An interview with the actor who portrayed Dick Hickock in the 1967 film.

Robert Blake and Scott Wilson in In Cold Blood: Image via Little White Lies

Richard Brooks’s film adaptation of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s landmark “nonfiction novel” about the Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959, turns fifty years old this year. Newsflash: It still works.

Starring Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as Perry White and Dick Hickock, a couple of ex-cons who set out to rob the Clutters at their farmhouse and wound up killing all four members of the family who were home that night, In Cold Blood was named among the ten best courtroom dramas of all time in 2008 by the American Film Institute, and added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry that same year. Reviewing the film in December 1966, Variety praised it as “a probing, sensitive, tasteful, balanced and suspenseful documentary-drama”; Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it “electrifying cinema” that “sends shivers down the spine while moving the viewer to ponder.”

On Thursday, November 2, the Paley Center will present The Stories You Are About to See Are True: Investigating Our Obsession with True Crime, a panel exploring our fascination with true-crime programming, be it television, film, or podcasts. Among the panelists is Kahane Cooperman, executive producer/director of Sundance’s upcoming two-part documentary on the Clutter murders, Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, airing November 18–19.

We spoke recently with Wilson, who was twenty-four years old when filming In Cold Blood, just his second film role (he had a much smaller role in In the Heat of the Night, which was released four months earlier). Asked if In Cold Blood is the work he is best remembered for even today, Wilson replied that it probably ranks second, behind The Walking Dead, in which he portrayed Hershel Greene for three seasons. (Watch a clip of Wilson at PaleyFest 2013.)

Here’s the rest of the interview, edited for length:

Paley Center: Is it true you were recommended for the role of Dick Hickock by Quincy Jones and also Sidney Poitier, both of whom you worked with on In the Heat of the Night?

Scott Wilson: Yes, I was. And Norman Jewison [the director of In the Heat of the Night] allowed Richard Brooks to look at the dailies, though I was not aware of any of those things happening at the time. My last day on the set of In the Heat of the Night I was told to go over to Columbia to meet Richard Brooks. And maybe six or eight weeks later I ended up getting the role.

PC: How much did you know about the character and the project when you met with Brooks?

SW: I knew absolutely nothing about the book. I was going to acting classes and doing plays and workshops and parking cars and working at gas stations and doing all the cliched things that actors do to survive, so I wasn’t even aware of the book. Then I went in and I met Brooks and he asked me if I had read it and I said no, and he couldn’t believe it. But I went home and immediately found a copy of it and read the book, and fortunately he didn’t write me off the first day.

PC: I read he was specifically looking for an “unknown” talent?

SW: He was, and I think that was the reason both Blake and I got the roles that we got. Blake had been a child actor, but he wasn’t a movie star. What Brooks was looking for was, he didn’t want an audience to anticipate the reactions of the characters we were playing. He wanted it to be totally fresh for the audience. He could have gotten Paul Newman and Steve McQueen — he referenced that quite a few times. But he chose us mainly because he didn’t want the audience to anticipate what we’d be doing.

He shot in black and white because he thought that would enhance the credibility, the reality of it.

PC: What did you think of Dick as you were reading the book and realizing this was a character whom you were hopefully going to inhabit?

SW: I have to say I read the book and I thought, “I wish this book had never been written. I wish they weren’t going to be making the film and I wish that the murders had never taken place.” But since they had, I was hoping that the film would be as hardcore as the book was, that the film would be as representative of real life — real life and death — as the book was, and I think the film was. I didn’t want people to want to emulate anything that Hickock was doing, and I think the way you do that is make them real, credible, and human beings, but very flawed human beings, and I think Brooks was very successful in doing that.

PC: Did you have to find something likable in Dick, or something that you could empathize with? How do you portray a character like that?

SW: I believe Capote mentions in the book somewhere that these two characters combined to create a third personality, and it was the third personality that actually committed the crimes. So individually they may have remained small-time criminals, but that’s a huge leap from being a small-time criminal to mass murderer.

The real killers: Perry White and Dick Hickock. Image via AP

PC: If Perry didn’t go off like that, I don’t know — as much talk as Dick did about not leaving any witnesses — I just don’t know if Dick had it in him to do that.

SW: I don’t know. Reading the book, there were several different versions of what took place. To start with I think Smith said they killed two apiece. And then he changed his mind after Hickock’s mother visited the prison and he thought she was a good lady, so he was going to let Hickock off the hook. And in the film, if you remember, you’re seeing the two men being executed, but when they go upstairs they go into a room and you don’t see — it’s implied, and you assume, that it’s Smith that’s pulling the trigger.

