The Watch - Patrick Radden Keefe on Bringing 'Say Nothing' From the Page to Screen

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Chris talks about the news that 'X-Men' director Simon Kinberg has been tapped to write and produce a new ‘Star Wars’ trilogy and questions whether or not this project will ever come to fruition, or just join the other ‘Star Wars’ projects that Disney announced and subsequently canned (1:00). He is then joined by author Patrick Radden Keefe to talk about adapting his book 'Say Nothing,' which delves into the troubles in Northern Ireland, as a series for FX (16:36) and the challenges that come with translating such a dense historical time period to the screen (29:05). Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Patrick Radden Keefe Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm still recording in England, but without Andy, it's a special show today because the watch has Patrick Raddenkeef, the author of Say Nothing. On the show today, we chatted about his new series that he is a part of based on his book on FX, Say Nothing, about the Troubles and a murder mystery at the heart of the Troubles that takes place over the course. of several decades. It's an excellent, excellent series that's dropping as a binge on FX on Hulu. So you can check that out, obviously. We're going to talk a little bit broadly in the beginning here about the first couple of episodes, but I won't do any spoilers because people are going to watch this at their own pace. I encourage them to do so, though. This is one of my 10 best shows of the year. I think it's phenomenal execution of a very dense, sprawling piece of nonfiction history. Before we get into that, I just wanted to do a little bit, and by the time that you

guys hear this, so this is being recorded Wednesday, or sorry, Friday, the previous week. So when you hear this on Thursday, you may think to yourself, this has been dispelled or disputed or whatever. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the announcement of a new Star Wars series coming from Simon Kinberg. And it really isn't an evaluation on whether or not this will be a good story or anything like that, because who knows, right? Like we've gotten these Star Wars series. announcements over the years about Ryan Johnson doing his trilogy or Benny Off and Weiss are going to do a trilogy or Patty Jenkins is going to do a Rogue Squadron movie or Tycho Waititi is going to do a movie or Kevin Feige is going to do a movie and all these things are kicking around and it seems

like Star Wars outside of the Faloni stuff and obviously our beloved and or that's going to be concluding next season next year outside of those things like Star Wars is more about announcements than it is about product and I think that that that is probably, I'm arguing against my own interests here when I say, I think we have a little bit of a hype problem when it comes to Star Wars specifically, but maybe the way we gear up for major movie and television blockbuster releases, because this was announced with some fanfare this week that I'm recording, that Kimberg is going to come in, that he's going to do a trilogy of movies, there's been some reporting on deadline, that this would be a continuation of the

Skywalker saga, which has been argued back about and forth. And, you know, there's also the Stephen Knight's scripts that was supposed to be the continuing Ray movie. So there's lots of different things, lots of pots on the stove right now in terms of Star Wars stuff and in terms of Lucasfilm. But we're coming out of like a very long era where it seems more important to win the day with an announcement than it does to just get the movie dialed. And I think that you're starting to see a long-term, like, effect of people being fatigued by false promises, not, like, in this kind of, like, you betrayed me, Kathy Kennedy way, but in a kind of like, how about you show me the money at a certain point?

Like, you have to come through with a movie. You don't have to promise a trilogy. You don't have to set it up where we're getting told this director or these writers are going to be working on something for the next decade. You can just say, like, you know, maybe when cameras are rolling, or maybe when you've got the entire cast locked and the studios are booked and you're coming to England to shoot it, that seems to be maybe a wiser way of doing this because I think at this point, with the amount of behind the scenes, I mean, there are almost more behind the scenes exposés about what's going on with Star Wars and there are Star Wars films at this point. And that's probably not a great place to be. I think that we, as people who talk about movies and TVs, certainly appreciate the content. We appreciate the rumors and the innuendo and the gossip and stuff like that.

And it makes for fun conversation. But I'd much rather talk about a new movie or a new TV show. And I'd much rather Lucasfilm was trying to innovate this franchise, if we're going to keep making it, innovated in the way that they did with a show like Andor, then they would just keep, you know, running through the same kind of hype cycle that they have been for the last couple of years. Yeah, I get it.

