EXCLUSIVE: Graham Moore Talks his Directorial Debut, The Outfit
Making his directorial debut, we got the chance to sit down with Graham Moore to talk about his new film, The Outfit.
During our chat, we talked the film, working with his cast, filming the movie in order, and so much more. Check out what he had to say below.
On his directorial debut: “It was a tremendously fulfilling experience. It was my first film was a director. So obviously, that was something I wanted to do responsibly. It felt like this story was so dear to my heart, it was something so personal and something I loved so much. I didn’t want to write a script and then hand it over to someone else and say, ‘Hey, can you please make this for me because I don’t know how’, but rather I think I just loved the material so much. It felt as if it was more responsible to the material to say, ‘No, if I really love this, I should learn how to make it myself.’ And take the responsibility for learning some things I don’t know. And surrounding myself with some great people who know all the things I don’t even know that I do know. ”
On the benefit of working with an A-list cast on his first film: “Getting to direct my first film with someone like Mark Rylance in the lead, in some ways it takes a lot of the burden off and certainly a lot of the pressure because on one level I can just say, ‘Hey, let’s point the camera at Mark Rylance.’ And once you do that, something fascinating is going to happen.”
On whether he was a little shell shocked about getting to work with such an experienced cast: “I was really touched by the outpouring of affection from such experienced people who did not let my lack of experience dissuade them from doing the movie. And in a way, I think part of what was so exciting about it was I could surround myself with people whose work I really liked like Mark, like Zoey [Deutch], like Dylan [O’Brien], like Johnny Flynn, like Simon Russell Beale, and to say, ‘Hey, I’m surrounding myself with these fellow artists whose work I really respect. Let me learn from them.’ One could do a lot worse in terms of finding a teacher for the art of screen acting than studying at the feet of Mark Rylance for a couple months, which is what I got to do. So in some ways I looked at my role as because it was my first time, and it was certainly not any of their first times, rather than coming in and saying, ‘Hey, this is how I organize a day. This is how I organize a rehearsal. This is how I do things.’ I could say, ‘Hey, how do you like to work? Tell me about your process. What do you appreciate? What don’t you appreciate? How can we design a filming process that will give you your best opportunity to do work you’re really proud of?’ But I think everyone really enjoyed that. It was like, ‘Oh, actually, you know what I’ve always wanted to do, blah, blah, blah.’ Or ‘You know what, I hate doing this other thing and we’re not going to do that.'”
On shooting the film completely in order: “We shot in completely chronological order. So we just started at the beginning and over 24 days went through the whole film after a good lengthy rehearsal period before we had any cameras around. And I think the cast seemed to really love that. That was something that everyone very excited about early on when we hit on it. Because I think no one in the cast had ever done that before. I had never done it before. And weirdly it allowed us and allowed them some freedoms that they might not otherwise have had in terms of performance. Because it wasn’t like, more typical films, where sometimes you shoot the end at the beginning then we’re locked into decisions we’ve made weeks ago when you come to shoot an earlier scene. But because we were going in order if we get to something in scene number six and Mark does something in an improv that’s really exciting, and we go, ‘Oh, that’s great. Let’s keep that.’ We can the change this later scene to call that moment back and actually make use of it later.’ So we can let what they’re doing, impact the story as it goes along.”
On when in the pre-production process did he decide to shoot the scenes in chronological orders: “Pretty early because I think when I knew in the writing phase that we wanted to try setting the film entirely within the Taylor Shop. The whole film was set and shot on this one big set. And that was something in very early drafts, my co-writer John [McClain] and I hit on and at first it was just an experiment. Let’s try doing a draft where we never leave the Taylor Shop and see what happens. And we got so excited because it felt like rather than being a constraint, it actually was expansive in some way. Because Mark’s character never leaves the Taylor Shop. It’s a constraint that puts us more inside the emotional head space of our protagonist. Yes. We only see what he sees, we only go where he goes, we only hear what he hears, and he never leaves the shop. So neither do we. Once we made that rule, we got to start thinking like, ‘Okay, this is this interesting concept. What does that allow us to do?'”
On the difficulties he faced shooting in chronological order: There’s all sorts of constraints. There’s also problems that creates. It means we can’t use establishing shops the way traditional film would. It means there’s all these basic cinematic language pieces that we can’t use. We can’t just cut to the sun rising up over the Chicago skyline the next day to tell you it’s the next morning. We have to tell you it’s the next morning through a different visual method. But we said, ‘Okay, so what does that free up for us? And what can we do that we’d never gotten a chance to do before?” And quickly it was, ‘Oh, you know what we could do? We could just shoot an order because we’re just in the same space the whole time. So let’s just plan on that.’ And then I started talking to Mark about it. He got really excited about it and I told Zoey and she got excited. Everyone sort of said, ‘Oh, this is going to be so fun. Here’s what we can do. And I’ve never done that before.’ And there was such great enthusiasm for it.”
