DAN FUTTERMAN FINDS NUANCES OF DANIEL PEARL

Dan Futterman talks about how he portrayed slain journalist Daniel Pearl.

Before going into the project of A Mighty Heart to play slain Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl, Dan Futterman went to Encino, California where Pearl spent his childhood and got his parents’ blessing.

That’s all he needed to then find the nuances of the man who lost his life in pursuit of the truth.

“I was mostly interested in two things about him. One was the sort of the mechanics of the way that foreign journalists work in a country like Pakistan where they have a local fixer, a local journalist who helps them sort of navigate, do translation if they need that, meet people and chase whatever story they’re chasing. On the other hand it was expressing something about him which was his sort of delight in immersing himself in different culture and his sense of responsibility in reporting that and showing that culture to an American audience that might not know that much about that part of the world. And show it a nuanced human way. Those are the things that I was mostly interested in.”

Through playing Daniel Pearl, Futterman began to appreciate his own family which tragically Pearl never got to know. While he was on location in India Dan’s daughter was newly born.

“It was hard on my wife. She’s 18 months now but when we were doing it, it was during that tough period of not sleeping all that well so it’s much easier to have two parents around than one. To me the great, great tragedy of this is that Danny Pearl didn’t get to meet his son, she was six months pregnant when this happened. I’m a father and it only makes you appreciate even more what you already do. The fact that you drive home and open the door and there are your two beautiful girls that you will watch grow up.”

A Mighty Heart opens today in theaters.