It's a tragedy, it's a classic tragedy. In a way, he's got a character flaw that is going to cause his destruction, and it's not going to come from the outside; it's going to come from the inside of him. |
It's more evidence that it's about the heart of the thing more than the magnitude of it. Not a David and Goliath thing. Small films, big films, it's not the size of the film that matters. |
It's very hard now that the film is done and you can look at it to appreciate the magnitude of the risk he took and the possibility of horrible, embarrassing failure. Think about this character. Think about who Capote was. And think about Phil Hoffman, who's basically like a big guy with a baseball cap with a deep voice. |
On the surface it's this elaborate story of a writer doing all sorts of things to complete his masterpiece. But nobody, and to some degree not even he himself, really understands the course he's on and what he is going through. He wanted fame so badly he was oblivious to what he was trampling on to get it. |
Phil was able to ... take the physicality of the character and really ingest it and own it completely so that he could really get to the core of this guy and play the complexities. |
Philip insisted it would be wrong for him to break down and be so emotional. But, of course, when we rolled camera, he proceeded to do exactly what he'd argued against. It's what makes his performance feel so real. When he entered a scene, he was no longer thinking like an actor. He was thinking like Truman Capote would think. |
The market creates conventionality and conformity, but that's not really what people want to see. |
This isn't really a biography. It's a tragedy. |
Unlike most films, it examines a side of a person's life that's hidden, and I think there's a lot of people who carry around a fair amount of darkness and keep it private for a lifetime. The film is about a very public figure and his very private tragedy. |
We couldn't have gotten it made without his involvement, without his showing up and saying he believed in us. |
We decided to do something completely different. Writing is the loneliest job in the world. I wanted to capture that solitude. Writers spend a lot of time alone in a room just typing away, and this is the first movie to really show how a writer works. |