murderer Perry Smith. Futterman gives us insight on life after campus theater, the pleasures of the Core, and the road to Oscar glory. -Julia Stroud

Spectator: Congratulations on your Oscar nomination for Capote. Has your life changed drastically since you found out?

Dan Futterman: People are very nice to me, I find. There are certain people who didn't seem to be terribly interested, who seem to be a little more interested in talking to me. You know, these parties you go to, nominees' luncheons and stuff, and it's really okay to go up to any of the people. Because, you know, you have your little sticker on that says you were nominated, so the sticker makes socializing much easier.

S: Did you ever think, sitting in John Jay freshman year, that you would end up an Oscar nominee?

DF: I didn't. I mean, I guess if I admitted like the biggest fantasies one has of oneself-which I guess during college age can be pretty outsize-it was that maybe as an actor I might get some sort of recognition. That hasn't happened, but this is good.

S: It's not too shabby. You started as an actor. Did you act at Columbia?

DF: I did, yeah. I mean, I don't know what there is going on these days, but there was not a lot going on when I was there. It was kind of disappointing in that way. There were some acting classes which were good, and then I was in some productions, like Columbia Players I guess. Eh. So I did a few different plays, but it was mostly after college that I started being serious about it and taking a lot of classes and auditioning.

S: So, was the Core a great preparation for your life?

DF: (Laughs) It was not bad from just sort of a research way, just knowing how to do research when you need to do research, which was what I needed for this movie, at least. Also, having a lifelong library card to Butler Library was important, 'cause I wrote a lot of the script in the stacks at Butler.

S: How did you decide to write about Truman Capote?

DF: My interest in it was slightly flukey because I got interested in the general subject of journalists and subjects first. Then it was almost incidental that it ended up being about Truman Capote and his relationship with Perry Smith.

I was given, I think by my mom, a book called The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, which I really recommend if you haven't read it. It is ostensibly about Joe McGuinness, who was a journalist who was writing about a doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald in California who was accused of killing his wife and kids and then eventually convicted. McGuinness got access to him, got access to the defense team, spent the whole trial with him, and then when the book came out, it was inexplicably a shock to MacDonald that it was a complete hatchet job.

Malcolm asks, "How could this happen? How could a convicted murderer think that a journalist was going to write a nice piece about him, and what are the sort of hopes and lies to oneself that go into that sort of a subject thinking that?"

And then for the journalist, "What sort of duplicity goes into leading someone on in that way?" And her conclusion is that this happens in large and small ways always in that relationship. The subject always wants to come off well and the journalist is always playing off that, whether he or she admits it or not. That to me was just interesting and seemed like an interesting story to explore.

And when I read Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote, it seemed like a great way to get at these issues. And then, you know, Capote happened to be a fantastic subject for a movie because he's compulsively social, and highly verbal, and very funny, and a great character.

S: So, you have an idea for a script. How does it go from scenes you've written to, "Okay, now I'm making a movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman?"

DF: Well, initially I was just writing scenes and that ended up just being a disaster. I was lucky to meet my now-wife [writer Anya Epstein] who was very clear with me I needed to write an outline, and I needed to have a really strong narrative. It went from just a collection of scenes to an actual screenplay, and I don't think that would have happened had I not met her.

And then, I just got lucky with the way that I met two-I mean, really, this is true-of the most talented people I know when I was a teenager. One was the director Bennett Miller, we met when we were 12, and the two of us met Phil Hoffman at this summer theater program when we were 16. So getting the script to them was giving it to my very good friend Bennett and him passing it on to Phil and us getting together in Phil's apartment and us kind of begging him to do it. And he eventually said yes. I think he was worried about it. And not convinced that he was right for it, but we were convinced that he was.

S: Well it worked out.

DF: Yeah, it worked out all right. (Laughs)

S: So, first script, Oscar nomination.

DF: Yeah, that's good. It's all downhill from here.

S: How involved were you with the filming?

DF: One of the reasons we had a successful working relationship is that we were clear about what roles we were going to play in terms of the making of the movie-that I was the writer. I was not acting in it. I was involved, I would say, in the way that a playwright would be involved in a stage play. Many times in filmmaking, screenwriters are kind of pushed aside, but that didn't happen with this. But, I don't want to overstate my role in terms of the filmmaking-that was Bennett directing the movie.

