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‘The Outfit’ puts new spin on mobster genre
By Peter Sblendorio
New York Daily News
scar-winning fi lmmaker
Graham Moore wanted to
bring new style to the mobster
movie genre.
The Columbia University
graduate makes his directorial
debut with “The Outfi t,” a crime
drama about a Chicago tailor
whose primary customers are
merciless gangsters.
The story came together after
Moore and co-writer Johnathan
McClain took interest in Lon-
don’s famed Savile Row tailoring
district and started researching
the industry for a potential fi lm.
Moore molded the lead
character after his grandfather,
whom he described as an up-
standing man who ran a small-
town medical practice where
notorious Genovese mobster
Jerry Catena was a patient.
“The fi rst bug that the FBI
ever planted in its history was to
get at the mob, and they planted
it in Chicago in 1956 inside a
tailor shop,” Moore told the Daily
O
Nick Wall/Focus Features/TNS
Mark Rylance stars in “The Outfi t.”
News. “Once we read that, we
lit up. It was like, ‘Oh, this is the
movie!’ It’s about a man like my
grandfather: a sort of gentle soul
who makes these clothes for
vicious killers.”
“The Outfi t” stars Mark Ry-
lance as a former Savile Row tailor
named Leonard, who operates a
high-end shop in Chicago where
the deep-pocketed gangsters
who buy his suits are the only
ones keeping him in business.
“All he wants to do is lock
himself in his shop and make
these beautiful objects, and he
wants to pretend the outside
world doesn’t exist. He wants
to pretend that some of the
violence and the danger that
lurks just outside the door
isn’t there,” Moore, 40, said of
the character.
“The problem with that is it
doesn’t work. You can’t do that.
Bad people are out there, and
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violent people are out there, and
at some point they’re going to
come knocking on your door,
and then Leonard, like everyone,
has to make a decision about
what he’s going to do about it.”
Moore, who was born in
Chicago, won the Oscar for best
adapted screenplay in 2014
for the World War II-era drama
“The Imitation Game” starring
Benedict Cumberbatch and
Keira Knightley.
The fi lmmaker said he
wanted “The Outfi t” to pay hom-
age to classic Alfred Hitchcock
thrillers such as 1948′s “Rope”
and 1954′s “Rear Window.”
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“We wanted to make a movie
that would keep audiences
guessing until the very end,”
Moore said. “It’s a puzzle piece,
but not quite a whodunit. We talk
about it a lot as a chess match.
Every character in the fi lm has
their own agenda. Every char-
acter in the fi lm is lying about
something.”
Moore was thrilled by the
chance to work with Oscar-win-
ning Rylance, whom he praised
as “the best actor in the world.”
“Mark is an expert craftsman
himself,” Moore said of the actor
who won his Academy Award for
“Bridge of Spies.” “As our lead
character has devoted decades
and decades of his life to per-
fecting the craft of tailoring, I
think Mark has devoted decades
and decades of his life to utterly
perfecting the craft of acting.”
Moore, who now lives in Los
Angeles, spent 10 years in New
York, and says his time studying
at Columbia helped him become
a thorough researcher.
“I tend to work on these his-
torical pieces, or pieces like this
one that are inspired by a real
event,” Moore said. “I learned so
much from my time there about
how to approach doing research
on a huge topic.”
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