The final of "Chernobyl" explained: Interview with the creator Craig Mazin

"Every lie we tell engages the debt of the truth. Sooner or later, the debt is paid. This line from the latest episode of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl – Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a candid and candid scientist, speaks at the heart of the series, which is both a fascinating chronicle of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history and a play about the cost of concealment.

As creator Craig Mazin explains throughout the five-part series, the devastating explosion of 1986 at the Chernobyl power plant is the result of a series of lies told by selfish bureaucrats at the Chernobyl plant. service of a corrupt and incompetent government that gave priority to its public image. above the security of its own citizens.

But if this story is deeply specific to the Soviet regime, it also resonates in a powerful and uncomfortable way in modern America. Legasov and his colleagues – the politician Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) and the nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), the only fictional character in the series – are forced to constantly defend the truth against powerful people who deliberately deny scientific facts, even if they observe them directly the face. For Mazin, the relevance of this infuriating dynamic was one of the main reasons why this story deserved to be told.

"It's in us a sense of denial, a sense of group," says Mazin The Hollywood Reporter. "It's not something that sits on a party line or on the other. We have seen it through all the permutations of history, and in the center of it there is some insistence that what we want to be true is now true and what we do not like is now wrong. It does not serve us well and it has never served us well. "

Below, Mazin speaks with The Hollywood Reporter sure ChernobylIdle success and unexpected memes, the story he left out because he felt "too Hollywood" and his plans for follow-up.

You end the show on Legasov by acknowledging, in voiceover, that the scientific search for the truth is often undermined by the fact that people just do not want to hear it. This seems pretty timely. Why did you finish on this note?

My personal belief is that it is not useful to show things from the past that are irrelevant to us today, or to not connect some sort of dotted line to the current situation, but otherwise it would become a duty. The history of Chernobyl convinced me more than anything else, it was something very universal. Yes, Chernobyl happened because the Soviet system was deeply corrupt and perverse in many respects, but the Soviet system did not reach us from another planet. It was designed by humans. It's in us. A certain sense of denial, a certain sense of group thinking, is not something that sits on a party line or the other. We have seen it through all the permutations of history, and in the center of it there is some insistence that what we want to be true is now true and what we do not like is now wrong. It does not serve us well, it has never served us well. We must ask ourselves why we feel entitled to say to scientists "We really think the climate is not changing". Or "I think vaccines could cause autism." We can say that everything we want, but it is not true, and it costs us. I want everyone watching this show to realize that they are themselves complicit in some sort of conspiracy against uncomfortable truths.

The series has really gained momentum – it has been well received from the start, but has gradually built a dedicated audience. Why do you think that sounded so much?

I am a strong supporter of the traditional way of television. That's not to say that the other platforms do not make great shows, but there's something about throwing everything away when I think, honestly, it costs a little more expensive . This also avoids any possibility of person-to-person propagation and encouragement, where observation becomes a common thing. Chernobyl It started well, but each week it went up, which is not the case, and we reached a critical mass as we headed for our fourth and fifth episodes.

Were there any reactions to the series that surprised you?

Yes. I was very worried about the reception of the show in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Belarus, Russia or in one of the former Soviet republics. It's fascinating. Basically, the overwhelming response of people has been incredibly rewarding. They recognize that we did this with love and respect for them, and that we did our best to get the details, which, from their point of view, Western productions often fail or do not look at at all. I expected – and my expectations were rewarded – at a certain level of propaganda from the Russian government and, after all, the man who runs this government is the former KGB. They publish their own Chernobyl story, which is based on a KGB officer trying to prevent a CIA officer from doing something, and okay. Sure. I thought it was going to happen, I understood it.

I have also just been surprised by the strength of the reactions of people from all walks of life. Some people have misunderstood because they want to see a condemnation of the right people who can not deal with science. Some of them think that it is a total condemnation of Soviet communism and socialism. We are at something a little more universal and human than "Your side is bad, my side is good".

What was your biggest challenge of writing?

Oh, of course, it was the test sequence in the fifth episode. I had plenty of plates to rotate at the same time, but the biggest challenge was to explain something complicated: nuclear physics and power plant engineering. And I had to find a way to explain that to people because I'm not going to explain, it's not me! I need people to know. So I worked very hard, and Jared too, we went through this file line by line to make sure everything was clear and that there was nothing more useless, but that we did not leave nothing important.

The red and blue cards were a good visual way to get out of this riddle.

Yeah, because if you really like it and you have a predilection for science, you can follow it on a level, and if it's not your jam, you can at least look at the colors and you get the point! This is redder and more blue, and you can see what's going on in the reactor. I'm coming out of comedy, where the idea of ​​boring people is just horrible, and losing your audience is your nightmare, so I just wanted it to be fascinating for everyone, the best I could.

The show is flawless in its description of the physical effects of radiation poisoning. Is there anything that you left out or that you were asked to leave out because it was too much?

Yes, we had to be very careful in the third episode when we showed the last leg of Vasily Ignatenko's body. This is the most extreme thing we have shown. Our makeup and prosthetic designer, Daniel Parker, has done a remarkable job. So brilliant, in fact, we had the anxiety to linger a little on it. HBO was so enthusiastic and terrific, and Kary Antholis, who ran the HBO miniseries during the production of the series, said, "You know, can you just shorten that photo? feeling compelled to look at you as if you were almost proud of it. "I did not intend to do it, and that's not what we want at all. Sometimes you lose sight of these things because you have looked at the prostheses being built, but you do not quite understand how powerful it is. So we shortened this plan a bit, because the last thing we wanted was to feel that we were talking about the sad destiny of this man for sensationalist points on a television show. What we wanted was for people to know the truth about what was going on, but we did not want to have the impression of exploiting it. These are things with which we have to do all the time, because this man was a real person and his wife is still alive, and the last thing we want to do is to show something other than a respect total.

Is there anything else major that you filmed and omitted?

We shot a sub-story about Dyatlov, the character of Paul Ritter, who touches his story. Chernobyl was not the first nuclear disaster of Dyatlov, he had actually been involved in another year before, while he was a nuclear engineer in an underwater base. He received a dose of radiation strong enough, a dose that theoretically could have killed him. The guy was tough, but his son died about a year later from a leukemia, which implied that, no matter how much contamination Dyatlov suffered, he might have brought it home and would have affected the health of his son. From the point of view of writing, if you have a story that helps to explain the motive of a character or that arouses sympathy for an unattractive character, it is generally considered a useful thing. But finally, I did not feel that it was justified. I had the impression of stretching me. I could do the business [for keeping it]but we felt a little Hollywood. In the end, when we looked at the cut, we did not need it.

The popularity of the online series is really striking – there are many more Chernobyl Memes there that I was waiting for! What are you doing with that?

[Laughs] I think it's just like that people are showing their love for something. When I was younger, I remember that I was just obsessed with The Godfather, and there were parodies like 1000 sponsorships and lines such as "We will make him an offer he can not refuse" became what people would say, but no one called them memes at the time. When I was small Welcome, Kotter was really popular so we were saying all those stupid things that they say in the show, or Happy Days, "Sit on it!" These were memes! I think that's how we show that we fell in love with something and I take it with joy. I do not think people make fun of everything that is serious, I think that they just say: we are connected to that and we love it.

Dyatlov's phrase, "Not awesome, not terrible," which is that moment of completely absurd denial, seems to be deeply memorized.

Yes, I have to give credit to Carolyn Strauss, who produced the executive Chernobyl with me and Jane Featherstone. Somewhere early enough in post-production, she said, "Do you know what I like the most? When Dytatlov said, "Not great, not terrible." "She just said that it was as if she knew, she was the original memer of that one, I do not know why she saw anything in this line, that for me was never a big thing, but she was right!

In the Chernobyl podcast, you briefly touch on the question of how a similar scenario would unfold in the West, especially when workers are actually sacrificed for the greater good. Is this something you thought about a lot?

The good news is that we do not have to worry about it because it would not have happened in the West. Our nuclear reactors do not explode, because they are built intelligently and cautiously, and they are surrounded by containment buildings designed in such a way that a plane can fly over them without them getting off the ground. break. The RBMK reactor used at Chernobyl was only a dreadful, flat design. Too big, too unstable, discovered, so that we do not have to deal with this problem. We can look at Japan – the way they treated Fukushima is impressive, and from there we can see that, anyway, there will be people who will perform heroically and somewhat so When you see these guys on the roof of Chernobyl, they carry the remains of lead hammered by hand that they themselves glued and tied to laces, which we do not do. We have resources and we would not, and they did it there. That alone, I find breathtaking. The Soviet system was so bad and the Soviet citizens so brave. They are remarkable people. What they suffered and went through in the 20th century and today is simply amazing and inspiring to me.

Have you thought about tracking the show? Is there another historical event that you want to approach in the same way?

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.