♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
May. 12th, 2019 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
0denseVALERY LEGASOV: What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies... then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?
sooo I let youtube run while I was doing some chores, and ended up on this BTS/dev interview between the writer for a new series and Peter from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and I ended up hooked:
00:30: PETER SAGAL: The intent here is to talk with Craig about where the show came from, why he created it, the experience of making it, and how closely the docudrama ... how closely it tracks real history, where it differs and why, and ultimately, why it was made at this time and place?
CRAIG MAZIN: Yeah, and of those many wonderful reasons to do this, the one that was most important to me from the jump was a chance to set the record straight about what we do that is very accurate to history, what we do that is a little bit sideways to it, and what we do to compress or change, in no small part because the show is essentially about the cost of lies.
01:25: PETER: Right.
CRAIG: The danger of narrative and I didn't want us to... I guess, miss a chance for transparency if we had one. So I'd never actually heard this kind of thing before, in relation to dramatic re-tellings of history. So, I'm kind of curious to see how it all works, if people are horrified by this, or enlightened, I don't know.
PETER: I think they'll definitely be horrified, speaking as someone who just recently saw the miniseries. What else happens, I think, is up to them.
PETER: This episode of The Chernobyl Podcast concerns episode oneof the Chernobyl miniseries, titled "1:23:45," which of course was the reading on the clock when the explosion at Chernobyl happened. Let's start, then, with the beginning. You were, I'm guessing, around 20 or so in 1986 when this all happened? Maybe a little younger?
CRAIG: I was younger. I was 15.
PETER: Fifteen?
CRAIG: Yeah. I was 15 years old. I remember it. I don't remember it quite as starkly as I remember the incident that occurred about three months earlier, which was the Challenger disaster.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: But I definitely remember that it happened, I remember that the entire world seemed concerned. It wasn't simply a local thing. And beyond that, it sort of devolved fairly quickly into a very simple notion: Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant, and it blew up. That's it.
PETER: Right. I was a little older then, and what do I remember? I remember that Chernobyl blew up. It was bad, but it ended up being okay, and the Soviets lied about it.
CRAIG: That's exactly right. And it's a bit of a shame that so much of the takeaway from that is that the Soviets lied and the Soviets created this system that would have led to that - All which is true, and all of which is a large part of the story that we tell.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: Because it's an important part. What we did not get on our side of the news was how... I like to say, only - this could've only happened in the Soviet Union. Only the Soviet Union could've solved this problem. What the Soviet citizenry did to sacrifice and solve was nothing short of remarkable. And we in the West, I don't think, had any sense of how multi-layered this disaster was and how, in many ways, the explosion was really just the beginning of a series of events that are increasingly hard to believe.
PETER: Well, yes. A lot of this podcast - just as a spoiler alert - is going to be me saying to Craig, "Really?" And he'll say, "Yes! And it was even weirder presumably."
CRAIG: In a number of cases.
PETER: But let's start here. So, this is what we knew about Chernobyl, it's what you know, it happened in your childhood, it happened in my young adulthood, we remember this, it happened, it went away, then the Soviet Union fell a few years later, and we just forgot about it. If you had asked me, before I started watching this series, what I knew about Chernobyl, I'd say, "Yeah, okay. That happened, and I know that there's a big concrete sarcophagus over it, and nobody can go near it. And it's kind of cool," I might've said, "because people have been removed from the area around it, so there's been this weird kind of renaissance of nature, which is kind of nifty." And I've seen, you know, film of, like, deer leaping about. It's kind of nice. So, I would've - Before this began, I would've said that was a problem that happened 30 years ago, and it's all over, and there's really no problem when we kind of have this cool abandoned city, which is fun.
CRAIG: Yeah.
PETER: Assuming that that's where you were before you started your exploration of the project, what started you on this exploration?
CRAIG: I knew that Chernobyl exploded, but I didn't know why! And it struck me as such an odd lapse because if you say to people, "What happened to the Titanic?" They'll tell you it sank. And if you say, "How?" They'll tell you, "Iceberg." Everybody knows it hit an iceberg. Nobody seemed to know offhand why and how Chernobyl blew up. So I just began to read. You know, one of those lovely evenings at home where you just start interneting yourself into a coma. And I started reading, and two things jumped out. And both of those things emerge in episode one, one of which emerges immediately. The first thing is that the night of the explosion, they were running a safety test. That's the kind of fact that any writer will stop and say, "Oh." Okay. That is deeply ironic. In the most disturbing of ways.
PETER: Why?
