Comedy, unlike drama, demands surprise. You can't quietly and thoughtfully enjoy a comedy.
Craig Mazin
This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.
'Chernobyl' is a human story. It's not a disaster movie. It's not about explosions. It's about people and truths and lies.
In my opinion, where comedy sequels tend to go bad is that they get sillier and lighter.
In the case of 'Chernobyl,' we're telling a story of a government that runs on lies the way cars run on fuel, and there are people who ultimately end up paying the price for those lies - and a certain culture of denial is in place, and the degradation of expertise is in place.
Bottom line: nothing of note happened when I was a youngster, really. I went to Princeton, which is where I met my wife.
I am eternally impressed and amazed by what directors do.
I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.
The strange rejection of the expert is mind boggling to me. When we're told that the worst word in politics is 'elite,' I have to wonder whom else are we supposed to be rooting for if not the most qualified and smart and informed people?
There are the movies that should never be made and resist being made until, through sheer brute force, somebody finally makes it. And then, there are the movies you can't stop from being made because they just want to be made.
We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It's within ourselves as well here in the West.
There's an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it's called 'Come and See.' Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.
I really hate people that spoil stuff by putting scripts online. I don't mind so much people that do movie spoilers when the movie is out in the theater. If you haven't gotten there the first weekend, it's on you to not read reviews or anything. But to put up screenplay reviews just kills me.
When I'm writing stuff, I need to watch the scene in my head, like a little movie, or else it just feels stupid. It just feels very written. There are things that actors do and faces they make and pauses they take and their rhythms. You need that.
I try my best to live by the principle that if you're going to be telling a story that you didn't live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.
I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.
The Soviet State had never made radiation something that was publicized in any way, shape, or form. In fact, the Soviet Union had experienced a number of serious accidents involving radiation since the 1950s and had covered it up a number of times.
If you organize your life around some political party's list of things you should believe, or an individual that you think is going to come and save you, you are disconnecting yourself from truth. And there is a price to pay.
I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that's required to be dumb in comedy.
There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!
'Law & Order' has the same plot every single episode.
Our culture reflects back what is true. It doesn't always reflect it back reliably. It can distort things.
When you look at the history of slavery in the United States, and you see the impact that 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' had, culture sometimes is the only way that we can put people's eyes on an emotional truth and make them feel why something has to change.
My personal belief is that there's not much value in showing things from the past that have no relevance to today or failing to connect some kind of dotted line to where we are today, because otherwise, it just becomes homework.
What compelled me about the story of Chernobyl more than anything else was something very universal. Yes, Chernobyl happened because in many ways, the Soviet system was deeply corrupt and evil, but the Soviet system did not arrive to us from some other planet. It was devised by humans.
I'm a big believer in the old-school way of releasing television. It's not to say that other platforms aren't making great shows, but there's something about just dumping it all down at once that I think, honestly, cheapens it a touch.
As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.
Governments are different, and philosophies are different, but when it comes down to it, a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher. A butcher is a butcher is a butcher. We are people. And we are far more common than we ever imagine.
What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.
Chernobyl happened in April of 1986. A few months earlier, in January 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. It did not have the impact on the environment and the amount of lives that Chernobyl did, but it was the result of the same exact problem: a failure of a lot of people and institutions over a long period of time.
My hope and my intention was that people would experience the tragedy of what Chernobyl was in every regard: a scientific tragedy, a political tragedy, an emotional and personal tragedy, all of that.
The planet is heating; the climate is changing. We know this. We have not just one scientist, or two, but thousands screaming this at us at the top of their lungs. And we have a government full of disinterested, stubborn people who are going to cling to their denial and their nonsense.
I'm a big believer in comedy writers. I've always defended the honor of all comedy writers. It's extremely difficult, but I've always felt that comedy writers far more easily can move toward drama than vice versa.
For me, I've been doing comedy for a long time, and I love it and have no regrets, but 'Chernobyl' expresses a side of me that is far more true to who I am on a day to day basis.
Of all the bad things Internet has done for us, one of the good things is exposing us to people that were our neighbors, and now we're at happy to ask questions about things that we were otherwise willing to just walk by and not notice.
At some point, and maybe it's a function of age, you've had enough of it. You start to slide in other directions. A lot of comedy writers begin to turn the dial. With me, it was a switch. Comedy off. Drama on.
When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.
Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.
Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.
If I don't know who I'm writing for, I make it up and pick somebody I'm writing for. That's really the only way to do it.
Sometimes critics disagree with the audience, and that's fine. I make movies for the audience. I guess I hope that the critics like it, but on the other hand, I just really want the audience to like it.
I grew up on lovely Staten Island, which is the forgotten borough of New York City.
Basically, the last 30 minutes of 'Goodfellas,' that was my neighborhood... literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that's what I thought being an adult was.
Women are suspicious of this male ritual of the bachelor party and are suspicious of what men do and say when they are not being watched by them.
