Graham Moore on Making His Directorial Debut and Working With Mark Rylance on ‘The Outfit’

variety.com:

K.J. Yossman “I would not have chosen to direct my first film in the middle of a global pandemic,” Graham Moore said wryly of his move from scribe to auteur.In 2015, the novelist and screenwriter won an Academy Award for his adaptation “The Imitation Game,” in which Benedict Cumberbatch played World War II codebreaker Alan Turing.

Now, Moore makes his directorial debut with “The Outfit,” which gets its world premiere as a Berlinale Special Gala on Feb 14.The feature, which stars Mark Rylance as a Savile Row tailor who finds himself embroiled in a mobster turf war in 1950s Chicago, was in part inspired by Moore’s grandfather, a doctor.

He was “the kindest, most gentle man I’ve ever known in my life,” said Moore, which made it all the more surprising when he found out that one of his grandfather’s patients was the infamous mobster Jerry Catena. “I’d always been interested in that idea,” said Moore. “What do you tell yourself if you’re a decent person working in the service of someone not so decent at all?” When “The Outfit” co-writer Jonathan McClain suggested he and Moore work on a project about Savile Row — a globally renowned center of men’s tailoring in London — the duo knew they had the makings of a character but they were still lacking a story.

It wasn’t until they stumbled across a single sentence in a reference book that said the first bug in the history of the FBI was planted in a tailor’s shop in Chicago in 1956 that “it instantly all connected,” Moore recalled. “We said, ‘Oh that’s a story.