CRAIG: Well... if you're running a safety test, and the result of the safety test is the least safe thing that could've ever possibly happened, you start to wonder what gap between intention and result existed here? How is that even possible? I can understand if you're, you know... In every submarine movie, there's the hull crush depth scene, you know? The whole point is to take this thing down and see how much it can take. All right, well, if it collapses in that scene, I get it. But if you're trying to just see - Like, if you're taking your car out for a spin and you've gotten to the section where it's not acceleration, it's braking distance, how does that make the car explode? What is going on there? So I found that shocking.
CRAIG: And the second fact that grabbed me was that the man that was, in many respects, put in charge of the clean up and the general - I call it a war against the atom - post-explosion, was an Academician named Valery Legasov. And Valery Legasov commits suicide two years to the day after the explosion.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: And that, of course, immediately gets me wondering... why?
01:25: PETER: Right.
CRAIG: The danger of narrative and I didn't want us to... I guess, miss a chance for transparency if we had one. So I'd never actually heard this kind of thing before, in relation to dramatic re-tellings of history. So, I'm kind of curious to see how it all works, if people are horrified by this, or enlightened, I don't know.
PETER: I think they'll definitely be horrified, speaking as someone who just recently saw the miniseries. What else happens, I think, is up to them.
PETER: This episode of The Chernobyl Podcast concerns episode oneof the Chernobyl miniseries, titled "1:23:45," which of course was the reading on the clock when the explosion at Chernobyl happened. Let's start, then, with the beginning. You were, I'm guessing, around 20 or so in 1986 when this all happened? Maybe a little younger?
CRAIG: I was younger. I was 15.
PETER: Fifteen?
CRAIG: Yeah. I was 15 years old. I remember it. I don't remember it quite as starkly as I remember the incident that occurred about three months earlier, which was the Challenger disaster.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: But I definitely remember that it happened, I remember that the entire world seemed concerned. It wasn't simply a local thing. And beyond that, it sort of devolved fairly quickly into a very simple notion: Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant, and it blew up. That's it.
PETER: Right. I was a little older then, and what do I remember? I remember that Chernobyl blew up. It was bad, but it ended up being okay, and the Soviets lied about it.
CRAIG: That's exactly right. And it's a bit of a shame that so much of the takeaway from that is that the Soviets lied and the Soviets created this system that would have led to that - All which is true, and all of which is a large part of the story that we tell.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: Because it's an important part. What we did not get on our side of the news was how... I like to say, only - this could've only happened in the Soviet Union. Only the Soviet Union could've solved this problem. What the Soviet citizenry did to sacrifice and solve was nothing short of remarkable. And we in the West, I don't think, had any sense of how multi-layered this disaster was and how, in many ways, the explosion was really just the beginning of a series of events that are increasingly hard to believe.
PETER: Well, yes. A lot of this podcast - just as a spoiler alert - is going to be me saying to Craig, "Really?" And he'll say, "Yes! And it was even weirder presumably."
CRAIG: In a number of cases.
PETER: But let's start here. So, this is what we knew about Chernobyl, it's what you know, it happened in your childhood, it happened in my young adulthood, we remember this, it happened, it went away, then the Soviet Union fell a few years later, and we just forgot about it. If you had asked me, before I started watching this series, what I knew about Chernobyl, I'd say, "Yeah, okay. That happened, and I know that there's a big concrete sarcophagus over it, and nobody can go near it. And it's kind of cool," I might've said, "because people have been removed from the area around it, so there's been this weird kind of renaissance of nature, which is kind of nifty." And I've seen, you know, film of, like, deer leaping about. It's kind of nice. So, I would've - Before this began, I would've said that was a problem that happened 30 years ago, and it's all over, and there's really no problem when we kind of have this cool abandoned city, which is fun.
CRAIG: Yeah.
PETER: Assuming that that's where you were before you started your exploration of the project, what started you on this exploration?
CRAIG: I knew that Chernobyl exploded, but I didn't know why! And it struck me as such an odd lapse because if you say to people, "What happened to the Titanic?" They'll tell you it sank. And if you say, "How?" They'll tell you, "Iceberg." Everybody knows it hit an iceberg. Nobody seemed to know offhand why and how Chernobyl blew up. So I just began to read. You know, one of those lovely evenings at home where you just start interneting yourself into a coma. And I started reading, and two things jumped out. And both of those things emerge in episode one, one of which emerges immediately. The first thing is that the night of the explosion, they were running a safety test. That's the kind of fact that any writer will stop and say, "Oh." Okay. That is deeply ironic. In the most disturbing of ways.
PETER: Why?
CRAIG: Well... if you're running a safety test, and the result of the safety test is the least safe thing that could've ever possibly happened, you start to wonder what gap between intention and result existed here? How is that even possible? I can understand if you're, you know... In every submarine movie, there's the hull crush depth scene, you know? The whole point is to take this thing down and see how much it can take. All right, well, if it collapses in that scene, I get it. But if you're trying to just see - Like, if you're taking your car out for a spin and you've gotten to the section where it's not acceleration, it's braking distance, how does that make the car explode? What is going on there? So I found that shocking.
