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Interview with Bennett Miller, director of Capote

 

Writing In Cold Blood put Truman Capote among America’s literary glitterati - but the experience haunted him until his death. Now director Bennett Miller’s new film biopic tells his story. Interview by Tony Earnshaw.

“Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged.”

So began a run-of-the-mill newspaper report in the New York Times in 1959 about a far-off crime scene involving the quadruple murder of the Clutter family – pleasant, middle-class folk who seemed to epitomise, in microcosm, the concept of late 1950s Americana. The Clutters’ grisly end and its interpretation by an assiduous – some would say obsessive – writer forever changed the way America looked at crime and the way it was reported. It also gave birth to the movement tagged ‘New Journalism’ and led directly to In Cold Blood, the pivotal book considered by many to be the very first “non-fiction novel”.

Capote’s genius – the word he himself used to describe his talents – was in his attention to detail. That, combined with his capacity for listening without interruption, meant that he was to bring a macabre grace to what would have been just another throwaway news story about some anonymous people in an anonymous town far from anywhere. It was big in western Kansas; everywhere else it was small beer.

His interest transformed the Clutter case into a notorious cause célèbre. Worse, his empathy with one of the killers, Perry Smith, and his attempts to comprehend what drove him to kill made him a hate figure for many who could not or would not understand his motives. Humanisation, they felt, was too close to glorification. It didn’t help that Capote was a 24-carat eccentric – a gloriously flamboyant and over-the-top homosexual who stunned rural Kansans with his attire, his manner and his voice: a lisping squeak that became a trademark.

Bennett Miller, a 39-year-old documentary maker who has segued into features with Capote, a compelling hybrid of crime thriller and studied biopic, believes strongly that while Truman Capote rode to fame on its spine, the long journey of researching and writing In Cold Blood ultimately broke him. He calls it “a consequence of character”.

“Truman Capote was destined for a level of greatness,” says Miller. “He wanted it badly and he was willing to do all sorts of things to get what he wanted. Perry Smith, in those terms, played a part. There was a desperation in [Capote]. He wasn’t able to separate his ambition from his desperation and that desperation was going to bring about his self-destruction. He really felt for [Perry Smith] and he really identified with him, but it became his will for this person to die - not because of any sense of moral justice but because he wanted his book to be finished.”

Capote laboured on the book for four long years, spending much of that time with the taciturn yet intellectual Smith and his garrulous co-accused Richard Hickock in their jail cells. Yet, as Miller points out (and as actor-turned-writer Dan Futterman’s screenplay illustrates) Capote became increasingly frustrated at his inability to write the final chapter: he could see no end in sight for his novel. The only solution was for both men to go to the gallows.

“He wanted the praise that he thought would accompany the completion of this book,” asserts Miller. “Something happened to him when he wrote this book. He did watch [Perry] die and it broke him. That was the beginning of the end. Later he said himself that he never recovered from the experience of writing this book.”

Miller sees courage in Capote’s actions. Others did not. Kenneth Tynan, the enfant terrible of British theatre criticism in the 1960s, accused Capote of befriending and then abandoning Smith and Hickock to fulfil his ambitions.
Says Miller: “What Tynan said - that Truman did not do what he could have done for these guys - was absolutely true. It burned Truman badly and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. But it takes courage to be who he was in that time: to get on that train, go to that town and stick with it. I think he was tremendously courageous [especially] for a person of his condition – by that I mean he was an oddity. He was a tiny little guy with a bizarre voice. He was a homosexual at a time when nobody was openly ‘out’. And for him to do what he did took unbelievable balls. He really was a fighter.”

Capote’s career – he also wrote screenplays and is remembered for his work on Bogart’s Beat the Devil and the Henry James adaptation The Innocents along with the film adaptation of his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s – was forever overshadowed by In Cold Blood and the dreadful events that inspired it. Reading the book, even 40 years later, is a visceral experience, and its sledgehammer effect can be summed up by these chilling words, quietly uttered by Perry Smith: “I really admired Mr Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat.”

Horror rarely comes colder than that, and the terrible beauty of its delivery is all Capote’s.

• This article originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post (Feb 24 2006)