“I loved the moral questions at the heart of it,” reveals writer Jon Robin Baitz of the FX limited series “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” The show chronicles a fallout between Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) and his dearest female friends after he published their scandalous secrets. The ensuing downward spiral of the author is a fascinating tale of betrayal and love. “When you’re a writer and you are using everything around you, which is an unstoppable mechanical event, “says Baitz, “as a writer, do you have an obligation to the people you have relationships with and are using in some way to be responsible to them?” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
Capote’s moral quandary is one that Baitz grapples with these days as he looks back on his career. “I spent many years as a playwright drawing from the experiences I’d had growing up and as an expatriate American in Africa and South America,” he explains. Years later he sometimes wonders how “fair” and “decent” he was in using his family’s lives as dramatic material. “So I got a chance, I thought, to explore that with Truman, who seemed to not realize that he had this thing called a soul, or a conscience which might come back to haunt him,” describes Baitz.
WATCH our exclusive video interview with Tom Hollander (‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’)
Baitz saw Capote as someone shouldering a great deal of pain, which then extends to his ally turned frenemy Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) as their close bond is tested. “Love causes pain when it’s ambivalent,” offers Baitz, “I’ve always found love to be beautiful and yet have a little aura of sorrow around the edges of it.” The writer’s scripts explore what happens to people as these elements are intertwined.
Since the main characters are a witty writer and a group of sharp socialites, they frequently unleash their pain onto an enemy in the form of cutting one-liners. These zingers offer Baitz a chance to step outside of himself. “I feel like they’re armor in a way. They’re used to deflect. They’re used to cover the pain. They’re a form of jewelry and ornamentation,” he explains. “So it’s projection really. I would like to be able to, in real life, have that kind of tongue, but I can only do it, pretty much, in creating characters.”
WATCH our exclusive video interview with Naomi Watts (‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’)
Those wicked lines of dialogue may have been fun to write, but Baitz ultimately considers it “unbearably sad” that Truman and Babe never truly reconciled. So in a bit of dramatic license he took inspiration from the author’s final words, “beautiful Babe,” and envisioned a hallucinatory moment where Babe appears before a dying Capote. One final moment where the purity of their friendship returned. “I think that unlocked what was going on in his corroded rusty consciousness,” reveals Baitz of those dying words. It made him think of a former romantic partner who confessed to him “my friends would kill me if they knew I was meeting with you” upon meeting post-break up. “I didn’t use that literal line, but I had to put them together, considering how they’d been kept apart,” describes Baitz, “It isn’t real. And so…in my view, it becomes even more poignant and painful that they couldn’t do that.”
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