Aptly dressed in a sharp grey suit, Graham Moore is discussing his feature directorial debut The Outfit, a 1950s Chicago-set gangster film with a difference, set entirely in a tailor shop.
The project had its world premiere in competition at last week’s Berlin International Film Festival and Focus Features has set a theatrical release in the US on March 18 and in the UK on April 8.
All the action focuses on and around a master ‘cutter’, Leonard Burling, played by Mark Rylance, who has to outwit a dangerous group of mobsters in order to survive a fateful night. The fact it is all set in one small location proved beneficial for Moore and his production team because they were due to start shooting in the US in April 2020 when Covid struck. Fortunately, they just needed a controlled studio space and so moved into the most unlikely of places.
“We decided to film at The Fountain Studios next to Wembley Stadium, home to The X-Factor, so we could be near Mark [Rylance]. It was actually quite funny recreating a 50s Chicago feel surrounded by posters of Simon Cowell and the team everywhere,” said Moore.
Former glory
Moore is already a best-selling author and Oscar-winner for his The Imitation Game script, which earned $233m off a $14m budget back in 2014. The accolades and contacts he amassed from that project proved useful when putting together The Outfit. FilmNation came onboard early as producers - alongside Scoop Productions and Amy Jackson - having also distributed The Imitation Game.
The idea for The Outfit was originally inspired by Moore’s grandfather who worked as a doctor in a small-town medical practice in the US. He was hugely influential in Moore’s early life after his parents divorced, helping him tie his first tie.
“But despite being a kind, gentle soul, one of his patients was the notorious mobster Jerry Catena. This was always fascinating to my family and abhorrent to my grandmother who couldn’t understand why he’d treat a known murderer. To which my grandfather would always say, ‘he’s only ever been a gentleman to me’,” laughs Moore. “The psychology of these two completely different men and their worlds colliding interested me.”
The idea was ruminating in Moore’s brain when his friend and the film’s co-scriptwriter and executive producer, Johnathan McClain, said one day: “How come no one’s ever made a film about a Savile Row tailor?”.
This piqued Moore’s interest and the two of them set to work researching this line of work, which takes years to perfect (even spending time in the basement of a Savile Row shop), until their lead character, Leonard, was formed. But then they needed a story.
“And that’s when we found a single sentence buried deep in a big book about 20th-century suit-making. We learned that the first bug the FBI ever planted was in a tailor shop in Chicago in 1956. We instantly lit up and said. ‘that’s our story’. It’s about a man, like my grandfather, a gentle craftsman, working in the service of these vicious mobsters in the 1950s and the FBI want to plant a bug to catch them,” says Moore.
“I thought ’what if we could build an entire film inside the tailor shop?’ It felt like an exciting, contained film noir concept, in a similar vein to Hitchcock films like Rear Window and Rope.”
The pair got to work on the script, sharing drafts with producer Scoop Wasserstein. “Even at that early stage, I knew I was looking at something special,”says Moore. “It’s full of surprises that are based in character.”
Class acts
Getting Rylance onboard to play the lead was a dream come true for Moore. “Having him for my directorial debut took a lot of the weight off my shoulders. All I had to do was say ‘point the camera over there at Mark and say action and something brilliant will happen, and I’ll take all the credit,’” says Moore.
The scenes between Rylance’s character and the crime boss played by Simon Russell Beale, are particularly memorable for Mooer. The pair have moved in the same acting circles for many years through their work on stage, but had never acted together before. “It was exciting to put them in the same room, you could tell they were both eager to bring their best when they were on set together,” the director recalls. “We used two cameras instead of one so we could focus on them at the same time and allow them to improvise and try things.”
Rounding out the small main cast are Zoey Deutch as Leonard’s assistant, Dylan O’Brien as Roy’s son, ohnny Flynn as a henchman and Nigerian born-UK actress Nikki Amuka-Bird as a rival gang boss All the chaacters werer based on real figures in Chicago in the 1950s.
The film’s title references the Chicago Outfit, which was a criminal organisation formed from the remnants of Al Capone’s empire, made up of gangs from across the US. “But it’s also a metaphor for how our clothes are an outward projection of ourselves, and when you pull back the layers, things might not be as they seem, which is the case for all the characters,” says Moore.
Creative talent
As a first-time director with a small $5m budget to play with, Moore surrounded himself with as much creative talent as possible. This included cinematographer Dick Pope whose credits include Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies, and Gemma Jackson as production designer, who brought experience working on projects including Game Of Thrones.
“I even managed to get my friend William Goldenberg, who’s worked on some of my favourite films, including Heat and The Insider [and The Imitation Game], to do the editing,” says Moore. “We worked out of his living room in Los Angeles due to Covid. It was funny because his teenage daughter was on Zoom schooling in the other room, so we couldn’t cut the loud shooting scenes while she was there.”
Moore has his fingers crossed but is nonetheless very happy with how the film turned out, despite having to film during Covid. “I just hope my next project, for which I’m currently writing the script, can be filmed in a non-pandemic environment,” he says.
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