Dan Futterman took on one of his toughest, and ultimately most rewarding, roles of his career playing Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart.Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists in 2002. A Mighty Heart is the story of his wife Mariane’s efforts to discover who had taken him and her bid to bring him home. As Futterman points out, A Mighty Heart is also a very uplifting love story and a tribute to a man who sought the truth in his work as a journalist and valued honesty and diligence above all else.“It was intimidating (playing Daniel) for a couple of reasons,” says Futterman. “To describe Daniel as iconic isn’t quite right. He does have an iconic place in the culture, I feel. And he was an unusually open and interested person. “It was impossible to find someone to say a bad word about Daniel and that was not just out of respect, it was because this was someone who was fascinated by people and did not have a bad bone in his body and was turned on by so many things – travel, music, literature. He really did love life and his job and his family.”Futterman, 40, was enthusiastic about the project from the very first meeting he had with director Michael Winterbottom. “We talked for about an hour - about my films, his films, the script for A Mighty Heart and what the challenges were,” he recalls. “And the more you talk to Michael the more intoxicated you get with his take on things.”Based on Mariane Pearl’s book of the same name, A Mighty Heart tells the story of Mariane and Daniel’s intensely close and loving relationship and the tragic events that led to his murder. Mariane was heavily pregnant when Daniel was kidnapped in Karachi whilst working on a story about the shoe bomber Richard Reid.The night Daniel disappeared, Mariane, and her close friend Asra Nomani (played by Archie Panjabi) sensed immediately that he was in danger. Both journalists, they quickly scanned his e mails to find out where he was going and started their own investigation into his abduction at the same time as alerting the authorities.

Over the following days, Mariane remained at the centre of the search for her husband and was joined by an increasing number of security and intelligence agents from both Pakistan and America. This eclectic group of several nationalities – Mariane is French with Cuban ancestry and Asra is Indian - and faiths, drew closer as they pieced together fragments of information about what exactly had happened to Daniel.

Mariane herself worked closely with producer Brad Pitt and approved of the choice of Winterbottom as director and was delighted that Angelina Jolie, who has become a close friend, would portray her on screen. She also gave Futterman a much-welcomed seal of approval.

As he researched Daniel’s life, Futterman found that they shared similar backgrounds and that this gave him a bond with the man he portrayed.

”I was interested in finding the ways that I overlap with him and we do in a lot of ways,” he explains. “In terms of heritage and in terms of what part of the world we come from, we’re both Jewish, so a lot of that felt very natural to me.

“This could be a guy I went to school with or a cousin of mine. So familiarising myself in that way was important and comfortable. And then Mariane was extremely generous in saying that I was the right person to play Daniel, which was very kind of her.”

The more he discovered about Daniel Pearl, the more his admiration for him grew. “He was a very good man,” he says simply. “And I respect him enormously.”

Futterman was born in Silver Spring, Maryland and attended Columbia University. As well as an accomplished actor, he is also an acclaimed screenwriter.

He wrote the screenplay for Capote which was directed by Bennett Miller and starred Philip Seymour Hoffman in an Oscar winning performance. Both Miller and Hoffman are childhood friends of Futterman’s.

Futterman lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Anya Epstein, and their two daughters. This interview was conducted at the Cannes Film Festival where A Mighty Heart was given its world premier.

Q: How did this start for you?

A: I got a call from my agent saying there was some interest in me for the film and that I should read the script because Michael was going to be in town. I read it and it’s a terrific script in that (earlier) version, although Michael did some work on it to get it ready to shoot, and I read Mariane’s book. It’s a beautiful book and I thought this was a terrific adaptation of it and not an easy adaptation at all, there’s so much information to juggle and I was really impressed and moved by it. And so I sat down with Michael in LA and, you know, his auditions are not really auditions, they are conversations. We talked about an hour, about my films, his films, the script for A Mighty Heart and what the challenges were and the more you talk to Michael the more intoxicated you get with his take on things – and he knows that part of the world so well. It was something that I left the meeting really wanting to do and I was glad to hear that he had decided that would be all right. So then I had a meeting with Brad and Angie to finalise everything.

Q: Was it an intimidating role to take on?

A: Yes, it was. It was intimidating for a couple of reasons. To describe Daniel as iconic isn’t quite right he does have an iconic place in the culture, I feel. And he was an unusually open and interested person. It was impossible to find someone to say a bad word about Daniel and that was not just out of respect, it was because this was someone who was fascinated by people and did not have a bad bone in his body and was turned on by so many things – travel, music, literature. He really did love life and his job and his family. The fact that this was a Jewish guy from Encino and his favourite city in the world was Tehran spoke to me in a certain way. So it was a challenge for me to get past that – past looking up to him in a way.

Q: Because he’s a human being and you have to play him that way. You have to find the man?

A: That’s right. So I spoke to Mariane and his parents and that helped a lot.

Q: Was that hard?

A: Yes, it was. It was nothing that they did but I did feel that I was putting them in a very painful situation. They were incredibly generous and incredibly kind but I can only imagine how painful it was for them. So I was really aware of that and for some extent it was for Mariane as well. But I think she had processed the decision to get involved with this somewhat more than they had. And then talking to his colleagues and his friends, getting little details about his life that humanised him – his journalistic habits, bits about their life together. Just getting a sense of what it was about Mariane that he was attracted to. And you know, he was living half way around the world from where he grew up and he had married a woman who had grown up in such a different way to him and he loved that difference.

Q: Daniel was drawn to the differences in the world, wasn’t he? And to state the obvious, he was curious about the way the world works..

A: That’s right. He would get into a cab with someone in a city anywhere in the world and have a conversation. There’s one story where he borrows a belt from a cab driver he has just met and that kind of says something about him, too.

