During the years he lived in Portland, Gus Van Sant became celebrated for movies that focused on characters defined by their gritty circumstances or outsider status, notably the drug addicts and thieves in “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989), the street kids and hustlers in “My Own Private Idaho” (1991), and the Oscar-winning films, “Good Will Hunting” (1997), about Matt Damon’s working-class math whiz, and “Milk” (2008), which starred Sean Penn as the trailblazing, martyred gay activist, Harvey Milk.
So, it might seem a stretch to see Van Sant as an executive producer and principal director of “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-part limited series on FX and Hulu that tells the story of what happened when author Truman Capote wrote a story that betrayed the secrets of the New York socialites who had made Capote their friend and confidant.
But as Van Sant said in a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles, he was, in fact, quite familiar with the actual episode that inspired “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” which involved Capote -- who had become famous for the nonfiction book, “In Cold Blood” -- publishing a story in the November 1975 issue of Esquire magazine.
The story, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” was presented as an excerpt from Capote’s in-the-works novel, “Answered Prayers.” Using a combination of fictionalized and real names, the story was taken as a gossipy, scandalous expose of the private lives of the wealthy women whom Capote had befriended and nicknamed his “swans.”
“I was in Connecticut during the ‘60s,” said Van Sant, 71. “’In Cold Blood’ had come out, and all the housewives in Darien, Connecticut, had it on their tables.”
Capote wasn’t just a renowned writer, he was a celebrity, “a character that was around, appearing on talk shows. ‘In Cold Blood’ made him a household name.”
Later on, “I was subscribing to Esquire when it printed ‘La Côte Basque,’ and I was aware that it sort of undid him,“ Van Sant said, “and that it got him in trouble with the people he was writing about.”
Ryan Murphy is executive producer of “Feud Capote vs. The Swans,” the second edition of the “Feud” franchise, which debuted all the way back in 2017, with Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange playing, respectively, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in “Feud: Bette and Joan.”
“Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans” is written by Jon Robin Baitz, based on Laurence Leamer’s book, “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.” The eye-poppingly star-studded cast includes Tom Hollander (“The White Lotus”) as Capote, Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, Diane Lane as Slim Keith, Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill, Demi Moore as Ann Woodward, Molly Ringwald as Joanne Carson, and the late Treat Williams as William Paley.
While having dinner with Baitz, Van Sant recalled, Baitz talked about working with Murphy on the “Capote vs. The Swans” project. “I said, it’s a great story. Do they need a director?”
Van Sant directed six of the eight episodes, which traverse eras, from the 1960s, when Capote enjoyed lunching with his glamorous society friends at Manhattan’s La Côte Basque, to the fallout after the Esquire story appeared, when the ladies shunned Capote, and the writer devolved into a self-destructive spiral in the years leading up to his death at 59, in 1984.
From left, Chloe Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, and Diane Lane as Slim Keith in "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans."FX
A director known for guiding actors to acclaimed performances, Van Sant said that, when working with the “Capote vs. The Swans” cast, “I always tried to make it as realistic as I could.” The female actors drew from parts of their lives, “and they all had ideas of the way the women were. We were using our own collective ideas about what was happening with these women.”
As Capote, Hollander had the tricky job of not turning the author, whose mannerisms were quite distinctive, into a caricature.
Van Sant credits Baitz’s writing for creating a “kind of facsimile of Truman,” using a lot of his own ideas, and matching them with Truman’s history. “And it all played, it all played really well, I think,” Van Sant said.
Hollander was “uniquely prepared” for his role, “because he had played a lot of characters that resembled Truman Capote. He could use his imagination, and his past experiences to really grab onto the words, and make them vivid and entertaining.”
Van Sant, who attended Catlin Gabel School in Portland, left the city after that to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, and worked in Los Angeles and New York before eventually returning to Portland, where he made his first feature, “Mala Noche” (1986), adapted from a book by the late poet, Walt Curtis.
The filmmaker’s Portland-filmed works include “Elephant” (2003) “Paranoid Park” (2007) and “Restless” (2011), and though principally filmed in California, the 2018 feature, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot,” is about the late Portland-based cartoonist, John Callahan.
Van Sant no longer lives in Portland. “I guess I officially moved when I no longer had a house there, somewhere about eight years ago,” Van Sant said. “I had bought a place in Palm Springs, so I needed to let go of a condo that I had in the Pearl District, and that was kind of like the last place that I had lived in Portland. So, officially, I was gone. But it wasn’t really like a purposeful move, or anything. I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles already, so now, I’m here, sort of wondering whether I should go somewhere else.”
Tom Hollander, center, as Truman Capote in "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans." FX
Van Sant has had a place in Los Angeles since 2007, he said. He saw the Palm Springs home on Zillow. “It was a house that Cary Grant had owned for 20 years, it’s kind of this cool place,” Van Sant said. “So, I impulsively bought that, and now I’m not sure if I should keep it or not.”
But it doesn’t sound as if Van Sant will return to Portland. “I don’t know, but that’s not in the plans,” he said. “I came to Portland for Walt Curtis’ funeral,” in November 2023. “I used to go back and forth from L.A. to Portland, like twice a month. But now it’s not that often that I get back.”
“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” premieres with two back-to-back episodes Wednesday, Jan. 31. The first episode airs at 10 p.m. on FX and the second follows at 11:19 p.m. on FX. The series also streams on Hulu.
— Kristi Turnquist
503-221-8227; kturnquist@oregonian.com; @Kristiturnquist
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