When Bennett Miller was hired by Sony Pictures to direct "Moneyball," his task wasn't completely dissimilar from being chosen to manage a struggling baseball team with a couple of stars and a lot of problems.
Director Steven Soderbergh had spent years developing the project, which was based on a compelling but statistics-heavy book about how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane -- a failed ballplayer himself -- had used new methods of statistical analysis to build a winning team on a small payroll.
But Sony had pulled the plug just as Soderbergh was going into production. Based on a script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, it would have included documentary-style interviews with some of the real people involved, and an animated version of stats guru Bill James, which would occasionally interrupt the film to lecture the audience.
Inheriting the troubled production with the support of star Brad Pitt, "Capote" director Miller ditched the talking heads and made a tense, smart, talky drama. It opened to $19.5 million last weekend (so-so for a Pitt film, great for a baseball movie) and instantly went to the top of many critics' lists and awards forecasts.
On the heels of that opening, Miller talked to TheWrap about approaching the film the way Billy Beane approached the A's. In conversation, the 44-year-old, New York-based director is thoughtful, deliberate and halting; you could fit entire Sorkin monologues into the spaces between his words.
So, how are you feeling?
I've never had so many people ask me about my feelings in my life. [laughs] You want people to see it, and you want it to mean something to people. Anybody who makes a film and says that they're cavalier about those things has got to be lying. So this kind of reaction is ultimately the big reward.
What version of that long-in-development script did you first read when Brad Pitt asked you to get involved?
I was given a pile of stuff. The first thing I read was Aaron Sorkin's first revision of Steve Zaillian's script. And then I read the Zaillian script that Sorkin had worked from. And then I read the book.
Going backwards?
Swimming upstream to the source.
Was there a key in that material that made you think, I can do this?
There was. It had to do with Billy's backstory. It had to do with this line in the book about Billy believing that there was a life he was meant to be living, there was some other life out there for him. Meaning, when he was a kid he made a big decision, and took the check [from the New York Mets] and the temptation and went down one road – and now later in life, he's thinking about what his life could have been.
