Miniseries provides an ‘Escape’ for Stiller
Comedian gets behind the camera for drama about daring prison break
It was the most daring prison escape in decades. ❚ Two inmates serving life sentences for murder mounted a meticulous, detailed plan to bust out of the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 2015, tunneling through a catwalk beneath their cells to a manhole and at least temporary freedom.
Richard Matt and David Sweat were aided by Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell, a flirtatious (and married) employee in the prison’s tailor shop where both worked and had sex with her, and Gene Palmer, a rogue guard who (perhaps unwittingly) slipped tools to the prisoners and looked the other way. On the lam for three weeks and headed toward the nearby Canadian border, the pair eluded a massive manhunt until one was captured and the other killed.
The incredible story is the subject of a sevenpart Showtime miniseries, “Escape at Dannemora,” that begins Sunday (10 EST/PST), directed by Ben Stiller and starring Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano as the prisoners and Patricia Arquette as Tilly, who’s now serving a prison sentence for her role.
“If this wasn’t true I might have a hard time believing it,” Dano says. “It was crazy.”
Arquette gained 40 pounds to play “femme fatale” Tilly over most of the monthslong production, then lost the weight for a harrowing flashback episode late in the series that reveals the three principals’ lives before prison.
“It was humbling, humiliating, interesting to go through life feeling like an invisible person,” she
says of Tilly, a libidinous philanderer. “But when she’s in (the prison), when she’s at work, she’s so visible.”
Stiller, a comedic actor and director, takes a sharp right turn as director of the dramatic story. “It was the first time I was really shooting anything where there wasn’t that pressure on me to be funny,” he says. “It made me realize how hard that is. It was at once freeing but also a new world.” So was not appearing in scenes he directed: “That was the biggest change I enjoyed.”
But residents of Dannemora, where some of the series was shot, had a different expectation: “The attitude in the town was … Ben Stiller is going to make a comedy; that was the assumption. Maybe even Showtime had that assumption,” he jokes. But “when I got to the place and started to experience the reality of these people, I just wanted to show what happened.”
Stiller says he didn’t closely follow the case in real time; he was in Europe filming “Zoolander 2.” But “what was interesting to me was how something like this happens in this day and age.”
Dano’s theory: “In prison you’re trying to survive. Maybe part of the human condition is you need a goal, you need something to dream about. It took a lot of will ... to do what they did.”
A first script, written soon after the incident, largely invented its details, and Stiller demurred. But a subsequent New York inspector general’s report, based on interviews with the accused and prison officials, filled in gaps and made the project a go. He also cast several people involved in the case to play themselves – including a tactical team, a sheriff ’s deputy, a nurse and a man who came upon the convicts hiding out in his cabin – and filmed in the actual locations where Sweat was recaptured and the pair hid out.
In filming the series, Stiller says, “you see how oppressive the prison experience is for all the people involved, and it does not feel like it’s rehabilitating at all; it’s more the opposite.”
“It made it clear that we need to fix the prison system. Places like Clinton represent how outdated it is, literally.”
The actors and Stiller went to a different prison to meet with Sweat, who “sees himself as the mastermind brilliant person behind all the smart things that were done to escape, and also this innocent person,” Arquette says. “But by a bunch of unfortunate incidents that were out of his control, there he is. It’s that kind of sociopathic game.”
Del Toro says: “Matt’s the one who had the original idea, so he’s kind of like the producer of the movie, (Tilly’s) the director and (David) was the actor.” But “they were handicapped at the end.” When things didn’t work out as they’d hoped, “they never had a Plan B.”