I get that there is like a shareholder interest in promising, you know, three movies over the course of the next eight or nine years, that there's a reason to be invested in this kind of IP. I understand why this happens. And I think also, even if there wasn't an official Disney announcement about signing up Kimberg or about signing Damon Lindeloff and then having Stephen Knight and then having all these things that happen

with these projects. I think they would probably leak out and I think we'd probably talk about them in much the same way, but there's something a little bit disingenuous about it being like this official announcement that this is happening and then we kind of like are slipping on,

it's the same Charlie Brown football thing over and over again. And I, for one, I will not be the Justin Tucker in this situation. I no longer will kick the football. I'm lying. I mean, obviously I'm talking about it now, but I do think that there's something that has diminishing returns on the film that it's supposed to be promoting. And if you keep telling people that writer X has got a dynamite idea for another trilogy of films, you could

barely get through the first trilogy of sequels that you tried. You know, in retrospect, those movies seem like the model of stability now, even though Force Awakens. was this sort of rewritten scripts from, like it included versions of different scripts patched together, even though you had what you have with the final film, which just felt like this bizarre, gothic kind of reconfiguration of the story to atone for, or, you know, retcon what Ryan Johnson did,

but the second film, the second sequel. And it just is like, outside of the Faloni stuff, which I find pretty inert, but at least like obviously a very stable hand guiding it, you know, the films themselves have been all over the place. Or at least, you know, that's the films that we've seen have been all over the place. I liked Rogue One a lot.

In retrospect, solo even seems like a pretty decent movie compared to like the non-existent stuff that never came out or the TV versions that we've gotten that have just felt like very, very volume core to me and very just sort of like standing in front of projected background and faithfully delivering this philoni dialogue about whatever, the Republic. I don't know if I care about the Republic.

I do still care about Star Wars, but I'm more interested in how we're delivering news these days about these massive franchises and whether or not there's any point, because you can just look online, fans don't care. They're almost actively hostile towards this idea of, oh, hey, don't worry, we've got it. It's going to be another trilogy.

Simon Kimberg might make three movies that are better than, you know, a new hope, Empire strikes back and Return of the Jedi. Like, I mean, who knows? But, like, the way in which we're presenting these projects seems to be a little bit faulty. Let me talk to you about a project that I don't find much fault in, and that's say nothing on FX.

It's based on Patrick Radinkeef's 2018 nonfiction masterpiece. Highly recommend people read it. That's one part social history, one part kind of family story, and one part murder mystery. And the series is created by Joshua Zettimer, who's had a fine, if not necessarily, like you wouldn't necessarily think he had say nothing in him over the course of his career, but he does an excellent job marshalling this project,

which could easily have gone wrong because I think you could be, it's a real achievement of tone to make an entertaining series about such a kind of tragic social event and military event in the troubles. I think one of the reasons why they achieve that is they have this story engine and say nothing that is essentially a murder mystery. But that over the first few episodes, we only get little breadcrumbs about that. It's told in flashback. It's told in recollection by some of the narrators that are being interviewed way in 2001, way after the events.

And so as the series goes on, it's starting to become a bigger issue. You can kind of see where things are going. but in the beginning, it's really just immersing you in this world. The series zeroes in on several main characters from Radin' Keith's sprawling book, Brendan Hughes, who is played by honestly like a very hot and upcoming actor in Anthony Boyle, who was recently, he played John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt on Apple. He played Harry Crosby, who kind of stole Masters of the Air from Austin Butler and Calm Turner with no disrespect to those guys, but Harry Crosby was the most,

kind of animated, interesting POV character on Masters of the Air. People stuck with it. This Brennan Hughes character does a lot of the dirty work for the IRA. Jerry Adams is also a major character in the show, who a lot of people know as the public face and leader of Sinn Féin for more than 30 years. But really the stars of the series are these two sisters, Dolores and Marion Price, who are our kind of way into the conflict.

I think the central challenge when you're trying to bring a big historical nonfiction work or whenever you're trying to combine genre with history, like a good example of this would be narcos, which I love, but I can understand why people might watch narcos and be like, this is kind of like a Wikipedia

entry about the drug war is balancing the sense of time and place and political and social context and the granular detail on research that goes into making something like this and being true to the history and the times, balancing that with compelling characters and that story engine that I was talking about

that keeps you coming back for episode after episode of a series. And you don't adapt to say nothing to throw stuff out. You know, this is not some super popular mass market paperback. This is a work of really, really astonishing research and journalism by Radin Keef. So you want all the Stivis flats and the way that Belfast is divided and getting south of the border to bring contraband back across the border. You want all of the detail about how the IRA was evolving from the 50s through the 70s and on. And to do that, you know, episodic television is an incredible vehicle for that.

