Philip Hoffman Capote Quotations

That's what attracted me to it. I wasn't interested in doing it if it was just going to be about trying to portray Truman Capote and if I could be successful or not. It really was about the inevitability of a tragedy unfolding.

Somebody said the other day, at the end of the movie, you feel like Capote committed a crime, and that's exactly right. That's why the film works so well. You really have this sense that he's the one who committed the crime, and I think deep down inside, that's how he felt, too. That's something he could never come to terms with.

If you have that kind of intimacy alongside ambition, ultimately it's going to leave an incredibly tragic impression on his psyche and spirit. He paid a huge price to write one of the great books of the 20th century. Capote didn't go to Kansas. Kansas reached out to New York and grabbed Capote. The minute he met Perry Smith, it was inevitable that these two men were going to die, one literally and one figuratively, because the identification they shared was too deep. The minute he got Perry to open up about his own life, and he learned they were both orphans, they were both abandoned children, he sees his muse, and that's the beginning of the end. Kansas sprung a trap on him.

I don't think Capote knew exactly what he was setting himself up for. He said later if he'd known what was going to happen, he would have driven right through the town like a bat out of hell.