The Truman shows

The second film in a year about Truman Capote? He would love the attention, Infamous director Douglas McGrath tells Michael Dwyer

If it is the case that great minds really do think alike, it must be particularly true of screenwriters and directors, given the number of times they have hit on the same subjects at the same time. In the early 1990s, three Robin Hood movies were in development, two got made and one, starring Kevin Costner, was a big hit.

Then Costner played the title role in Wyatt Earp, but it was overshadowed by Tombstone, in which Kurt Russell portrayed Earp. And Costner was also planning a film about Michael Collins around that time, but Neil Jordan got there first. More recently, Baz Luhrmann's film on Alexander the Great was abandoned when Oliver Stone's version went into production ahead of him.

In the case of Capote and Infamous, the coincidence is quite remarkable.

Both movies started shooting in the autumn of 2004. Both deal with the flamboyant US author Truman Capote. And both are concerned specifically with the 1950s Kansas killings that inspired Capote to write his innovative non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood.

Timing was crucial. Directed by Bennett Miller, Capote was ready first, opened to excellent reviews, and earned Phillip Seymour Hoffman the best actor Oscar last year for his title role performance. Released after what has been deemed a decent interval, Douglas McGrath's Infamous is its equal in many respects, but while there is no denying the fascination exerted by the story it tells, it inevitably prompts a sense of déjà vu.

English actor Toby Jones uncannily captures Capote's personality, appearance and distinctively fey speaking voice. The film is bolstered by a particularly strong cast that also includes Sandra Bullock (never better) as novelist Harper Lee, Jeff Daniels as the Kansas district attorney, Sigourney Weaver as New York socialite Babe Paley, and in a singing cameo, Gwyneth Paltrow as Peggy Lee.

McGrath's screenplay, based on George Plimpton's book about Capote, sparkles with the bitchy wit of its subject before it turns deeply serious as Capote is drawn to Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), one of the two Kansas killers.

An affable, erudite Texan, McGrath believes that Capote would love to have lived for the time when there would be two rival movies about him.

"I think his only complaint would have been that there were only two, and that he believed he was fascinating enough for many more movies to be made about him. And he is. He was one of the most beguiling, appalling and brilliant figures, and endlessly interesting.

"I think he was his own best audience. I believe that the very deep feeling he had for Perry Smith was, in some measure, an expression of his vanity. What he loved about Perry, I think, was they had such similar backgrounds. It says something very interesting that, when they got past each other's exteriors, which were very different from each other, they found their interiors were very like each other.

"If you have an interesting subject - and whatever else you say about Truman Capote, he can never be accused of not being interesting - and you're doing something more than a traditional biography, each film-maker is going to come at it from a different point of view. I came to it with a very specific idea of what I wanted to say about Truman, and I assume the makers of the other film did, too."

ALTHOUGH MCGRATH had heard rumours of another Capote screenplay, he says he was shocked to learn in the summer of 2003 that the rival production was falling into place. "We knew it was a possibility. It was the timing that was strange, that they both happened at exactly the same time. What surprised me about the other film is [that it is] not really humorous, because I regard humour as such an essential part of Truman's personality. But that's how I see him, and they saw him in a different way, and that just tells you how many sides of him there were."

In one of the funniest scenes in Infamous, Capote calls the district attorney's office in Kansas and the receptionist tells him the DA doesn't take calls from strange women. To which he protests, "I'm not strange!"

There is more humour when Capote arrives in Kansas and his camp demeanour startles the local population. "This was a time when there were three TV channels in the US, and nobody who appeared on those channels was in the least bit outside the norm," McGrath says. "Lucy Ricardo [in I Love Lucy] was about as wacky as people could be. So, for Truman to come to your town . . . people just didn't know what to make of him. I'd like to say that it was my idea for them to call him ma'am, but the people in the town really did call him ma'am.