But you can easily get over your skis with telling people about like this is way things were. this is what this person was doing politically. Instead, they really center it on these really, really amazing performances and incredible characters. It has this tragic and fascinating mystery plot at the heart of it about the disappearance of a Northern Irish woman named Jim McConville. But it doesn't turn into a whodunit. It basically has this air of tragedy about it because you understand where the criminals, not criminals, where the, you understand where Gene is going to meet her end way before she does. Because you understand the headwinds that are blowing.

You understand the way in which the IRA is starting to operate through Belfast in this increasingly, I guess you would want to say absolutist way. So that it has this air of inevitability. It has this air of this fate, this destiny that's almost, you know, Greek beyond being Irish. It's also a story about two sisters. who become firebrand Irish Republican Army soldiers and like I said about the evolution of the army through decades and the brutal response of the British government

and the British military that occupied Northern Ireland at the time and the face of that response is Rory Keneer's performance is Frank Kitson, which is incredible. Speaking broadly about the first three episodes and I think Andy and I will go into way more detail about this next week. At some point the first episode of The Cause, you know, it very much sets up the world and introduces us to a broad spectrum of characters.

and it can be hard to process all the names and places and time periods. The series jumps from like the 50s to the 70s to 2001. And it's using this audio history project featuring interviews with several major characters later in life as a framing device. So you have to really get down into your stance to understand what this show is doing on this first episode. But once it does and once you do, it just starts flying. The second episode is one of my favorite episodes of TV this year. and it's basically a thriller

after the Young Price sisters experienced violence at the hands of Protestant loyalists and police officers during a peace march they become radicalized and join Jerry Adams and Brennan Hughes's

new guerrilla vision for the IRA. They rob banks to pay for weapons to kill British soldiers which brings on more violence and more torture and more restrictive rules and we learn about

Belfast as an urban battlefield where every idling car is a threat and every home is a possible safe house. By the time we arrive at the third episode when Mary Naï takes over from Michael Lennox. Michael Lennox directed all Dairy Girls and obviously has a real feel for the area. Mary Naï brings like this very handheld, intimate style to the show. And I enjoy both equally.

I think they both did wonderful things with this. And one of the things I love about this new era of television where we get all these different directors jumping in is you can have multiple visual ideas throughout the series. The cast certainly deserves a lot of credit here. Lola Petacru is in many ways the point of view character as Dolores and she reflects a beautiful passion for her character's cause as well as some ambivalence

about the methodology she's asked to adopt. Special shout out to Maxine Peek who is also excellent as the older Dolores who serves as a kind of narrator for the series. I also really liked Hazel Doob as Dolores Stoic sister Marion.

Boyle, I mentioned for some kind of stardom, you can see why. Every time he bust through, door to make a joke or give a warning. The camera kind of gravitates to him. And I also love Josh Feinan as Jerry Adams, who I remember almost as more of like a spectral presence in the book, but he brings this political figure to life. And he shows us the man before he became the leader of Schimfein. Highly, highly recommended. I won't waste any more of your time because we want to hear from Patrick Radin-Keefe, who wrote Say Nothing. It was published in 2018, like I said.

Highly recommend you check it out. I find this to be something where even though I've read the book, and even though it's doing a faithful adaptation of the book, I don't find this to be repetitive at all. Or, you know, like, oh, I know what's going to happen. So then she's going to do this. I think this series brings the book to life, which is the highest compliment I can pay it. Let's get into my interview with Patrick Radankeef.

Andy and I will be back in some capacity in the United States next week. I hope everybody has a great weekend and enjoys say nothing. The playoffs are here, and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul Predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, wishes, and misses. Predict the spread, the total points, and even the game winner. Sign up for Fandual Predicts and predict it from the couch. Offered by Fandual Prediction Markets LLC, a registered futures commission merchant.

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millions of items delivered fast. Available in select areas, terms apply. Patrick Radinkeef, thank you so much for joining the watch. Andy and I have been talking about. about your work, I think on and off for years now, and I'm such a huge admirer of what you've done over the years and especially of Say Nothing, which is one of my favorite books in recent memory. So it's really exciting to have you on. And I guess I want to ask you a little bit about your relationship to TV, specifically Say Nothing, the new FX series. What kind of role as an executive producer? Like, how did you work on the show? What was your kind of day-to-day with the show? So this was an unusual one for me in the sense that I have, you know, I've had a lot of things adapted over the years.