Q: Did you feel like you knew him?

A: In certain ways. I was interested in finding the ways that I overlap with him and we do in a lot of ways in terms of heritage and in terms of what part of the world we come from, we’re both Jewish, so a lot of that felt very natural to me. I mean this could be a guy I went to school with or a cousin of mine. So familiarising myself in that way was important and comfortable. And then Mariane was extremely generous in saying that I was the right person to play Daniel, which was very kind of her.

Q: Presumably the experience of making this film was vastly different than it was for the rest of the cast because you play Daniel when he’s still alive and mostly, during the happy times he spent with Mariane. Was it like being a different film almost?

A: That’s right. We had to go to all the different places because there were things that Michael wanted to shoot, you know me as Daniel in Karachi and Islamabad and here in France, in Poona, India, and in Bombay. So I had to appear in all the places because Michael needed shots of me. And then they would shoot their stuff (in the house) chronologically and I would drop in and out and when Angie needed a break from that we would go and do the scenes we had together – getting on a train, walking around town, going on a boat, whatever it was. It was kind of challenge because it was a series of little moments that we were trying to capture and it was up to Michael to figure out how put them together and drop them into the movie in the right places. We shot probably twenty times what ended up in the film and he was choosing those moments that spoke the most and fit the best. It’s a strange world to associate with this movie, I know, but remember this was prior to the tragic events and it was fun to do and they had a lot of fun together, they loved exploring and meeting people. And we had a good time shooting that stuff. He was obviously a very kind man, a nice man and very much in love with Mariane.

Q: What do you hope that people will take from the film?

A: I hope they get a couple of things. One is said explicitly in the movie and I hope they believe it, because in a way it’s unbelievable, and that is that Mariane does not carry anger in her heart towards anybody – not towards a religion, a group of people, a particular part of the world. She is as embracing of the world as she had ever been and had to make a decision to be that way and I think that is an incredible lesson to see played out so beautifully by Angie in the film. And also there’s this one line which I feel encapsulates that exchange between Irrfan Khan (as Captain) where he is interrogating Omar and he says ‘do you think you are a good Muslim?’ And it’s important to see that it’s a small percentage of people who bastardise a religion. And it’s true of every religion – the Jews do it, the Christians do it too. And I hope people take that away from it and not a fear.

Q: Michael clearly knows this part of the world very well. Does that help the film?

A: Yes and he clearly has a great affection for it. As crazy as it can be, you get that affection for it. It’s almost the simplest thing in the world but it’s hard to do but he doesn’t editorialise, it’s just the facts. Obviously they are arranged in a way that makes the story move but there is no speculation about things that happen – it’s all true. Certainly the dialogue is made up but all the scenes are true. Aside from the fact that it’s told from Mariane’s point of view, there’s no speculation about what was happening to Daniel while he was being held because people don’t really know and Michael didn’t want to go there and I think rightly so. And in a way it’s the simplest decision to just present it and I think in another hand there might have been some sensationalising of it and it doesn’t need that and shouldn’t have that, it would be wrong. But Mariane wouldn’t have wanted that to happen. She trusted Brad and Michael and rightly so.

Q: Do you think that the film has a potential for a big audience?

A: I certainly hope so and obviously Angelina’s involvement helps a great deal in that respect. She is a star, man. In the past couple of years, in my acting career a couple of these transcendent performances and one was Phil Hoffman (in Capote) and I was watching that from the sidelines and with Angie, I was right next to her. And it’s transformational and deeply felt and human. And restrained when it should be restrained, and I know how hard it is as an actor when you are doing an accent that’s not your own and yet she is as free as she could be. And to be able to improvise in a way that’s not your own is not easy. I was so impressed with her. Anything Michael wanted to do, she was like ‘yeah, sure..’ You couldn’t dare her to do anything she wouldn’t do, and that’s fun to be around. I hope people are drawn to it because of her and then appreciate the performance and the movie.

Q: You have this dual career now, as a screenwriter and an actor. How is that working out?

A: It’s going extremely well thank you. I’m very lucky. I’ve got healthy children and a great family, it’s going well.

Q: Do you have a new script you’ve written?

A: Yes, I’ve written it with my wife and it’s very different from this or Capote. It’s based on a romantic comedy and Sarah Jessica Parker has said she is going to do it with Lasse Hallstrom directing. We’ve been talking and we’ve all agreed and we’re just trying to find a window, finance, all of these things. It’s a juggling act but hopefully in the New Year we’ll get it going.

Q: How do you balance the two jobs?

A: Actually, I got hired to write a script while I was acting on this and that was hard; it was hard to write on days off from acting. I’m not very good at concentrating on two things at once but I had to do it because I had a deadline. It turned out OK and I just did a re-write of it, it’s a novel I had been hired to adapt.

Q: So in an ideal world you would keep them separate?

A: I think I would primarily write and act in some of the more interesting things that come along. With Capote it was something I got interested in and just wrote it. And then once I gave it to Ben (Miller, director) and Phil (Seymour Hoffman) then it all moved in a certain direction. I went to Junior High School with Ben and we met Phil when we were 16 doing theatre.

Q: And have obviously stayed in touch over the ups and downs of a career?

A: Yes, and there are many! Watching Phil get a lot of parts that I auditioned for (laughs). I really don’t mean to be facile, but I felt that Capote was a one off thing where you get to work with guys who are friends and the stars aligned. And I felt the same way about this in a very different role, that people are doing it for the right reasons and that it was lifted because of that. I feel really fortunate.

Q: What’s next?

A: I don’t know. I’m going to turn in this re-write and see. There are some fantasy novels by Garth Nix that I’m interested in developing. That could be fun.