PC: Perry’s got the gun.

SW: He has the gun, but who knows what happened when they go into the other room? Brooks didn’t show that for a purpose. The bottom line is they both are killers, even if he didn’t actually pull the trigger.

PC: It’s amazing what you do with the character. You make him very human.

SW: Yes, human, but not someone that you want to emulate.

PC: Right. First of all he gets hanged, so I don’t think people want that.

SW: When I was doing the role, I was saying to myself, “I don’t want people to emulate this guy.” So when he’s being charming I wanted there to be an undercurrent of sleaze there, an undercurrent of, “My God, the audacity of this asshole!”

PC: Did you have any sympathy for him at all?

SW: When I was reading the book, I didn’t feel that Capote and Hickock really connected with each other, and I brought it up to Richard. Even though — and to me this is one of the marks of Capote’s brilliance, really — he didn’t particularly like Hickock and I don’t think Hickock particularly liked him, he was still able to bring that character to life. And then recently you find out that Hickock was writing his own book on the Clutter murders, which would have been competition. His manuscript has apparently disappeared.

PC: Was it a hard character for you to grasp?

SW: Very intense. You were totally into bringing reality to what we were doing. It was twenty-four/seven. And you’re meeting people who were involved in the actual crime — you’re meeting the court stenographer, the court photographer, you’re meeting people who were on the actual jury, you’re meeting people who caught Hickock and Smith and interrogated them, so you’re talking to people who were, it was part of their real life. So you’re talking to people. It isn’t like you’re making everything up. You’re talking to people who lived it.

PC: I read this article that called Richard Brooks a “thirty-take maniac” and said he had a reputation as a bully. What was it like working for him?

SW: Richard was a very complicated and creative person. On the one hand he could charm birds out of the trees. He was a great story teller. He would tell you stories about working with John Huston and Humphrey Bogart. On the other hand there were times on the set when he would blow up, he was like a volcanic eruption. And it didn’t matter who. He didn’t choose the weakest on the set. I heard him go off on the head of the studio one day because there was a secretary who hadn’t received a raise that she was supposed to get. And then he’d go off on the best boy, he’d go off on me. He had two satchels that he carried around, with travel stickers all over them. One of them had the script in it and the other was a decoy. He didn’t want anyone to read the script. He gave us a copy of the script early on. When we were through reading it we had to turn it in. Then he would give us the scenes a few days before they were shot and then he would collect the scenes after we were done shooting them.

PC: Do you remember what he went off on you about?

SW: He did it a couple of times and later I kind of understood that it wasn’t a scene that you were shooting currently. It would be something coming up that he was anticipating having problems with. The first day that he pounded me at the end of the day I said, “Give me another take,” and then I said, “Your problem isn’t me. Your problem is that you changed the direction of the scene from what it was in the book.” And later, in ADR, or looping, as they call it, he changed it back to the way it was in the book, so he heard me on that.

PC: How did you and Robert Blake develop the chemistry that you had on screen? Did you spend a lot of time together off screen?

SW: We bonded on that film. We were working pretty long hours and then you had scenes to work on. We might have dinner together, we might not, depending on what each one of us had to do after we got off work.

PC: Was it hard for you and Robert to get out of character when you weren’t shooting, given how intense it was? Was it tough to transition from Dick back to Scott?

SW: I remember I had dinner one night with the court stenographer and the court photographer, who were married to each other, if I recall correctly, and we were just talking and I was trying to absorb what I could from their recollections and who they were. The next day we were shooting in the courtroom — where Robert and I had no dialogue — and Will Geer did that wonderful speech that he did as the prosecuting attorney. There was a break and I went out in the hall and tapped the lady on the shoulder and startled her and she turned around and said, “Oh, my God, I thought you were him.” The night before she said, “You’re nothing like him.” Now she’s in the courtroom with the jury box filled with people that were the real jurors and two or three of them were the K.B.I. agents who caught the two guys and she’s sitting at her normal place and so all of a sudden it’s re-creating those memories for her.

PC: Did you ever meet any of Dick’s family or read any of his letters?

SW: No, I didn’t. I know when we were in Hickock’s hometown I was in an ice cream parlor and this old lady, she said, because of the movie — the trucks and everything were in town — she was talking to someone, she said, “All these movie people are here shooting a movie about Dick Hickock,” and she knew his mother and his father and him. And I said, “Did you know them?”

And she said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: he was always very polite to his mother.”

Blake, Wilson, and Truman Capote. Image via Deep South Magazine

PC: Did you have any interaction with Truman Capote?