I've been involved as an executive producer and a consulting producer on various things. I'd never had this kind of role where I was really in the sandbox from the outset. And that was largely thanks to Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, the producers who, when they optioned the book, I never showed the book to, you know, more broadly, we never shopped the book. they were the only producers I talked to because I had known them for a long time I really admired their work I particularly admired the people versus OJ Simpson Yeah

And so when we first started talking about doing something They basically said, listen, you would come along as a partner with us It wouldn't be a situation where you gave us the rights And we came back with a TV show You'd be there with us every step of the way And I was, it took five years And so were you involved in selecting the showrunner

Or was it down to casting? Were you on set? Tell me a little bit about what the kind of steps were. It was all the above. So I helped pick the showrunner, Josh Zedimer, who, funnily enough, he and I share a screenwriting agent at UTA. And so I had been aware of his work for years. There's an early script that he wrote that never got made called The Infiltritor, which is actually about the IRA. Oh.

And I had read that script. And so I was involved in that decision. But then casting, you know, we worked with Nina Gold, who's this incredible casting director in London, who does The Crown and Game of Thirteen. Thrones and is just amazing. And so we were working with her very closely. I mean, truly like locations. I was on set for big chunks of the nine months shoot, including kind of, you know, several months continuously over one summer when I moved my family to the UK. So it was, it was pretty involved, right? You know, right down to the to the edits over recent months.

Is there a part of the process that you really loved? And was there a part of the process that you found a little bit more tedious than you expected because I know people like I mean there's a lot of waiting It's a lot of waiting for sure yeah I mean it's funny I I mean I think just broadly one of the things that's so so strange I listen to a great there's a terrific podcast uh Ian McEwen was a guest on the Adam Buxton podcast which is okay is a wonderful podcast in the UK and he talked about his work on movies over the years and he's talked about how he said you know when you're a novelist It's like you control this little patch of turf, but you're God. You're the absolute sovereign. And when you are working on a movie, it's like you're a minor lieutenant colonel in this huge army.

So some of it for me was just the idea of kind of having to sacrifice control, a measure of control, right? To be a voice in the room, but by no means the ultimate arbiter on a lot of this stuff. I loved casting. I had so much fun watching these different tapes. And some of this was that I had lived with these characters for solo. long that to see, you know, with this young actor from Liverpool, Josh Finean, who kind of came out of nowhere, at least for me, I had never seen him in anything before. Me neither, yeah. And he plays young Jerry Adams so brilliantly. And that was a thing where we just saw a million audition tapes

and his just kind of jumped out. So that, that process was amazing. And watching Nina Gold kind of do what she does and put together this sprawling cast with more than 200 speaking parts was incredible. I loved finding locations. Yeah. And the kind of, you know, working with a production designer and sort of building that physical world. And then we had a bunch of different directors on the show. And it was incredible to get to watch them work up close. They're different styles, you know, the way they use the camera, the way they work with the actors, all of that. I found just thrill.

I mean, an education. It was like going to film school, but also just thrilling. Yeah, you know, I wanted to ask a little bit about the transition. And you mentioned, you know, you live with these characters. For a novelist, I imagine, you know, you're living with these characters in your brain and they're your creation. And maybe you have a degree of a protective instinct for those characters and to some extent. You are also this sort of, I don't know, almost like a guardian or, you know, a treasurer of history where you're like, I actually, there's a real Brendan Hughes and there was a real Jerry Adams and Dolores. And so when you're casting, I wonder if it takes on this extra element if it's not only trying,

trying to honor the creative intention of your work, but also the historical accuracy of who these people were. Yeah, it's a great way of putting it. I did think of myself as having a kind of custodial role in the sense that I'm protecting the book and I'm kind of protecting the truth of this, the true story. But having said that, I guess the one way I would caveat that is to say that a really loyal, really faithful adaptation of the book. would be a bad show that nobody wants to watch. And I, in part because I've worked as a screenwriter, I, you know, I had some kind of familiarity with the ways in which you need to create something that is its own work of art. That is, it exists separately and on separate terms from the source material.

And so, you know, with Josh and the writers and the directors and the actors, I mean, everybody's bringing things into the brew that are different and new. and I felt as though I had to be, I had to on the one hand, be sort of controlling in the sense that there were places where I would say, no, this didn't happen, and it wouldn't happen. Like, it's a kind of license that doesn't fit.

It's cheating. But then on the other hand, be kind of prepared to say, this is a drama. It's a drama based on a true story. It's a different kind of creature. And I do think that this gets overblown. Every time you get a new season of the Crown,

this happens, right? Where there's a lot of pearl clutching. and all these people saying, but it didn't happen that way. You know, John Major never had that conversation. And to me, it's a little silly. I think we know. I think we understand that when you watch a drama on television, there is some license being taken.

