Ryan Cormier, and Sarika Jagtiani

As flashbulbs popped at a recent Philadelphia red-carpet premiere of "Foxcatcher," passersby stopped with smartphones in hand, ready to snap shots of Channing Tatum and Steve Carell.

The three actors that dominate the film – Carell, Tatum and Mark Ruffalo – were absent, likely drained from the marathon media gauntlet they've been navigating since the film debuted at Cannes Film Festival in May.

Director Bennett Miller, actor Anthony Michael Hall and Nancy Schultz, however, were on the red carpet and all smiles at the Prince Music Theater.

It's a vision much different from the film's final scene with Schultz, played by Sienna Miller, witnessing the shooting death of her husband, David Schultz, at the hands of John du Pont.

The Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, murder of Olympic wrestler David Schultz in 1996 was headline-grabbing material across the Philadelphia region and Delaware.

Anguish flows from Sienna Miller as she re-creates the moment when du Pont, founder of the Delaware Museum of Natural History, pulls out a handgun while and calmly shoots David Schultz.

Former wrestlers who trained with David Schultz and the erratic millionaire at his 880-acre Foxcatcher Farms were with Nancy Schultz at the premiere last week as Hollywood and real-life tragedy intersected ahead of the film's Nov. 21 release.

It wasn't the first time Nancy Schultz spent quality time with the film's Oscar-nominated director Bennett Miller – a filmmaker who knows something about transferring real-life events into entrancing cinema, as with his previous two projects: 2005's "Capote" and 2011's "Moneyball."

Nancy Schultz, who now lives in California, visited the Pittsburgh-area set to help coach the cast and director through the events.

"She's the source of so much information, but also it's just a really potent reminder that this happened," Bennett says. "You know, this is real. It's a real story. And it charged the atmosphere with a kind of energy."

Wrapped in Oscar buzz that's been steadily building since its Cannes Film Festival debut and subsequent film festival stops, "Foxcatcher" is only a week away from its wide release, although it's already in New York and Los Angeles. It gives film-goers a look at Carell as a downright creepy du Pont thanks to three hours of applying prosthetic makeup to transform the comedic star ("The Office," "The Daily Show") into a madman.

Ruffalo plays David Schultz, whose brother Mark, a fellow Olympic wrestler, was the first to join du Pont's wrestling training center. Much of the film focuses on du Pont's relationship with Mark Schultz, played by Tatum.

A jury in 1997 determined du Pont was guilty of third-degree murder and found to be mentally ill – 13 years before his death in a Pennsylvania prison hospital of natural causes at the age of 72. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

"It's a story about wealth, corruption, power – all that stuff," says Anthony Michael Hall, who plays a du Pont assistant in the film and attended the Philadelphia premiere.

Thomas Bergstrom, du Pont's attorney who gave the defense's closing argument, told The News Journal in August he was "anxious to see if [the film will do] justice to his illness. It's so easy to paint him as an evil man, but on the other hand the reality is that he was really a sick man."

Bergstrom might be disappointed.

While Bergstrom's hope that du Pont would not be presented as a cartoonish caricature of someone mentally ill came true, the film surprisingly bypasses any deep exploration of why he did what he did.

Instead, viewers are left with an impression that chalks up du Pont's bizarre behavior to eccentricity and isolating, blinding wealth.

While du Pont is shown in one "Foxcatcher" scene firing a gun into the ceiling of his training center in front of wrestlers, much of his outlandish behavior didn't make it into "Foxcatcher."

There was plenty to choose from if Miller wanted to include it in the film, like the time du Pont shot a group of nesting geese because he thought they were casting spells on him, or the time he removed all the treadmills and bikes from his property because he thought their clocks were sending him backward in time. He also once held a loaded machine gun to the chest of a wrestler.

After the shooting, du Pont attorney Bergstrom would see his client's illness firsthand, he says, listening to him argue that he should be tried in a military court because he believed David Schultz was a secret Russian agent.

Nancy Schultz, who lived for years in a guesthouse on du Pont's estate with her husband and two children, told "Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane" that du Pont was extremely lonely, and had probably dealt with components of mental illness since he was a young man.

Nancy Schultz has been busy helping with a documentary about her late husband's life, which she says will feature interviews with former Foxcatcher wrestlers, along with prosecutors and defense attorneys.

Because David Schultz's life and wrestling success are often overshadowed by his killing, and with "Foxcatcher" focusing much of its time on the relationship between Mark Schultz and du Pont, she decided to get into the movie business herself in a way and show a fuller picture.

"It also has some new, revealing information about what led up to the murder," she says. "Often Dave is known for the way he died instead of the way he lived."

"Foxcatcher" probably won't change that.

Even though you know it's coming, his death is still shocking. The fateful shots are fired on a cold winter day and echo across a frozen Foxcatcher Farms – a chilling climax to the film's slow burn.

-- Ryan Cormier, The News Journal. Facebook: @ryancormier. Twitter: @ryancormier. Instagram: @ryancormier.