Dan Futterman

Spotlight By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

One imagines Dan Futterman is something of a jack-of-all-trades. He has worked extensively as a stage actor, and has appeared on film in hits like The Birdcage. A few years ago, he had recurring roles in hit TV shows like Will and Grace and Judging Amy. And oh yeah, then there was that thing about him becoming an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for writing Capote for his friend Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Busy with his variety of job descriptions, he's back in his first film role since 2002's Enough. The movie is A Mighty Heart, in which he plays the real-life journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in 2002 in Pakistan. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, the pregnant wife who worked tirelessly to find her husband and his kidnappers. It's directed by Michael Winterbottom.

'I was astonished by it,' Futterman says of the film. 'I've seen it twice, and I've cried both times, and I'm incredibly moved by it. I also think that Angelina gives an absolutely astonishing performance, you forget in about two minutes that it's her doing it. As a writer, I got to see a friend of mine give one of the great performances of recent years, Phil Hoffman, and I felt like, well I'd done that experience, that'll never repeat, and that's fine, but I had the same feeling watching Angie do it, that she's doing this completely transformational work that's just remarkable. I think she's one of the great actresses.'

He also has kind words to say about director Winterbottom. 'Michael kind of guides a very gentle hand, but you're being guided in a particular direction. He'll tell you if he wants you to do something else, but I think he'd much rather have you discover it, and be looking for that moment when you do discover it, to capture that on film, so he doesn't want to give it away.

'There were some crowds, but because of the way Michael shoots, there are very very few people involved in one time at one shooting, and you can all sit in three or four cars. So you all pile into the cars, you drive somewhere, you get out, shoot, very very quickly. He shoots very quickly, at least these outdoor scenes. And we were doing small snippets.' But Jolie is one of the most recognizable actresses in the world, right' 'In five or ten minutes, people would kind of twig to the fact that, 'oh wait, there's different hair, but I think I know who she is.' So people would get interested, but we would shoot quickly and then move onto the next thing.

Working on the film also gave him the opportunity to do some globetrotting. 'I'd never been to that part of the world, and Michael works in such a way that you're really integrated into it. There are actors and non-actors acting in the film, and who you get to have discussions with. I developed something of a relationship with this guy Mushtag Khan, who plays the taxi driver, and was cast from a Karachi taxi stand. He'd never been out of Karachi, and they got him a visa to go to Puna, and India, and it was thrilling to develop relationships with people you normally wouldn't get to develop that kind of a relationship with.' The language barrier wasn't too much of a hindrance. 'We both had daughters, so we talked mostly about that. The truth is, he speaks primarily Urdu, and I don't speak Urdu, and he speaks a little bit of English, so we were communicating on a pretty simple level as best we could, but on much more of a personal level, not on a political level or about the work we were doing.'

Since Futterman played the kidnapped Pearl and the movie is told from his wife Mariane's perspective, the majority of his role involved scenes in the beginning and flashbacks. 'There was some quality to it as if I was in a different movie than everyone else,' he says. 'The bulk of the movie is this desperate search, this three-week search, in the house. Those were wrenching and hard scenes for everybody. Almost everything I shot pre-dated Danny's abduction, and those were happy times for Danny and Mariane. They were deeply in love, he and she were so excited to be expecting a child. He was doing work that interested him, and he was fascinated by this part of the world. We were creating an entirely different film in a way, this brave love story. There was a bit of a quality to doing it that we were trying to capture little moments that would speak to the whole relationship.'

Was he ever worried the flashbacks would be cut or abbreviated for the finished product' 'We shot an enormous amount of material, many many many many scenes that didn't make it into the film. Certainly we weren't aware, and I don't think Michael was aware either, how much he was going to use, or exactly where in the film he was going to place it. I believe that during editing he played around a lot with it, to see what seemed appropriate and what seemed the most effective.'

