There are many strange things about Bennett Miller's upcoming film, Foxcatcher. Based on the violent psychological meltdown of John Du Pont, late heir to the Chemical empire that bore his name, the film finds the hitherto amiable Steve Carell delivering a performance of impressive malignity. It gets at horrible truths concerning the hyper-wealthy.
It also passes at the most extraordinary pace. In Foxcatcher, characters speak very slowly and then allow an age to pass before cocking an ear for the next line of dialogue
“Give me five minutes to answer this question that should take 30 seconds,” Miller says and then leaves a silence long enough to paper a bedroom.
“It’s about a theory of my own,” he eventually says. “It’s my own pacing. It feels musical. It doesn’t feel slow to me.”
It is disconcerting to encounter Miller after sitting through his latest film. Neither of his first two Oscar-nominated features – Capote and Moneyball – could be confused with Transformers: Age of Extinction, but Foxcatcher is drenched in Miller's compelling torpor. And he speaks as he directs. No sentence rushes to follow another.
“It was a strange story of how I came to make this film,” he just about manages to say. “A guy came up to me with an envelope and gave it to me. It is the only time this has happened to me. The raw facts of this du Pont story were fascinating.”
They certainly are. In the mid 1990s, John du Pont, an apparent schizophrenic with a taste for cocaine, took it upon himself to sponsor the US Olympic wrestling team. He lured two brothers, wrestler Mark Schultz and coach Dave Schultz, to the family estate in Pennsylvania and, with no talent or qualification to speak of, began acting as team manager. His obsessions eventually led to murder.
An extraordinary story has generated an extraordinary film for which Miller won best director at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. So, how much of it really happened?
“Well, 84.743 per cent I think,” he says with a slow smile. “Look, it’s cinema. The research took years. We have all this testimony. I think the film is essentially true. There is a difference between facts and truth. Look, I know this sounds roundabout, but what I am saying is I can sleep at night, knowing there is nothing that violates the essential truth of what happened.”
An erudite middle-class New Yorker in his mid-40s, Miller has managed to secure strong central performances in each of his three dramatic features: Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote; Brad Pitt in Moneyball; Carell in Foxcatcher. That last turn is surely the most unexpected. We have seen comic actors turn serious before, but Carell brings supernatural grimness to his version of du Pont. There's a clamminess there we've never experienced from the actor. I assume Miller enjoyed playing with our expectations.
“Yes. Though I would say that ‘playing’ is not a good word,” he says. “There are preconceptions about du Pont also. Nobody expected him to do what he did. There is something about du Pont whereby people do perceive him as being benign. You get something a bit similar with Steve. As he said to me, he’d only ever played characters who were perceived to have mushy centres.”
There are, for those of us outside the family, whole missing decades in Miller's life. He studied at NYU. He made corporate videos. He planned films that never came to pass. When he was 30, he made a documentary called The Cruise. But it was not until Capote, in 2005, that he registered with the greater film world. Why did it take so long? (Was everyone just waiting for him to go on to the next sentence?)
“Yeah, I was at NYU for a while, but I spent most of the time playing chess in Washington Square Park,” he says. “I continued to sit there after graduation. Ha ha! Later I lost a job I’d got working as an assistant to a film-maker. But I realised that this was where I belonged. I wanted to be a film-maker. I would either do that or become a homeless person.”
The Cruise, a study of a New York tour guide, attracted quite a bit of attention, but it was still some achievement to get Capote off the ground. He had never directed a dramatic feature. Here we had a biopic of Truman Capote on a decent (if not huge) budget.
The gamble paid off. The film received five Oscar nominations and Hoffman won best actor for his spooky impersonation of the writer.
"Well, I was sort of a one-man band," he says. "I found a routine and the people I wanted to work with all the time. By the time Capote came along, I had a cinematographer and a costume designer. We were a team."
Miller has belatedly made quite a career for himself. His first two films received Oscar nominations for best picture and Foxcatcher seems likely to repeat the feat. Somehow or other, he has become one of the industry's most original tellers of true stories. He has the ear of the studios. When we speak at the London Film Festival in October, he is dating Ashley Olsen (yes, of the Olsen twins).
So, what does he plan next?
“I have absolutely no idea. Do you have an envelope to pass to me? Ha ha!”