"I talked to some of the few people from there who are still alive, and they said they didn't mind the fact that he was gay. They said they knew about gay people - usually the choirmaster or the church organist - but that the reason they didn't like Truman at first was that he was so rude and demanded access that nobody else was getting. I think they admired his persistence, that he wouldn't take no for an answer. You also have to bear in mind that the town was quite traumatised by the murders that had taken place and had not been solved by the time Truman arrived there."

McGrath gave his movie the punning title, Every Word is True, before he had to change it to Infamous. "I got everyone, everything I wanted for the movie, except the title," he says. "Warner wouldn't let me have it. Their legal department felt that it could leave the company liable to lawsuits, because, of course, every word in the movie isn't true. It's obviously an ironic title, but you know how insensitive to irony legal departments are."

While McGrath drew on George Plimpton's book for many of the vignettes in his screenplay - in one scene, socialite Babe Paley sends a "care package" of beluga caviar to Capote and Harper Lee in Kansas - McGrath credits his cast for their own research. "Sigourney Weaver met Babe Paley's daughter who told here that Babe, though ravishingly beautiful, was quite ashamed of her teeth and whenever she would laugh, she could cover her mouth geisha-style, so Sigourney did that in the film.

"The funniest thing was when Isabella Rossellini discovered that Diana Vreeland, who's played by Juliet Stevenson in the movie, liked to have her money ironed. That says so much about Diana Vreeland and her class, and by extension, Truman's world, that I had to work it into the movie. It's the first big laugh in the movie - because people don't believe it."

McGrath's film benefits considerably from the casting of an unfamiliar actor, Toby Jones, in the pivotal role of Capote. "I have to say on behalf of Toby that, although he has a physical similarity to Truman, he prepared for the role like an Olympic athlete," McGrath says.

"He studied Truman physically and changed his own appearance to get as close as possible to his appearance, and before we started shooting every morning, Toby did 90 minutes of vocal exercises because he doesn't sound at all like Truman off the set. His commitment was complete. That's why when you watch him, there's no separation between our memory of Truman Capote and what we're seeing and hearing on the screen.

"People say I've had such awful luck with the other Capote film, but I've always said that I've had so much luck in so many other ways that I can't complain. In so many ways, the best thing that ever happened to me professionally was getting to know Woody Allen."

MCGRATH WORKED with Allen on their Oscar-nominated screenplay for the 1994 comedy, Bullets Over Broadway.

"It would have been enough, just to know Woody," McGrath says, "because he's so smart and you learn so much about movies just by being with him. But then to have the experience of collaborating with him was even more special because he's such a generous collaborator and such a great teacher. I can trace decision after decision I've made back to things I learned from writing with him - about respecting the audience, and pace and intelligence."

Infamous is McGrath's fourth film as writer and director, and it continues his preoccupation with literary subjects, following his adaptations of Emma and Nicholas Nickleby. "I've always loved the movies, ever since I was growing up in Texas as a boy," he says. "My parents were great readers and I got a real love of language and storytelling from them, and of all the complexities you can get in great literature that you don't always get in movies, although you can in some. Part of what appealed to me about Truman is how complex he was, just as the whole story in the film is so complex, and I loved how it went from something very funny and comic to something so dark and despairing.

"When you adapt a novel - and a novel is almost invariably bigger than what your two-hour movie ever will be - you have to take it apart like a car engine and then reassemble it inside a smaller car. In that process you learn more about what an author is thinking, page by page, idea by idea. In adapting Dickens, I became acutely aware of how he mixed comedy and tragedy and how the comedy felt funnier and the tragedy more tragic in juxtaposition. I found the same when I was writing Infamous."

McGrath is moving on, working on his adaptation of Alec Wilkinson's book, A Violent Act. "He's a New Yorker writer and it's a fantastic book," McGrath says. "It was written around 12 years ago and it's about a terrible murder that happened in the middle of America, but it follows a very different path to the story in Infamous. It deals with this awful crime and then the manhunt for the killer. It's set in 1990, so it will be the most modern film I've ever made."

Infamous opens tomorrow