Philip Seymour Hoffman Feels The Love

Philip Seymour Hoffman Feels The Love

Disheveled dad Hoffman changed himself into Capote. Now he's feeling the love: Aidin Vaziri | Hoffman recalls the day they brought a renowned Italian hair designer into the preproduction meetings for "Capote" so he could survey old television clips of the "Breakfast at Tiffany's" author and come up with a strategy for making the schleppy actor look as much like the dapper real thing as possible. The stylist took one glance at the screen, one at Hoffman, also the movie's executive producer, and declared, "This is not going to work!" It took about five months for Hoffman to go through the physical and mental transformation to play Truman Capote circa 1959-1965, the unsavory years when the Southern author spent investigating and writing his nonfiction novel, "In Cold Blood," about a quadruple homicide in the small conservative community of Holcomb, Kan., and the lives of the killers. "It's not the feel-good movie of the year," the actor laughs. Hoffman actually had to lose weight to play the famously egg-shaped socialite. He also had to lose some height and change his deep baritone into the writer's high-pitched wheeze. "I needed every minute of it," he says of the time he spent willing himself to become Capote. "The most important thing was internal -- to somehow understand very specifically why and how he did what he did. It couldn't have been easy being that guy, basically."