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Douglas McGrath is a gentleman, one of a dying breed. He is impeccably well-dressed, polite, witty, complimentary and engaged. Two films, Capote and Infamous, both concerned with the events surrounding Truman Capote's writing of the journalistic novel In Cold Blood, have been released within a year of each other, but McGrath is perfectly capable - at least in public - of taking the issue and the barrage of questions he must receive surrounding the situation with a sense of humor and faultless �lan.

The two films are exactly the same and yet completely different and Infamous is certainly worth seeing, regardless of whether or not you've seen Capote. For some film fanatics, that might make the experience even more fascinating. Infamous is based on George Plimpton's oral biography, which is just as it is described in its own title: Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. McGrath draws on the book, and particularly its style, throughout Infamous, enlisting a group of highly respected actors to play the interviewed "friends," Capote's companions in the New York social scene: Sigourney Weaver (Babe Paley), Isabella Rossellini (Maria Agnelli), Hope Davis (Slim Keith, whom some might know as Howard Hawks's first wife), Juliet Stevenson (Vogue editor Diana Vreeland) and Peter Bogdanovich (Bennett Cerf) doing what he loves best, that is, telling anecdotes.

Infamous, featuring British actor Toby Jones as Capote, is filled with both bubbles and big themes. Its original title, "Every Word is True," was a much more fitting ironic moniker. One of its biggest concerns is the lack of truthfulness in Capote's personal interactions, his so-called non-fiction novel writing, and, by extension, the role of McGrath himself in choosing what possibly fictional facts and stories told about Capote to keep in the film. While Infamous is undoubtedly an incredibly sad tragedy, it has the blind romantic heart of McGrath's earlier inspirations, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. But this time, that romance is tainted with the heartbreak of mostly real people and largely true events.

I know that you already had the idea to make the film before you optioned George Plimpton's book, but obviously, judging from the style of onscreen interviews, you drew a lot from it. What came first, your idea for the film or reading the book?

That's a good question. You know Christine Vachon, the producer; I told her the idea. I always felt I knew the exact structure of the movie. Starts with writing Answered Prayers, taking his notes, gets the idea for In Cold Blood, the whole Kansas thing happens, back to New York, can't write Answered Prayers. So I knew that was the wedge of the story, and she said, "I think that's a great movie." If she were going to be accurate, I think she would have said, "I think that's two great movies," but anyway, she said, "That's a great movie and we should probably get..." She's done a number of sort-of-true-life films, and she said we should get some underlying rights because that's always helpful. So then we talked about it and she remembered that there'd been an excerpt in the New Yorker and she said, "Let's find the excerpt." We found it and I said, "Oh, that's from the Plimpton book, I've read it, it's great!"

What the Plimpton book did was give me the idea for the testimonials, because it's an oral history, so the idea of the people talking to the camera came from that. That's what the book feels like. I got many, many, many good details from the book. And a very key detail from the book, which was that someone in the book speculates - not speculates, claims - that Truman and Perry [Smith, the primary subject of In Cold Blood, played in Infamous by Daniel Craig] had sex. To be fair, if that's the word I want, the person who says it in the book is not friendly to Truman, it's a guy named Harold Nye, and I didn't take it at face value.

I said, "I'm not sure I trust you," because he didn't like Truman and it would be like him to try and say something like that. But it did get me thinking. That's when the penny first dropped. Because I felt very strongly that his connection with Perry Smith and the events of the writing of the book ruined him for the rest of his life. As I looked at all the material, I just kept thinking, what event would ruin your life? What thing would ruin your life? Because you know that book is his greatest success, and then it's just straight to hell. I feel - I'd just like to predict, I'm often wrong in my predictions - I feel that if I were to have my greatest success, my life would not go straight down quite that quickly. But in his case, it did. Everything seemed to go wrong after that.

I believe - I know it's a romantic idea - but I believe that it's because, you could say his heart was broken in some way, but I think what he realized is that he met the person to whom he felt emotionally the closest. I do believe there was one instance of an intimacy, and you'll notice we cut out before they go much farther. I wanted to leave in the middle of a kiss to say that there might be more kissing, I didn't want to say it was just one kiss, but I also didn't want to say just how much more it was. I don't know.

I just thought the thing that would so explain how he could lose his way, a guy who had been making his way very carefully and successfully for his whole life. I thought the worst thing would be just once to have that intimacy where you can remember the taste of someone's kiss and the... [breathes in] smell of being that close to them, and then never to have that again? And then to have to see that person executed? And then to have to live with the memory of that one time? I think that would do me in for a while.

And it would also make sense of his constant quips about looking forward to the execution - wanting the whole thing to be done, instead of having to live this life with this man you feel for just there all the time, living, held over you behind bars, a constant emotional obligation.

That's a very good point. You know that old clich�, it was an impossible love affair? Well, this really was an impossible love affair. You know, the black man and the white woman is impossible, but... well, not really. This? Impossible.

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