![Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, Treat Williams as Bill Paley in FEUD: Capote Vs. The Swans](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/feud_307_20240606_high_res_still.00036976-H-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
The penultimate episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans sees Babe Paley, the New York high-society socialite played by Naomi Watts, succumb to cancer and take her dying breath on her bed, estranged from friend Truman Capote (Tom Hollander). The shot of Paley’s death is a rare moment of inertness for the show, a deliberate decision from episode seven’s (titled “Beautiful Babe”) director Jennifer Lynch.
“It’s such a pivotal moment in the show,” she says. “There was so much in the series that had movement, elegance, a flair and a pace. What I really wanted to capture in Babe dying was the stillness, that the only thing moving in that room was her breath and that she was tiny in that large bed.”
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Lynch insisted the camera remain still: “There was some pushback. The DP was concerned. And I said, ‘This is not about releasing the audience into a drifting away into heaven. This is a static, horrifying, sad moment.’ ” The position of the mourners at her bedside — her children in chairs opposite the foot of the bed and husband Bill Paley (Treat Williams) seated at her side — was also a calculated choreography: “The staging tells me about her family and about the distance between them all.”
The fragile moment was captured under a time crunch — Lynch recalls the crew had “less than 90 minutes to set up all of it.” A saturated blue palette is a nod to “the dance between worlds, the living and the dead.”
This story first appeared in a June standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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