The issue for me is, like, is it a kind of credible license? Is it a justifiable license? Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why I love Say Nothing, the book and you're writing in general, is this background narrator who doesn't put his thumb on the scales one way or the other about how I'm supposed to be. feel about certain people, not even in a moral way, as much as I'm able to look at somebody like Kitson, you know, who is involved in some pretty horrific stuff over the course of his life.

And you contextualize that so well, both his work in Kenya and in Ireland and in Northern Ireland. And I just, you know, watching Rory Keneer bring that character to life. I'm like, God, you know, he's so good. this guy is so bad but like I'm watching and I'm just like there's something about putting something on screen and having great actors play it that then it kind of escapes containment

and you can't really control how people are going to feel about it and I even felt that way watching the second episode as like the Brendan Ambush becomes this like yeah it's an urban it's a thriller I mean this is this is like gripping TV you know your book says this huge thing But like on page to page, I think the show really captures the electricity that that book generates so much.

I mean, are you a fan? I mean, you're obviously a fan of genre, genre movie making and TV. But like, when it comes to those set pieces, what kind of reaction did you have when you first started seeing some of those things come to life that you had just written about? Yeah, it was hugely thrilling. I mean, I am a fan of genre. And when I'm writing nonfiction, I'm trying to use the whole toolkit of, you know, suspense and set pieces and kind of conflict and character. I want these books to read in a very dramatic way, but you're completely right that the materials that you're working with when it comes to television and film have a sort of visceral power that's just different, right? So, you know, you have to, first of all, kind of subtract a lot of what's in the book.

It's a lot less cerebral. It's a lot less kind of analytical, let us, almost like a lawyer would, like look at the evidence and sift through it. You have to kind of pick the stories that you're telling. But then the amazing thing about the series is that it can do all these things in a way that is, no matter how powerful a writer you are or aspire to be, it's just hard to do on the page. I mean, we open in the show with the abduction of this woman, Gene McConville, which is also the opening of the book. But when you're actually watching this actor, Judith Roddy, play this mother of 10 kids, you know, and get pulled out of our house and you hear the screams of those children. I was on set the day we shot that. And everybody's standing around the monitor.

I mean, we did take after take after taken. It's one of these things where every single take you'd look around and everybody was crying. We're all just watching it crying. and that kind of just like in your solar plexes feeling. You know, I don't know that it's necessarily unique to film, but you do realize you're just in a completely different kind of affective relationship with the viewer than you are on the bridge. I mean, you know, as you're talking,

I was thinking about some of the descriptions, especially early on the book of Divis Flats. And, you know, you do this incredible job talking about it as, you know, this fortress essentially for the IRA and how, it has all these warrants and halls and, you know, even when Helen is coming back from the chip shop and she's nervous because it's December, so why are people hanging out on the balcony? Because it's supposed to be temperate. They'll hang out during the spring, but not during the later part of the year. And it's a beautiful piece of writing in the book. And then you kind of just need two shots in the show

to communicate the same thing. And I think I went into it a little bit like, wow, how are you going to possibly get this incredible book and distill it down and you kind of can do it. You can do it with an overhead shot and a cool shot of the balcony and somebody looking out their door. And it's that way that you can communicate visually that that is pretty amazing. And it's actually, this is one of the rare occurrences where it's, you can get so much from the book and you can get so much from the series itself. Well, yeah. And if you think about, I mean, one of the subjects that I'm really intrigued by across a lot of my work is charisma. And, I spent a lot of time thinking about the charisma of different types of people and the way in which people can get kind of drunk on their own charisma, the way they can inspire and lead others, the way in which they can, you know, change industries or change the world, kind of by dint of their own force of personality.

And I can write about that all day, but you get Lola Pettigrew or Anthony Boyle, you know, some of these young actors in our series, and you light them and you costume them. and you'd give them the stage. And it's like you say, I mean, they can do it with a look. They don't even have to say anything. Yeah. All the Brendan stuff in the beginning of the book about how he seems to be 100 places at once and he's never sleeping and he's always got a gun.