CRAIG: And the second fact that grabbed me was that the man that was, in many respects, put in charge of the clean up and the general - I call it a war against the atom - post-explosion, was an Academician named Valery Legasov. And Valery Legasov commits suicide two years to the day after the explosion.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: And that, of course, immediately gets me wondering... why?
07:03: PETER: So, when you were pitching this idea to HBO and Sky, how were you presenting it as something that people would want to-- and even need to-- watch?
CRAIG: The way I like to think of it is, what is the relevance to everyone?
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: I mean, ultimately, we can tell any particular story, but there needs to be some sort of universal relevance or it just becomes a story in and of itself about the event, which... At that point, I refer to those things as homework. I'm not interested in making homework for people. The reason that I was compelled to write about Chernobyl was... I mean, in part because it was filling in these large gaps of a story that we all knew and yet didn't know, but primarily... it's because it is a story about the cost of lies. This is the first line of the whole show, and this is the theme that we are going to continue with as people watch these episodes: that when people choose to lie, and when people choose to believe the lie and when everyone engages in a very... kind of passive conspiracy to promote the lie over the truth, we can get away with it for a very long time, but the truth just doesn't care. And it will get you in the end. And the people that suffer, ultimately, are not the people that are telling the lie.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: I mean, ultimately, we can tell any particular story, but there needs to be some sort of universal relevance or it just becomes a story in and of itself about the event, which... At that point, I refer to those things as homework. I'm not interested in making homework for people. The reason that I was compelled to write about Chernobyl was... I mean, in part because it was filling in these large gaps of a story that we all knew and yet didn't know, but primarily... it's because it is a story about the cost of lies. This is the first line of the whole show, and this is the theme that we are going to continue with as people watch these episodes: that when people choose to lie, and when people choose to believe the lie and when everyone engages in a very... kind of passive conspiracy to promote the lie over the truth, we can get away with it for a very long time, but the truth just doesn't care. And it will get you in the end. And the people that suffer, ultimately, are not the people that are telling the lie.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: It's everyone else. And that is where we start to see real truth: in the behavior of human beings who are motivated to save their fellow men, their fellow women, their loved ones, that's where truth is. And so, for me - and this, by the way, was before our entire planet seemed to become engulfed in a war on truth - for me, this was an important kind of story to tell about the value of truth versus narrative.
CRAIG: It's everyone else. And that is where we start to see real truth: in the behavior of human beings who are motivated to save their fellow men, their fellow women, their loved ones, that's where truth is. And so, for me - and this, by the way, was before our entire planet seemed to become engulfed in a war on truth - for me, this was an important kind of story to tell about the value of truth versus narrative.
PETER: Right.
CRAIG: Which because we are, I think... as humans, we are so susceptible to storytelling. It's why we tell stories. We like them. Stories are sometimes very good ways of conveying interesting truths and facts... but, just as simply, stories can be weaponized against us to teach us and tell us anything. So, of course, I choose narrative to tell an anti-narrative story, but that's why I think this is relevant now. Maybe more relevant now - In fact, yes. Definitely more relevant now than it was when I started writing it.
PETER: Which was - and I think we should just point this out - before the 2016 elections.
CRAIG: Which because we are, I think... as humans, we are so susceptible to storytelling. It's why we tell stories. We like them. Stories are sometimes very good ways of conveying interesting truths and facts... but, just as simply, stories can be weaponized against us to teach us and tell us anything. So, of course, I choose narrative to tell an anti-narrative story, but that's why I think this is relevant now. Maybe more relevant now - In fact, yes. Definitely more relevant now than it was when I started writing it.
PETER: Which was - and I think we should just point this out - before the 2016 elections.
CRAIG: Yes, it was. I think I started in 2015 on the writing, yeah.
PETER: Yeah, because I will say, speaking for myself, it's impossible to watch this miniseries with its tale of government malfeasance and lies and bureaucratic... let's just say, incentives....
CRAIG: Mm-hmm.
PETER: ...taking the place of, shall we say, other motives without thinking about what's going on in America and across the world today.
PETER: Yeah, because I will say, speaking for myself, it's impossible to watch this miniseries with its tale of government malfeasance and lies and bureaucratic... let's just say, incentives....
CRAIG: Mm-hmm.
PETER: ...taking the place of, shall we say, other motives without thinking about what's going on in America and across the world today.
and anyway I don't have HBO so I'm not gonna end up getting to actually watch this, but wow, if this is what the writer means to be talking about, I'm so into this
no subject
Date: 2019-05-14 04:21 am (UTC)yeah that's how I feel! if it happens to float my way, I'll have an eye out for it