Miller's Crossing

Capote director Bennett Miller waited almost a decade for overnight success.

by Jim Hanas

At 39, Capote director Bennett Miller was not only the youngest nominee for this year's Best Director Oscar, he was—compared to the rest of the field, which included Steven Spielberg, eventual winner Ang Lee, George Clooney, and Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis—a complete newcomer. In Hollywood terms, he has only begun to live.

Overnight success is the stuff of biopics, not careers, however, and Miller's path to an Oscar nomination was, in reality, a bit more circuitous.

After dropping out of NYU film school, Miller served as an intern and an assistant to director Jonathan Demme—a position from which he was eventually fired. He kicked around in his twenties, trying his hand at industrial films, music videos, and tear-jerking fundraising documentaries before embarking on 1998's The Cruise. The documentary portrait of eccentric New York City tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch won critical praise, festival awards, and an Emmy. It also brought feature scripts Miller's way, although the director opted to bide his time.

While covering the advertising business, I became aware of Miller because of his commercials. Between The Cruise and Capote, Miller shot more than a dozen campaigns a year, all in a style that might surprise moviegoers, unless they arrive in time for the commercials that screen before the feature. Working through Hungry Man—the production company behind comedic campaigns like ESPN's "This is SportsCenter" and Careerbuilder.com's monkey-based Super Bowl spots—Miller proved to be a master of a style of broad, jokey comedy that is sometimes known in the ad biz as "gags with tags." Have you seen those Cingular spots where Rob Huebel (of later Best Week Ever and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame) chews up the screen as "Inconsiderate Cellphone Man"? That's Miller. How about the Verizon ad where a young man gets a job and his unemployed, Maxim-addled friends keep calling to clown on him? Miller again.

While advertising might seem like a perfect proving ground for would-be feature directors, few commercials directors make the leap with much success. Big-screen directors cross over into commercials with impunity—Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, even the Coen Brothers have all directed commercials—but commercials directors rarely find success in features, either commercially or critically. David Fincher and Michael Bay, who both came up through the music video and commercial ranks, have had box office success, but Spike Jonze was the last commercials director to cross over with critical praise, with a 1999 directing nomination for Being John Malkovich. More typical are the paths of advertising A-listers like Joe Pytka and Kinka Usher, whose filmographies boast lightweight fare like Space Jam and Mystery Men. By and large, commercial directors get offered genre schlock like The Ring (directed by Gore Verbinski, who parlayed it into the successful, if disposable, Pirates of the Carribean francise) or remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (directed by Marcus Nispel). Noam Murro, perhaps today's most accomplished and versatile commercials director, has had both. He was briefly signed on to shoot The Ring Two and is currently at work on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

What's even more unusual about Miller is the disconnect between his ads and his films. Fincher, Bay, and Jonze are visual stylists—all products of Propaganda Films, the now defunct production company that brought the quick cuts of MTV to commercials and, later, to their movies. Documentary Oscar winner Errol Morris frequently directs commercials, but his spots feature all the cubist camera-play found in his films. Not so with Miller's oeuvre of offbeat gags.

"That was just the opportunity that came up," Miller says. "The very first scripts I did were comedy and physical, and that's a lot what the commercial business is like. I don't identify more with that genre than I do with any other. When I think about what kind of movies I want to make, rarely do they resemble, in tone or humor, the kind of stuff that I do in commercials."

While some subscribe to the Roger Corman school of filmmaking, whereby you jump in and learn by doing, Miller kept directing commercials and patiently waited for the right script, aware that, these days, a freshman filmmaker might not be offered a second chance. "As far as I'm concerned, [commercials are] a totally anonymous way to practice," he says. "In that world, it's not anonymous at all, but in the world that I had my eye on, nobody pays that much attention. To me, that was a comfort."

The script, as we all know by now, came from Miller's high school friend—and first time screenwriter—actor Dan Futterman. The pair, in turn, drafted another high school friend, Philip Seymour Hoffman, for the title role—a chain of events Miller calls an "incredible coincidence."

Coincidentally or not, Capote turned out to be particularly well suited to Miller's skills as a filmmaker. It is not difficult to draw a line from Speed Levitch—the manic, self-absorbed rhapsode, who some reviewers compared to Truman Capote when The Cruise was released—to Hoffman's Capote, a man torn between compassion and self-will. In each case, Miller manages to capture these conflicts in a way that inspires both sympathy and moral discomfort.

"I'm like the sniper in the tree, the hunter that just sits and waits and waits," says Miller, who has shot a campaign for MasterCard since Capote's release and plans—in a "much more selective way"—to continue directing ads. "I did commercials for all that time, but I never lost sight of what I wanted to do, so when it came up, I was able to move. In many ways, I feel like everything leading up to it was preparation."