I was up there for the rehearsal process in Canada and actors would read through the scenes and talk about any problems they had. I would talk with Bennett about it. I'd go up to my office and work on the scenes and try to do some rewriting. I'd come back down at the end of the day, they'd read through the scenes that they had worked on, re-read stuff that I had worked on from the day before, and it was a terrific process. I loved it. And then I went away. I came back periodically to visit the set, but it was to visit and have a good time and check in.

S: Your biggest competition is probably Brokeback Mountain, yes?

DF: Yeah, no doubt. It's terrific. Really different, I mean a really different kind of movie from ours. Much more, I would say, sort of, a gut-emotional rather than an intellectual-emotional. I think it comes at emotions from a sort of a different standpoint. I think the script is really good, and, you know, I think he [Larry McMurtry]'s certainly, he and Diana Ossana, have got to be frontrunners. Not only because they wrote a great movie, but also because, you know, he's a revered elder statesmen. I think people like to reward that.

S: You have Columbia competition, too, from Tony Kushner's (CC '78) Munich screenplay.

DF: One of my first reactions in being nominated and also seeing his name there is that he's been associated professionally with two incredibly proud moments for me. One was acting, walking on stage in Angels in America, when I went into that show on Broadway. And the second is being nominated alongside him. And I just think he is one of our greatest living writers, and I admire him so much. So to be included in a group with him has been amazing. It was pretty thrilling.

S: Many interviewers ask you about being known for playing a lot of gay roles. And now you're nominated in what everyone is calling the gayest Oscars. Is that somehow fitting? What do you think your attraction is to these roles and characters?

DF: Um, you know, like, all joking aside, I think the function that homosexuality plays in our movie-probably also in Brokeback Mountain, but I think that I'm going to talk about our movie-is not terribly important. Only in that I think that it goes some way to explain some of the relationship between Capote and Perry Smith.

Also, I find Truman Capote a really fascinating character not because of his flamboyance-the fact that he was gay-but the fact that he was "out gay" at a time when nobody was, or hardly anybody was. This is like the early '40s; he came to New York and started working and was this short little elfin homosexual, and he apologized to no one about that, and I admire that enormously. I think that homosexuality used to be much more of a burden than it is now, socially, and that's what I find interesting about it. How people deal with that-public and private self-whether they separate it or not. What allowances they have to make to get by socially, and Capote was forced to do that in Kansas in a way that he never was in New York.

Yeah, I've played a lot of gay roles and, you know, I have no feeling one way or another about them. I sort of have no judgment about it-it seems flukey to me. Although, you know, my wife does turn to me occasionally and say, "Look, if you are gay, just tell me now. You know, we can get it done with and that'll be it. We can both move on." (Laughs)

S: Have you put aside acting for a while?

DF: I've been doing a little bit of acting on a television show lately. I really enjoy it, though I find that I'm a little more interested in exploring writing right now.

S: Would writing ever move into directing, or is writing the ultimate goal?

DF: I've directed a play that a friend of mine wrote, and I loved doing that. I feel like maybe I would do more of that in the future, directing theater. But I literally do not know how to turn on a film camera. I feel like there is a technical level that you need to reach in order to really be a director, and I know the kind of work that Bennett put into this. And the ways that he thought about it that didn't even occur to me. In simple ways, in terms of film stock and framing, but in larger ways that I can't even talk about 'cause I don't even know. But he's a director and I'm not, and that's fine.

S: In Philip Seymour Hoffman's Golden Globe acceptance speech, he called you one of the smartest men he knows.

DF: Yeah, I've been introducing myself around like that.

S: Which is higher praise, the Oscar nod or that?

DF: (Laughs) Well, that was very nice and very public and I appreciated that a lot but, uh, well, I don't know. One was certainly more personal and one was not, but I guess if I thought that Phil was the final arbiter in terms of, like, who's smart and who's not, then I might have a stronger reaction to it. But yeah, I'd probably trade that for an Oscar nomination, if push came to shove.