You get that from Anthony Boyle sitting and telling just the punchline of a joke. Totally. Yeah. And the thing, I mean, the thing that matters a lot to me that won't, it won't necessarily, mean anything to certainly a lot of people in the U.S. who watch it, but that matters to me is Anthony Boyle is from West Belfast. He is from the same streets as these people in the series. Lola Pedigrew is

from West Belfast. Those two have known each other since they were kids. No way, really? Yeah. And I think you see it in their chemistry, actually, when they're talking. There's a lifetime of closeness that they are kind of cashing in on, right, in those scenes. This episode is brought to you by the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo. That's a mouthful, but that's because it packs a lot in. Earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases with it, big or small. So whether it's buying tickets at the game or grabbing a coffee, it earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me. The active cash credit card from Wells Fargo, be a 2%er. Learn more at at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash. Terms apply.

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I was curious about as somebody, I guess, let's just loosely say writer and then as a creator now, whether or not your involvement in television on now increasingly like more nuts and bolts level has changed either your relationship to watching TV as a viewer. And also your relationship. to your written work. Like as you go forward with other projects,

you know, one of my favorite recent New Yorker pieces is the story of the murder in London, where the unsolved crime in London that took place among the, like, sort of Russian oligarch community. That is just an incredible piece. Thank you.

And, but I was curious whether or not, like working in different mediums starts to bleed into your work as a writer. Yeah. I mean, I guess the first thing I should say just for the sake of clarity is I was very, very involved. Don't say nothing, but I'm not a creator of the show. It really is Josh Zettimer and this amazing room of, I mean, he put together this room of writers. It's Joe Murtaugh who did The Woman on the Wall, who's like a showrunner in his own right.

It's Claire Barron, who's this Pulitzer-nominated New York playwright. And then Kristen Sheridan, who's Oscar nominated for In America. So it's this incredible team of writers who spent a long time. I mean, it took us five years to do it, putting it together. But yeah, it's such an interesting question. You know, when I, years ago, when I was freelance, there was a long period of time when I was a freelancer, the New Yorker would not put me on staff.

And to pay the bills, I wrote a bunch of studio movies that didn't get made. But I was the proverbial screenwriter, like kind of working screenwriter who you haven't seen anything they've done because none of it got produced. And the whole pitch for me, as a screenwriter at that time was that the idea was that I was sort of, I was like drawing on my life as a, you know, all my experience as a real life investigative reporter and importing that into the scripts. And I think I didn't fully appreciate that actually there was more happening

in the other direction. It was more that my work on movie scripts was influencing my nonfiction. And I don't mean that in a kind of cheesy, like there's a kind of magazine writing that I hate, which is sort of very self-consciously cinematic. And it always, feels a little to me like somebody's really desperate to get the story option, and so they want to kind of write it in a way that will appeal to a development exec. I mean more stuff, like, to give you a really obvious example, my books are full of cold opens. So it's like you'll start a chapter. You don't know where you are. You've met a new character. And as a reader, in the same way that you, you know, you enjoy it in a TV show, I think part of it is that we are pretty sophisticated. Like most of us feel as though we've seen everything and read everything. even if it's on a kind of only quasi-conscious level, we're always sort of trying to think ahead of the story and figure out where it's going. And at least for me, at the point where I can figure out where it's going,

that's the point where I'm check out. And so I think the thrill of a good cold open is that you drop somebody in the middle of nowhere and there's this kind of wonderful confusion, which is they're like, I know this isn't the main road, how are you going to get me back to the main road? Like, how do we get back there? And that sort of thing,

I think in a way that started actually not even consciously it started filtering into my nonfiction writing in a way that I, that I'm pleased with. Like I, you know, I'm a big fan of film and television and I feel as though these genres can speak to each other. Yeah, I was, I was curious because like, you know, in the beginning of the book, I was rereading it a bit last night. And there's a momentum to it, but there's obviously also, like you start with the kidnapping and then you're talking about the historical context of the troubles, but then you're scooting ahead and scooting behind. And then when that's translated into the first episode of the series, which is quite good, but it jumps three different time periods within

like 11 minutes. And as a viewer, I was like, oh, yeah, this is a completely different intellectual experience to watch something that's jumping all over the chessboard versus as a reader in a book. You're like, I know where Patrick is going to bring me back around. Like I have confidence in this experience because I've invested this. I'm sitting here with this book. And I know he will like guide me back to why this was important and this was important. Whereas in TV, and maybe it's just because it's thought of more as like a mass market kind of medium, you're just like, well, are we sure we're running all over the place? But it was, I mean, by episode two, you're like, I'm so locked into this. It's kind of, they do an incredible job bringing it back around in the show.

