By Holly Grigg-Spall.
Daniel Futterman
E. Max Frye
Foxcatcher is director Bennett Miller’s second collaboration with screenwriter Daniel Futterman, the first being the Academy Award winning Capote. E. Max Frye worked on the project prior to Futterman, whittling down and sculpting Miller’s copious research into the true story of Olympic Gold Medal winning wrestlers Mark and Dave Schultz and their relationship with wealthy heir John Du Pont. Frye is celebrated for his work on HBO’s Band of Brothers for which he has won a Peabody Award.
Creative Screenwriting sat down with both Daniel Futterman and E. Max Frye to discuss their involvement in the film.
How was the research material presented to you, Max, by the director and what most interested you most about this story at first?
Max: I met Bennett in Spring of 2007 as we shared an agent at the time. The agent told me about this fantastic project. I met Bennett in a coffee shop and he told me this story. I remembered reading about it in the newspaper, this rich guy and the wrestlers. I think initially part of the attraction for me was being an ex-athlete. Here was the opportunity to do a sports story where there’s no home run, winning basket or touchdown at the end. It’s a horrible tragic story, but it still has a sports story element to it.
Bennett had done hundreds of hours of interviews prior, but together we went down to Philadelphia and saw the Du Pont estate. It had been sold and developers had put a huge chain link fence around the entire property. But the house where Dave and his family lived and where Dave was killed was only about 50 feet from the road. We could almost walk up to it. Du Pont had that building painted black after he was sent to prison. So there was this house sitting there with crumbling black paint all over it. There was the driveway where Dave had been shot.
The real Dupont Estate
When did you, Dan, take over the project and did you do any more research from that point?
Dan: Max did the incredibly important job of groundbreaking on structure and story wise the first draft of the script. Max had a bunch of other projects he had put off to do this one and it was then that Bennett asked me to take a look at the script. The work I did over the next number of years was a continuation of what Max had started. We had to figure out how to condense a 10 to 12 year period into just two years, how to make Dave the third part of this story. Initially it seemed like a story between Du Pont and Mark and we needed to make Dave a part of this, that was the big wrangling.
Mark Schultz was always available to talk and he’s very open, but he’s still very affected and pained by what happened. He was a great resource, but a sad resource. I met Nancy in Colorado Springs at the training facility there. She was there with her son Alexander.
How was it to work with Mark and develop his character simultaneously in the script?
Dan: Du Pont and Mark were two powerful men – one was very wealthy and one was one of the greatest athletes in the world and yet they lacked love and respect with other people. They both retreat to Dave for that. Dave is the Alpha, he is the one that they want, he’s the one they want love and respect from. They fight over Dave and that’s the story of the film. When Mark now speaks of Dave, that loss is really palpable.
The real Dave and Mark Schultz
Did you both come up with opinions as to why Du Pont did what he did, why this happened?
Max: I think when writing a script you always ask yourself what a person’s goals are. What are they after and what do they want? There’s a superficial answer with these three characters in the movie and then there’s the real answer. The movie is about the real answer, what these people really want. Then, what are they willing to do to attain that? They had this intense dynamic between the three of them. Dave was the Alpha and Mark and Du Pont were the needy ones in the triangle. That’s what made the drama and the tension.
Dan: Dave could be very giving and loving, but it was on his terms. Same on the mat. Mark was a weight class above him, but he could never beat Dave. In the film, Mark says to Du Pont that “you can’t buy Dave” and Du Pont doesn’t take that very well. Then you see Mark trying to get Dave to leave Foxcatcher and Dave won’t do it. You see Dave is put in this terrible position to talk about Du Pont as a leader in this documentary, and how hard it is for him to do that. He negotiates for Mark to be taken care of when he leaves. Dave will do things on his terms, but he will not be pushed too far. That and the jealousies and desires underpinning the dynamic build until Du Pont realizes he can’t own this person in the way he can own Mark. He can’t mold Dave. Dave was that unobtainable thing that he couldn’t make do what he wanted. Clearly Du Pont could get what he wanted from everybody, except Dave. And, of course, his mother. Dave was the only person he couldn’t own.
Did you have access to legal documents from the trial and what did you make of those materials? How did it impact your perception of the story?
Max: Bennett always felt the movie ended with the killing of Dave. The subsequent trial and investigation was not that important, what led up to the shooting was important. Once that happens there’s no reason to go on. Du Pont never said why he did that, he never confessed. There was no interview he gave where he explained himself. That was to our advantage as the storytellers, as we could play with that and leave it to the audience to determine why Du Pont did what he did.
Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz and Mark Ruffalo as Dave Schultz
When writing the script, did you assume people would be aware of the story or did you think that they probably would not know what happened?
Max: I vaguely remembered it myself, only because I would read the sports pages. Now, most people would not remember it and if they did it would be vague memories.
Dan: I wanted it to work both ways. If you knew what happened there would be a sense of dread that you would know something terrible was coming. If you did not know, then the ending would be shocking. Either way would work fine.
How did you work on writing in the physical scenes? The wrestling scenes seem so meaningful and have such a subtext to them. What did you need to know about wrestling to write that?
Dan: Mark Ruffalo was someone on Bennett’s mind as we were working on the script. He was a wrestler when he was younger. We knew that the wrestling consultant and choreographer would be available for those scenes. So, we wrote them short hand to be filled in by experts who could do a far better job. We could watch the tapes of some of the matches. In terms of the odd physicality of those scenes, the subtext, I was definitely aware of that. I knew that when Mark was training Du Pont that it should feel fundamentally different, the way he was moving, the way he allowed him to take him down. It becomes strange and uncomfortable. There is something very intimate about those scenes. It can be intimate in a tender way, but it depends much on the feelings and responses each person has to and for the other. What comes out in the film is a lot of what Mark and Channing brought to the scenes in their athleticism.
Max: Let’s not try to hide the fact that there’s a thing we see when we see two men touch each other like that. Wrestling is very tactile and intellectual. It’s like a physical chess match. But it’s also about dominating someone else. So when Mark and Du Pont wrestle it’s the same thing, but in a different way. It’s not two athletes going head to head, it’s two people – one of whom is rich and powerful, dominating someone else because he is rich and powerful and not because he’s a superior athlete. So, wrestling is a physical manifestation of their power struggle.
Dan: So many scenes are power struggles. Even when Dave is negotiating with Du Pont’s right hand man for the conditions under which he will stay with Foxcatcher, that’s as much of a wrestling match as anything. It’s about who is going to be dominant.
Steve Carrell as John du Pont
It even seems apparent with Nancy (Dave’s wife) and Du Pont in some scenes. She has a real presence and influence, despite her few lines of dialogue.
Dan: That’s exactly right. Sienna Miller is perfect in the movie. She is strong and loving and at the same time, very dismissive of Mark.
When Mark turns against Du Pont it feels like more happens off-screen than on and that lends a certain mystery to their relationship. Was that intentional?
Dan: Mark opens up emotionally to Du Pont. They establish what feels like a friendship, but what’s unstated is Du Pont is paying Mark to be his friend. When Du Pont decides to, he steps on this. He slaps Mark. Mark could then pick him up and break him like a twig, but astonishingly he doesn’t. You get a sense of the controlled anger that drives Mark crazy. When Dave is then summoned to take over, all of Mark’s power is taken away from him.
Max: For a moment Mark was powerful and an equal to Dave and that was crushed, emotionally and spiritually, when Dave arrives at Foxcatcher. Mark spent his whole life striving to be like his older brother and then, once again, he was relegated to the younger brother status.
The real John du Pont, on trial
Bennett Miller often has actors improvise on scenes, are there any specifically that were significantly changed from what was written?
Max: I think the best example of that is the helicopter scene. When I wrote that scene with Bennett there was no cocaine. We talked about whether we would go so far as to have Mark doing cocaine. Everyone knew that there were those kinds of drugs at Foxcatcher, but we didn’t have confirmation on the speculation. I wrote the scene as Mark and Du Pont going down to Washington. Then Dan came in…
Dan: …and I said “Fuck it! I don’t care if they did cocaine or not we’re having them do cocaine in this scene!” (laughs)
Max: Clearly Dan and Bennett spoke about that and it became the cocaine scene. I’m not sure though that what was written following that stayed the same in the movie.
Dan: So what was written was that Mark was coked up and he’s at the podium on stage at the event and Du Pont is trying to coach him from the sidelines. He stumbles on the word “philatelist” when introducing Du Pont. Du Pont tells him to just say “stamp collector” and so Mark does. That was written as a moment that happens on stage at the event. But, instead, on set, they decided to do that scene in the helicopter and it’s great. That’s creative screenwriting, but it’s creative filmmaking too. We gave him the script and he creates this environment with the actors in which they have the ability to build on the script. Then he has the editing room and he is intimately involved in all of it. It’s a great example of a scene that has its DNA, but it’s brought to life in a new way, because, if you hire an actor like Steve Carell you’re going to get something magical. Everything is working in that scene in the way it is supposed to.
Did you watch many of the documentaries Du Pont made himself at Foxcatcher and did you have access to much of the archival material from the Du Pont family?