One of the highlights of the project was actually getting to meet Mariane herself. '[We] met in LA. She brings [her and Danny's son] Adam to visit Danny's parents pretty frequently. So I met with both of them, I met with Mariane, and I also met with Mr. and Mrs. Pearl. Yeah, I was terrifying of meeting her. I think my feeling was that it's so presumptuous to take on this part of her beloved husband. And then, meeting them, of their son. They really took it upon themselves to reassure me that they wanted to give me as much information as possible, and they also wanted me to feel as comfortable as I possibly could.'

Mariane's involvement was integral to the movie. 'Mariane was quite involved in the script development, and then she was quite involved in talking to us before we started. She came to visit, it was after I'd been in Pakistan but before Angelina started, and we were in Marseilles, shooting the wedding sequence first. And Mariane came down from Paris with Adam to visit for a couple days, and to talk, and then she sort of gave us her blessing.'

Futterman did remember the story when it first broke, and Mariane in particular. 'I remember seeing daily reports on TV, I remember hearing her interviewed on the radio and I think on television as well, but I remember having a sense of her. She seemed like an incredibly dignified person to me. I admire how she was handling herself through that period,' he says. 'And then, sadly, you kind of move on to the next one. I mean, there have been so many stories like this, [currently] a BBC reporter, missing 95 days now, today, or something' You know, so, tragically, there have been more and more stories like this.'

Did Futterman's screenwriting experiences inform his work acting as a journalist' 'Obviously it's different kinds of writing, but there was some challenge of assimilating facts from different sources, and it was something that I'd done and felt somewhat comfortable with,' he says. 'So I was able to at least imagine what it was like to be able to do what he was doing, which was obviously on a much quicker daily basis. For Capote I had interviewed people, read through trial transcripts, you know, as much as I could, and he was doing that kind of thing every day, just in a quicker way. So it was interesting to see that. And also, he had a very clean, elegant style, an immediate style, and I don't know in what way that informs performance, but it was interesting to me.'

Did he do any writing on this one' 'I had very little say about this script. When I read it, I thought John Orloff's script was fantastic. In addition to that, you're using it as a very kind of strong foundation to keep returning to, but Michael encourages actors to play on top of that, and improvise. And so it's a terrific way to work, and you can only work that way if you completely trust your director. You're experimenting, you're going off script sometimes, and you know that if you look ridiculous, if you fall on your face, if it's not good, it's not going to end up in the movie anyway, and his taste is pretty impeccable. So it was pretty thrilling.' He also realizes that his writing and acting inform each other. 'I'm probably a little bit less precious about dialogue as a writer than I had been, having butchered somebody else's script now,' he says, laughing. 'You know, you invert words, and writers can get so uppity about that, and I'm probably less so now than I had been before.'

His career on stage, meanwhile dates all the way back to starring in Angels in America on Broadway about fifteen years ago. ('Not that long ago,' he protests, then figures out that that's just about right. 'Thirteen years ago,' he corrects, laughing.) However, he doesn't see himself returning to the stage, especially with two young daughters. 'Yeah, with kids it's a ridiculous schedule to be on. I did a play probably five years ago in New York, when my older daughter was one, and it was difficult. It was really difficult on my wife, and you're on like an opposite schedule, so I don't think I'll do it for a while.'

At this point, with a critically acclaimed film about to come out, Futterman seems relaxed about his career. 'The truth is, particularly as an actor, you gotta pay the mortgage and you gotta pay the tuition, if you're doing that with your kids. So some jobs you take for the money, and some you take because you care about them, and you hopefully get to a point where those two things are combined, and you're only doing things you genuinely care about. Certainly, Angels in America was something I cared deeply about, I'd never been on Broadway before either, so that was pretty thrilling and wonderful. I've been lucky in the last few years in that I've been able to work only on things I genuinely care about, either as a writer or an actor. Whether that will continue I have no idea, I hope it does.

Playing Daniel Pearl has ultimately made him reflective as well. 'I'm so conscious of the fact that this beautiful little boy Adam [the Pearls' son] is never going to get to meet his father. I have two little girls at home. I think what spoke to me most was how lucky I am, having two healthy girls, and be able to watch them grow up."