I think that's right. I mean, a couple of things. One is that like the challenge, I think, with any television series about that's based on true story or even something that's based on mythology, And you think about the crawl at the beginning of Star Wars, right? Is it like any story where you're sort of choosing to drop the needle on the record. But on some level, you need to say, like, okay, actually, we're picking this up 800 years into a longer story. Like, you know, there is an Anglo-Irish conflict that's been going on in the background for nearly a millennium. And we are going to try, like, how can we efficiently, how can I tell you that in 45 seconds without a crawl, you know?

And so there's that, just that you need to kind of lay a certain amount of pot. for people to lock into the drama and engage. And, you know, we felt very strongly that this was not a, we're not making a Ken Burns documentary. This is not a kind of, you know, do your homework, eat your vegetables type of show. And frankly, I thought of the book as not a history book about the troubles. I thought of it as, you know, a murder mystery and a really compelling story about a handful of people.

And if you kind of learn about the troubles through that lens, then great. but my responsibility here is not to give you homework, right? In fact, a lot of the time I think it's how little can we tell you about the history for you to have the sort of bare bones background you need. In terms of another difference with television, though, exactly the thing you're talking about in the first episode, but actually throughout, what that does is it puts this huge, puts an enormous amount of pressure on how do you cast these pairings of the young actor

and the old actor. And this is an area where we were, you know, we kept talking about Goodfellas, which we all felt like is sort of the best possible version of that. Yeah. And it's an area where I feel as though the show succeeds really beyond my wildest hopes. Like in terms of those pairings of the three major of Dollar's Price, Brennan Hughes and Jerry Adams, the matching of those actors and their performances that the older actors delivered,

kind of drafting on these characters who created by the younger actors, I think is really uncanny. Yeah, I mean, the relationship these characters have, and I think as people involved in that conflict, but specifically those Dolores and Brendan have, as older people with the secrecy that their youth had to happen in. And then, I mean, it's not a spoiler to say that they have a lot of misgivings about that. You know, I mean, like, especially Dolores obviously has a lot of misgivings about

the purity of purpose that she had when she was young. and I think that that's actually a really universal idea that like if you asked anybody in their 40s or 50s or 60s what they thought of some of their ideals when they were in their teens and 20s, they'd be like, well, I mean, my heart was in the right place, but maybe this, this sat and the other I would have done differently. And then if you add guns and petrol bombs

and also, you know, institutional imperial oppression to the mix, you get something like this. It's just so magical and also so heart-priced. breaking. Yeah, I'm so glad to hear you thinking about it in those terms, because that's absolutely the way, you know, when Josh Zedimer came on board as the writer and showrunner, he said that, you know, he said, you know, to me, I think he literally told this to John Langraf in our first pitch meeting. He said, this is a story about the romance of radical politics, but also about the cost of those politics. And it's about, it's about these people who have a kind of intertension between their politics and their humanity. And these things are kind of constantly, intention. And in some cases, the politics wins and in others, the humanity. But I felt as though, even when I was doing the book, but I have to say much more so since the book came out in the last five years, been working on the series, that, I mean, to give you an example, like when we had the writer's room and we're breaking the story, Black Lives Matter was happening. Suddenly,

you turn on the news and there are protesters in American streets, young people marching, and military, like heavily militarized police cracking down on them. There's tear gas in American cities. What had seemed to me kind of like a foreign period piece when I was writing the book suddenly felt much, much closer to the lived experience of lots of people today. And so, you know, it's not, the show is not like an op-ed. Sure. But I do think it is it is trucking in themes that will have a kind of relevance to people today, people who in some cases probably couldn't find Ireland on a map. I was curious, this is really more of a personal curiosity question, but like one of the things I love in the book and love in the show is the dialogue. Obviously, you were privy to like archival information, tapes, etc. of how people talked? How hard was it for you to get the voice and get the cadence of how people spoke in Belfast in the 70s, well really over the course of decades? And then how do you feel like it translates?

under this show. Obviously, in a TV show, there's a lot more expository dialogue. People have to walk into a room and be like, well, I'm never going over there because that's where the British paramilitaries patrol. But I do find it quite entertaining and quite gripping. And especially in the book, you know, you're just like, oh, that's such a great line. Was that a line that they're telling a story about saying? Is that on tape somewhere? Is that how does this recall? And how did the dialogue kind of come to you? Yeah. So, so when I'm doing this kind of nonfiction writing, nothing is in quotes unless I either have an original source, a kind of contemporary source for it, or I'm interviewing somebody else who is a

witness or who's recounting a story. But like anything that's between quotes kind of has to come, it has to come from somewhere that I can delineate in the end notes. Very occasionally there'll be a place in the dialogue where you will not see quotes. And that's where somebody's basically not giving me an exact quote, but they're giving me a kind of a, they're sort of the gist of it. you know, and then he told me to come over there. That's what I tell you. And you would maybe write, come over, you know, he said, come over here, but it's not even going to be in quotes because of that hedge, right?

