When you meet Bennett Miller in person, his films seem to make a bit more sense. A quiet, intense man, the cadence of his answers can be charitably described as "deliberate," while others might simply wish for him to speed up slightly and get to the point.
The same charges have been levied against his works by detractors, but fans of "Capote," "Moneyball," and now "Foxcatcher" revel in the lugubrious tone and torpid pace of the dialogue, while sudden, kinetic bursts of physical exertion punctuate without warning.
Moviefone Canada spoke with Bennett about "Foxcatcher" at the Toronto Film Festival, and we started by discussing a key scene that takes place behind a closed door, a metaphor (perhaps) for much of the film's narrative opacity.
Moviefone Canada: In my opinion, the most remarkable scene is the one that takes place behind the window. It embodies everything that you're doing with the story -- as much as we know, so much of it is left unsaid, we can witness it, but not actually know what's going on. Can you talk about whether or not that scene means as much to you as a director?
Bennett Miller: I don't think I have some kind of hierarchy of important scenes, but that scene is a turning moment. It is a chapter change where Dave [Schultz, played by Mark Ruffalo], who had moved back to the farm, really is forced to make a decision, and feels compelled to protect his brother and to dismiss Du Pont momentarily.
Like many things, when scrutinized and you think about in life how these moments are, it doesn't matter what was said. You just see it and this guy is protecting his brother and you have to step away. He's kind, but he's firm about it. It's a significant beat. I had pondered all different versions of scripted scenes, and eventually, it's just when we were scouting, I saw that door, and that window, and [thought to] rip it up. That'll work. I just thought it would play better.
What made you want to become a filmmaker?
I was a very quiet kid. I started speaking very late. Maybe that had to do with circumstances that would make a kid quiet, but I think I understood language long before I started speaking. When I was about five years old, I saw a production of "The Miracle Worker," the Helen Keller story, and that made a major impression. The play itself, a moment in the play, it just seared me in a way.
The water-on-hand scene?
I remember that moment too, the moment of connection when she figures out the language, absolutely, but I remember the mother realizing that the child was blind and deaf and screaming into the crib. It's actually shattering. And then I went on to the stage after. It was a small community theatre and so it wasn't a stage up here, it was black boxes. I remember I was able to just walk on the stage and I opened a door that should have led into a house, but there was no inside of the house, it was just pulleys and ropes and sandbags and flats, backstage darkness. I realized this is a set.
That concept of a set, it was new to me and I wanted, from that moment on, to become a production designer, a set designer. And I actually did some of that in college before I dropped out, designed for some plays. But photographs, taking photographs, my father took slides on vacations, so that was incredibly entrancing, watching the slideshows and I started taking pictures ... I feel like this [stuff about me] is the most boring stuff in the world.
I don't know how to turn the lens around so much. I think the reason I'm in it, the main reason, is I love cinema. I think it's just the most powerful medium in the history of art, and I think the potential is unimaginable. You spend lifetimes [sic] trying to master it and it's also something that feels like it's dying. If cinema dies, it's not because we've managed to discover everything that it can discover and do everything that it can do, it's going to die because there is no longer an audience and a demand for it, because the exploitation of the medium for monetary gain will snuff out its true potential.
Mark Ruffalo has discussed the use of meditation on set.
I was awfully surprised when he started talking about that. I think there's a lot to learn from meditation. That's kind of why you do it. It's a discipline of observing, awareness and equanimity. Not concluding, but being able to look at something that perhaps is difficult to look at, and not succumb to the temptation to conclude. To just keep looking past. Being with it in that moment and really seeing what is there and not having a mind trigger to a conclusion, to the temptation to label something or just to see it as it is and how much deeper you can go if you don't reach for the low-hanging fruit. If you don't sensationalize, if you don't contrive to manipulate a response. If you're not trying to do a dualistic thing, but rather accept the complexity, the chaos, the anxiety and disturbance of reality.
Clearly, you're talking about your film, right?
Yeah, of course, but I think there's many forms of meditation. What interests me is that it doesn't have any imagination, no fabrication, no mantras or visualizations, or vocalizations or anything like that, but is observational.
Some critics have gone so far to say that Du Pont's actions are a larger indictment of the U.S. in general.
Part of what's attractive about the story is that these characters do embody the conflicting characteristics of my country and the world. Ultimately, you can recognize the metaphor and the allegory in it. When you make the film, you really can't be working politically, it would contradict the whole style and integrity of the film.
In choosing the subject, I thought it was fascinating because so many of these themes, like wealth and class and entitlement and things like that, exceptionalism, they're just in the story. Perhaps if I'm interested in those things, perhaps the lens will gravitate in the direction of how those things manifest on the most banal, mundane interpersonal level.
It's kind of an extraordinary story: you have one of the wealthiest men in America and he's got working class blue-collar middle America guys just rubbing up against, their interests just rubbing up against each other. I saw the story as allegorical, but when you're working on it, you don't think like that.
Channing Tatum seems to have been born to play this role.
I offered him the role 8 years ago.
I saw a film called "Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" when I went to a special screening in New York, it was the premiere, at a theatre in Chelsea. I'd never heard of him, I'd never seen him before. I saw that movie and I didn't even have a script yet for "Foxcatcher," but I was researching it and pursuing it. I saw that performance and he's incredible in that film. He's electric and dangerous and I thought, "Holy s**t!"
That doesn't happen a lot, that someone just jumps off the screen like that. The character's this sort of unmoored, dangerous guy from Queens, New York, and I thought well, he's got that animal energy, the intensity, and he radiates. I thought, wow, he's got that energy, but they probably just hired some guy from Queens who's like that to play himself. When I found out that he's from Alabama, and doesn't sound like that or walk like that or think like that, I offered him the part before there was a script.
He said yes, and as time went on and I developed the thing, his career started to change and he started to do other things, and as he told me, he kind of got freaked out by the whole idea, and it turns out I wasn't able to get the movie made. After "Moneyball" I bumped into him on the Sony lot, and we caught up. I told him I wanted to get "Foxcatcher" going again and was he in.
And what did you see in the other two?
Well, Mark Ruffalo's Mark Ruffalo. There's no explanation needed. He's just got the biggest heart of anybody I've ever met, and he's sort of the Dave Schultz of the entertainment industry. There's no movie without him.
And Steve Carell, the fact that he's not an obvious choice is what made him an obvious choice. He does what Du Pont does, which is the unimaginable. Nobody saw Du Pont doing what he did, nobody thought Du Pont had that in him, and so it had to be an actor who you considered benign, but had this whole other thing, which was not hard for me to see once I'd met him and talked to him.
"Foxcatcher" opens in theatres on November 28.
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