Ben Stiller drops the funny for real-life story
Inmates who escaped prison and went on the lam subject of new miniseries on Crave
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, tunnelling 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 seven-part Showtime miniseries, Es
cape at Dannemora, that begins Sunday night in Canada on Crave (formerly The Movie Network), 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 pris- on sentence for her role.
Arquette gained 40 pounds to play “femme fatale” Tilly over most of the months-long production.
“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 this 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. 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 and filmed in the actual locations where Sweat was recaptured and the pair hid.