On potentially taking The Outfit to the stage: “We’ve joked about it sometimes. I think we knew this was written and designed to be a film and that was important because we wanted to really bring the audience close to the action and the way that you couldn’t do on stage. I think one of our initial arguments from making this a film was that it’s about a tailor or a cutter, as he would put it. And the work he does is so detailed and precise that we need to be able to bring the audience microscopically close to that work so that they really understand what it is that he’s doing. And so they can see the lushness and the beauty of these things that he creates. And just on a stage, you couldn’t quite bring an audience that close, so you’d have to figure out something else to do. But that’s why I think we knew initially we wanted this to be a film and that it still, in some ways it became this fun challenge of how could we take something that’s all in one location that only has seven speaking parts and still craft something that feels uniquely theatrically cinematic.”
On what inspired The Outfit: “Emotionally, I think some ways it started with my grandfather. When I was seven, my parents split up and my grandfather, my mom’s dad, became this hugely important father figure for me and my little brother. He’s some of my first memories of going to the movie theater or because he took us, he was the one who taught me how to tie a tie for the first time. He was, I think the most gentle and kind person I’ve ever known in my life. He was a doctor with a small town medical practice. And one of his patients was a notorious mobster named Jerry Catena. And since I was a little kid, I was always just fascinated by this. How does a man as gentle and sweet and decent as my grandfather care for this patient who we know is a vicious murderer, what do they talk about behind closed doors? And so I’d always been interested in that dynamic”.
On crafting the story: My friend and co-writer Jonathan McClain, he said to me over dinner one night, ‘How come no one’s ever made a movie about a Tailor’s Shop?’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. No one has. How come they haven’t? It’s a fastening esoteric world that I’d love to explore.’ And Jonathon, I think knows more about the art of bespoke men’s wear than I will ever know. So he was a great guide through it. And we have this idea that we wanted to write about someone who makes these bespoke suits in several row, but we love the character of that. We love the psychology of someone who spends decades training to do something so precise and esoteric. But we struggled around for a couple years. We kept saying to ourselves, what’s the story? What’s the story? And we tried different things and nothing was landing. And then one day, in this book about men’s wear history, we found a single sentence that said that the first bug the FBI ever planted in its history was in Chicago in 1956 inside a Tailor Shop. And instantly, the whole story made sense to us. Instantly, we saw the whole thing. It was, ‘Oh, that’s what it’s about. It’s about a tailor to the mob. It’s about a man, like my grandfather, this meek, gentle guy who just wants to make these beautiful things who has to make them in the service of people he knows to be monsters.'”
On creating the film’s twists: “The goal was a movie that didn’t just have one big twist, but rather a whole series of them in the back half of the film. And they certainly evolved through the writing process as we found exciting things to do. I think in some ways, because we had so few ingredients to work with so to speak, we kept asking ourselves on a return, ‘Okay. What’s something interesting and exciting that can happen here?’ And then how do we plant it? I’m sure you can tell from the film, I am a huge of Agatha Christie fan. I grew up reading those novels and I think Agatha Christie is the best mystery novels there ever was. And I know she would do something similar process-wise where you get to the back half of the piece and start saying, ‘Okay, what are exciting things that could happen here? And now how do I go rewrite the beginning parts to help set that up properly?’ And I think for us, the point of the twist was to be exciting, but also I believe very deeply that twists for their own sake can sometimes feel a little bit cheap or gimmicky, and rather they’re much more compelling if we can use a twist to reveal something interesting about character. That every twist is actually coming from hopefully a deeply established character place and tells you more about them. It makes the people are more interesting for the twists than they were otherwise.”
On making sure the character development helped elevate the twists: The film’s called The Outfit. It’s about clothes. Every character in the film has all these layers to him or her. And throughout the film, with a set of clothes, we’re removing a layer sometimes, literally speaking from every character to reveal more and more about them.”
On the film taking place in Chicago, him hometown: “I grew up in Chicago, I love it very deeply. It was a world that I felt I knew very well. Chicago’s gangland history is so much part of the air when you’re growing up in Chicago, as I did. And because this sort of was inspired by a real story, it just felt so perfect. But I think because I tend to work on a lot of historical pieces, I think the history is really important to me drawing from real life and from real history is really exciting to me. Every character in the film is based on a real person who was really part of the Chicago gangland world in the 1950s. Every bit of gangland warfare or gangland dynamics is drawn from something that was really going on in the gangland world of 1950 Chicago.
On what he hopes fans take from the film: “Well, the movie’s coming out in theaters, which I think at this point in March of 2022 is not only a given, but feels like such a blessing. And I think that I’m so grateful that if the past couple years of pandemic living has taught me anything, it’s to really be grateful about our ability to get to sit in a darkened room with strangers, laughing, and gripping the edge of our seats and enjoying a fully cinematic experience together.”
The Outfit hits theaters this Friday, March 18.
Photo credit: Rob Youngson / Focus Features
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity