How Patrick Radden Keefe and Joshua Zetumer captured the contradictions ofSay Nothingonscreen.
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Nobody was more surprised than me that it found the audience it did, he said.
Keefe was wary about bringingSay Nothingto the screen, however.
What would it be like to be that kid?
How did you approach the adaptation?
That idea informed everything: the scripts, the casting, the sets.
The vibrant color is wildly different from what most people see when they think about The Troubles.
We also wanted to focus on the cost of that violence for both the perpetrators and the victims.
Patrick Radden Keefe:Which, in its way, is a radical thing to do.
The sentence I just said would be anathema to some.
For some people, the IRA were morally repugnant.
They were evil psychopaths.
In the context of these characters, they were also very much still kids.
Even Dolours was embarrassed about how they comported themselves during the mission and has been public about that.
Some of the characters were indeed incredibly young when these things were happening.
Marian Price was a teenager.
What is it about that youth and fervor?
One of the biggest challenges adapting the book was not what to include but whatnotto include.
For that, we needed a strong gravitational center.
Otherwise, the episodes would become so diffuse.
But she also had this twinkle in her eye.
When men met her, they found her captivating.
Bythe end of the series, those things collide.
PRK:In her life, Dolours was always the star of her own show.
There was a sort of magnetism she had, a dynamism, a charisma.
That made her naturally compelling to build a story around.
The first was that she was a woman in the IRA.
I had thought about The Troubles and the IRA as a very male story.
I have a riff about this in the book: Che died young and beautiful.
To me, the question was: What happens if you dont die young?
How do you make sense of it all as you get older?
What can I safely take out to find the story?
This medium is character-driven, its emotional.
You want the thing to come to a finer emotional point at the end.
JZ:Figuring out the balance was one of the trickiest things about the show.
As Patrick mentioned, the search for the Boston College tapes was something we ended up cutting.
I actually wrote those scenes, and I liked it, but it didnt belong in the show.
PRK:Its funny because I actually had this problem when I was writing the book.
There was a similar issue here.
Like Dolours, Brendan also went on a hunger strike, and that experience absolutely shaped who he was.
Tell me about how you handled that.
Then we land at this idea, as Patrick said, where you weresupposedto die but you didnt.
Now youre a martyr who lived.
The idea was that episode five would have this Michael Mann energy to it.
Its like a procedural, a heist.
Theyre there, theyre going to plant the bombs, and youre going to get caught up in it.
Then you get the devastating moment when the bomb goes off.
Then, after that expansive episode, the idea was to compress back down with episode six.
Suddenly, youre in a tunnel, a cocoon.
One of the stickier thingsSay Nothinggrapples with is this ambiguity around armed struggle.
Obviously, a TV drama is very different than a book.
Youre in the characters heads from moment to moment.
Youre seeing events from their perspective, so one would think you would start to identify with them.
Our idea was that sometimes you would identify with the characters and sometimes you wouldnt.
PRK:There is obviously a vast literature on The Troubles.
You feel your stomach drop.
I wanted that because I felt theres an honesty there.
Youre not saying, Brendan Hughes is an evil guy who I would never relate to in any way.
Nor are you saying, Hes such a charismatic guy that Ill co-sign anything he does.
To me, that feels very true to life.
This series is not a work of political science.
Its not even an argument.
I would welcome that.
Id be horrified if people came out of it with a monochromatic view of any of those characters.
It had been confirmed by multiple sources.
PRK:Youre making such a nuanced point here, but I would quibble a tiny bit.
From where I sit, there isnt any ambiguity about whether Gerry Adams was in the IRA.
And I also dont think theres any ambiguity on whether Marian Price was the person who shot Jean McConville.
But its another thing to take me out of the equation.
Thats exactly what I mean.
I really want to include a denial from you.
And she didnt respond.
I wrote back repeatedly.
I wrote certified mail to the lawyer so I know he got it.
I think its actually the most sympathetic portrayal that Marian could possibly hope for.
With Adams, I dont know.
In theory, he could take issue with any particular thing in the show.
But we didnt reach back out while making the series.
Its fitting in light of the title.
The shows coming out during a sensitive time.
People should draw their own conclusions if they feel there are parallels to whats happening now.
There has been no shortage of unrest during the five years of putting the show together.
When I was writing in Los Angeles, it was after some of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Armored personnel car carriers drove down Melrose.
There were protesters in the streets.
That was the thing that compelled us: What would it be like to be that kid?
Ive been to Colombia twice now.
I was in Catalonia this summer.
They all see it in a different way.
But I can tell you there will be a sense of a kind of intractable divide in the country.
Theres no simple message.