SW: Only when the press came in. He was there. And I got a card from him after he saw the movie. He was very complimentary about it.

PC: You made an interesting point, though: he seemed to have bonded better with Perry. Dick was a more mysterious character than Perry in terms of motivation, for instance.

SW: There were a lot of people that you could talk to that knew Hickock, from high school, from the little town where he grew up, people know everyone in a small town, so there were just a lot of people that you could talk to that knew him.

With Smith, there was hardly anyone. Hardly anyone knew him growing up. His family, his brothers and sisters, had scattered. Mostly what you had to work with was what Smith told you. Whereas in the case of Hickock, you could verify things, you could get an idea of who he was from the people that knew him.

I think when kids are young and they’re rambunctious and if they do something that could get you in trouble but it really isn’t that bad, if you grow up and you become the president of the bank, everyone says, “Oh, I knew he was going to do good, he had so much spirit,” but if you end up in prison, it’s, “Oh, I knew he was going to end up in prison because he was just a bad kid,” doing the same things. So I think that once your personality is set when you’re older, the people that grew up with you form opinions based on what you became, as opposed to what you were then.

PC: What was it like being in the Clutter house and in the basement where the shootings took place? What kind of impact does that have emotionally?

SW: There’s no doubt that there was an aura about being in that house. It was a horrible thing. If I remember correctly it was in there that we saw the actual photos of what took place in the house for the first time, which was pretty horrible.

PC: What was it like filming the hanging scene?

SW: We weren’t able to shoot in the prison where they were actually hanged. Some of that was shot on the sound stage at Columbia Ranch and some of the prison stuff was shot at Colorado State Penitentiary. It was interesting, with some of the inmates and prisoners. You got a taste of what was going on there, if not a full dose. You listen to people who were there and you hear their side of the story and why they’re there, and some of them were murderers — people who had killed people. You hear it and they know they were wrong, they know they did the wrong thing. One guy, his wife was pregnant, he was robbing a liquor store, he was leaving and a cop came up on a motorcycle and he shoots the cop and kills him and boom, he’s in prison. The cop’s dead. His family is without a father. So you had two families without a father.

PC: Was there a scene that was most intense for you, a favorite scene?

SW: I remember the interrogation scene. It isn’t often as an actor that you get to play someone who actually lived or is alive and you’re doing a real examination of that person warts and all. And in this case you were able to talk to people who actually knew those people, regardless of in what manner they knew them — if they were interrogating them or if they were in the courtroom with them or in some other way. I did talk to people who at least came in contact with him and had opinions about him. So after he’d done that, to have them validate what you did as reminding them, thinking that you were Hickock, that kind of puts a seal of approval on what you did. Later one of the people who interrogated him sent me a message that he thought that I was Hickock during that interrogation scene. He said, “You became Hickock.”

PC: What did you capture about Dick that resonated so strongly?

SW: That scene was set up to be shot in three days. And I went to Tom Shaw, who was the assistant director, and I said, “Tom, let’s shoot this thing today.” And he started laughing at me and we went over to Brooks, and Tom’s laughing, he says, “He wants to shoot this in one day.” And Brooks started laughing. I said, “It can’t be that hard. Put the damn camera down and let me go.” And we shot it in a day and a half. Because you know that when you read something and you sense the rhythm that it will take and the tempo and you know that some things you don’t want to just break it up and break it up, you’re having to live with that for a number of days, with that one scene, you want to get it out of the way, because the more lifelike it is the more tempo you need.

PC: In the book and the movie, it’s always Perry who’s worried about getting caught, and Dick doesn’t seem to have any anxiety about that, at least on the surface. And then when that interrogation starts, he’s really cocky, but by the end he’s given up Perry.

SW: Yeah, he gave up both of them. When you break it down, they’re ex-cons. He knows what the law says, and for him to confess, that’s — the shoe prints didn’t mean that much, really. If he had said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We weren’t there,” as Smith did, I don’t know that they would have ever been convicted.

PC: What do you think turned him?

SW: I think both of them had suicidal impulses, to do something like that.

They were free, they were in Mexico, and they came back to this country. It’s crazy. What prompts someone to do that? It’s insane. It’s just crazy. I think that’s why Capote’s book and the film were so strong, because they captured people and showed what kind of people might do something like that, and they weren’t totally without some human qualities. But I remember saying, “If there’s life after death, I know Hickock would not want anyone to emulate him.”

Next: An interview with Ande Parks, the author of the 2005 graphic novel Capote in Kansas.