Max: Oh yes, the footage at the beginning of the film is from an existing documentary and we saw all of those videos. I love looking at the photographs and seeing the way people are posed. We also had all the photos of the estate and the horses and the trophy cabinets and so on. It gives you a real feel for a person to see how they live. We had so much material. We had to weave it all together to create an interesting and forceful and dramatic story, with a character that we could manipulate to get to the end we wanted to get to. That was hard, because we had no motivation for why Du Pont did what he did.
Dan: The first scene with Mark giving the speech to the kids is a classic Bennett scene as he picks out the best kids to focus on, the ones with the best expressions. Then after that, we want to see Mark alone so we had to figure out what that would mean. We thought about him alone, going to the gym and turning on the lights to an empty room. The scene was just that for a long time. Every time we examined the script and went through the scenes on the cards there were moments when we would get a bit burned out on it, so we would turn on the computer and watch Mark wrestle or something. One day we were watching wrestling stuff and a guy comes on and he’s wrestling with a leather dummy. We immediately knew that that was how we wanted to start this. That was the metaphor for Mark. Mark is wrestling himself and he cannot get out of his own way.
It’s interesting to consider how such an event would be received today. Would we put it down to Du Pont having Asperger’s or some other mental disorder or would we see more in it?
Dan: I think he was diagnosed with a thought perception disorder as he did have audio and visual hallucinations in prison, but he was this side of crazy, given his name and his money. If you or I had the same problems we might be locked up, but he had a lot of money. He had friends that were policemen and he was allowed to take it as far as he took it. If a regular person got a tank with a machine gun delivered to their house, they’d arrest that person, but Du Pont was a model citizen because he contributed to the Police Benevolent Fund and things like that. I was interested in not putting a label on him and instead finding out emotionally why he reacted in the way he did to events.
Max: We didn’t want to paint him as crazy or a monster. We wanted to keep him as accessible as he could be. We wanted to keep him from being someone that you saw and immediately assumed would clearly kill somebody. He wasn’t supposed to be the bad guy. Part of that is the fantastic casting of Steve Carell, because you don’t picture him as a monster or a sociopath, he’s not that kind of guy. It works fantastically well in the movie.
How did Channing Tatum come to be involved, as he also an unexpected bit of casting?
Dan: There’s an element of this role in his first movie, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints’ He’s fantastic in that movie. There’s a similar lack of articulation, it’s very physical. You can see the seeds of his performance in that. I love his performance in that movie.
Max: In the Summer of ’07 Bennett comes in and says he’s met this guy and he thinks he’s really good. He’s really athletic and he’s tough. I asked his name and he said, “Channing Tatum” and I was like, who’s that? Sometimes you catch lightening in a bottle. In ’07 Bennett meets Channing and says he really likes him for this role, the movie is made five or six years later and Channing’s a huge star. You can’t see that coming.
Who, aside from Mark and Nancy, were helpful in the research for this film?
Max: Well, with Mark, it was hard because you couldn’t ask him about when he was bonding with Du Pont because he still has a lot of anger towards him. He had forgotten that time and you could not approach it. The man who became the wrestling consultant on the movie – John Guira – was very helpful. Bennett had found him when I came on. John was a great wrestler in four Olympic trials. He was good friends with Dave and he had been at Foxcatcher for six years when Dave was killed. He knew them all very well. He was my go-to for questions. He was a neutral source too, he was very clear and he didn’t take sides. He was always straight forward. He didn’t know what was coming with Du Pont, he didn’t judge anyone retrospectively. He would laugh about how Du Pont wanted to wrestle with them all and how they would go along with it. He would laugh about how Du Pont couldn’t wrestle.
Would you say there is any kind of moral or message that audiences could take away from this movie?
Dan: I would say Bennett had in mind a larger thing about America and what the ‘80s represented. I was interested in the notion of purity and corruption. Mark’s pure attachment to the sport and the corruption of that. That to me is his arc. I was also interested in the notion of there being winners and losers in life. Mark and Dave were athletic winners, but Dave was a winner in life because people were attracted to him. He was loving and funny, people loved being around him. Mark was great on the mat, but he had a hard time in life. Why is that? Du Pont was similar – he was a winner in so many ways, but interpersonally it was very hard for him. I hope people will be thinking about that.
Max: To me it’s like any kind of work of art, you look at it and take away what appeals to you or touches you. The characters are so interesting, tragic, power hungry, sad, hurt, terribly crippled by who they are. I think, for me, it’s about people recognizing these traits, the plays for power, the need for affirmation or love or understanding from others. To me, there’s no one single message, only what you see in it for yourself.