What I was really struck by when I was writing the book was, I spent four years on it. I've met seven trips to Northern Ireland. I interviewed all these people again and again. And as I was reconstructing it, I was surprised at how funny a lot of it was, that these people would be describing just the darkest shit you can imagine. And I would be laughing. And that struck me as a kind of particularly Belfast coping mechanism. There's like a particular gallows humor where even in the darkest times, people can kind of find the sardonic spin on whatever it is.

So when I was working on the book, one of my big things was I need to capture that. I have to bottle that because this is such a grim story and a little bit of humor, you know, makes these people more relatable. And it will kind of bear you through the story and it feels true to it. In terms of the series, listen, the writers were so good at, first of all, you know, picking up on the stuff on my book, in a bunch of cases, I gave them underlying research material where there's stuff that's in dialogue in the show that's not in the book but is actually drawn from real conversations, real quotes. But then they were able to kind of adopt those voices and come up with this very sort of jokey, sort of sly, banter-ish way of talking. And then we had Michael Lennox was one of our lead directors. So Mike Lennox is from Belfast. He directed the first two in the last two episodes, last two as well.

And he was a producer on the show. Mike directed every episode of Dairy Girls. Oh, I didn't know that. I should have clicked on that. Totally. So he brings to it this kind of natural wit. I mean, in addition to sort of, you know, it's the old idea of Francis Ford Coppola being able to smell the spaghetti

when he made The Godfather, right? It's like, smell the spaghetti, but also he's just a funny guy. And so you get the authenticity, but also the wit. And then the actors really were able to kind of lean into that. It's not that they're improvising necessarily, but they can just, there's like a little spin on the ball that they can do with a line reading. And so it's amazing. I've been hearing from people just recently who've seen parts of the show who are from Belfast. And what's wonderful is they're like, I don't know how you did it. I don't know how you guys

captured that voice, that particular music. Incredible sequence into, which I, you know, it's going to be a binge release, so I don't want to get too into like what happens. But essentially it's the kind of gallows humor you're talking about where they only see each other at wakes and funerals.

And it's at a pub. And all these characters are there and the characters are both being observed by the British military. They're flirting with one another. They're also making jokes and trying to show off for each other. And then there's this incredible private moment between Dolores and Brendan where they're just sitting out in an alley. And those characters or those

actors have to play those characters in like three or four different modes. Like being observed, being flirtatious, being, you know, trying to show off. It's, it's such a fantastic little, like, microcosm of what the show accomplishes. But it's also, but some of that I do think is also the fact that they were young. They were, they were so young. And when we cast it, it was, it was, really important to me that we not cast 30-year-olds playing 20. You know, the woman who plays Marion Price, Hazel Doop, I think Hazel's like 22 now. And Marion, the character, was 17 in the show. So, like, there's a moment in episode five, and I don't think I'm giving too much away,

but where a team of young members of the IRA go to bomb London. And it's this big, kind of scary, crazy, it's almost like a heist episode. You know, it's a sort of got a kind of Michael Mann. energy to it. And they went to bomb London, but the night before, it's like some of them go to the theater, they go to a play, some of them go out drinking and get really loaded, like the night before they're going to put these massive car bombs in this in central London. And it might even seem unrealistic if you didn't realize that it's based on a true story.

And this actually happened. Part of it for them was that they were from these, they were these like 21-year-old kids from this, at the time, pretty provincial city, Bill. And they go to London to bomb it, but then they're also like, it's London. It's this super fun town. Yeah. And so they sort of have to, you know, they're kind of conflicted and they want to have a good time before they plant these massive bombs there. And so I think a lot of that is also just an expression of the kind of heady excitement and confusion of being 21, 22 years old. Especially at that time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for joining me. I don't want to

take too much of your time. It was, it's really been a pleasure to talk to you. And this show is, a really awesome testament to the power of your book. So I think you should be super proud of it. Oh, that's amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining me.