From creator/writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck, the five-part HBO mini-series Chernobyl explores how the 1986 nuclear accident become one of the worst human-made catastrophes in history. After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, Soviet Union suffered a massive explosion that released radioactive material across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and as far as Scandinavia and western Europe, countless brave men and women sacrificed their own lives, both knowingly and unknowingly, in an attempt to save Europe from unimaginable disaster.

During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, executive producer Craig Mazin talked about why he sees Chernobyl as a natural next step in his career, what made him want to tell this story, finding the right home at HBO, some of the most startling moments of the mini-series, juggling all of the various aspects of what happened before, during and after the events at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and the role that truth and lies played in the outcome of it all. He also talked about the challenges of having a career as a writer, working in TV vs. working in film, and staying at HBO for his next project.

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Image via HBO

Collider:  The last time we spoke was at the press day for Identity Thief, and I feel like this project could not be possibly be more different.

CRAIG MAZIN:  Yes, it is different.

So, how did you get here?

MAZIN:  It’s funny because it all seems perfectly consistent to me. I understand that people on the outside would look at this and go, “How does this connect?” We are multitudes, as people, and we always have an interest in things, in terms of our creatives lives, that are different, and we have different seasons and rhythms. 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. If you look at people, like Matthew Weiner, who were working on sitcoms, and then suddenly there’s Mad Men, it’s not surprising to me. Charlie Kaufman started on The Dana Carvey Show. 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. It reflects my general sense of curiosity and interest in the world, in science, and in human nature. Also, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more connected to the heartbreak of life. So, to me, this is the most natural thing in the world.

What was it that led to Chernobyl and made you want to write about that? Was there something that made you feel like you had to tell that specific story?

MAZIN:  I was just reading casually about it, about five years ago, and it occurred to me that, while I knew Chernobyl exploded, as I think most people do, I didn’t know why, and I thought there was this inexplicable gap in my knowledge. We know why the Titanic sank. How is it possible that we don’t why Chernobyl exploded? So, I began reading about it, just out of this very dry, intellectual curiosity, and what I discovered was that, while the story of the explosion is fascinating, and we make it really clear exactly why and how it happened, what really grabbed me and held me were the incredible stories of the human beings who lived through it, and who suffered and sacrificed to save the people that they loved, to save their countrymen and to save a continent, and continued to do so, against odds that were startling and kept getting worse. I was so moved by it. It was like I had discovered a war that people just hadn’t really depicted, and I became obsessed.

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Image via HBO

Did that lack of knowledge that people had, especially of the details, help or hurt, when it came time to pitch this to networks?

MAZIN:  I pitched it to one network. I only went to one place. The first person I spoke about it with was Carolyn Strauss, who is one of the executive producers, along with myself and Jane Featherstone. Then, Carolyn and I went over to HBO, which seemed like the right place to me. If anybody was going to be willing to spend a lot of money on a big program that wasn’t going to be eight seasons of blockbuster entertainment, it was going to be them. I simply told the stories. I told them how I was going to lay it out, through whose eyes we were going to experience this, what it was really about for me, and what I wanted to impart to the audience. When I was done, they said, “Thank you,” and I didn’t know what that meant. Then, the next day, I got a call and they said, “All right, let’s do it.” Every step of the way, it’s been an absolute joy. I’ve never had such a beautiful, smooth, and nourishing creative experience.

If the reaction had been different and they had said no, would you have taken this to other networks, or would you have just moved on to another project?

MAZIN:  It was 2015, I believe, when I went to them, and in 2015, you might recall that there weren’t really a ton of outlets, the way there are now. There wasn’t Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Apple, as well. In my mind, I thought, “Well, if they don’t like it, I think I’m not going to do it because then maybe there’s something wrong with me. I think this is important and beautiful, and this is a place that appreciates important and beautiful things. If they say no, maybe I’m just wrong.” They didn’t pass on it. If they had, I may have just curled up in a ball and cried for a bit, and then gone about my day.

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Image via HBO

They’re also a place that really lets stories breathe, which this story really needs to do, with the moments of silence where people are just trying to absorb what’s happened. It feels like there are lot of places that wouldn’t have allowed for that.

MAZIN:  Yeah. They really let me set every aspect of this, from tempo to tone. What they bought was a six-episode miniseries, and along the way, I said, “You know what? I think it’s five episodes, and here’s why.” And they said, “Okay.” There were moments where I wanted to accelerate things and I wanted the audience to feel like they were falling because I think that’s how it must have felt to the people involved in the middle of it all. Then, there were times where I wanted to feel this long stretch of a war that you feel like you might not ever escape from. Those are things that you simply can’t do in a movie, nor can you tell a story like this from the multiple perspectives that I think it requires and deserves. So, this format was the only format I could imagine telling the story in.

There were two things about this that really haunted me. The first was the fact that you showed what happened to these firemen especially because my father was a fireman. He’s retired now, but I grew up with many times where he had to go off and be a first responder somewhere, and it’s just unimaginable that they would send all of those people into something where they had no idea what they were even walking into. The other thing that really stuck with me was the scene in the first episode, with the people on the bridge. That’s the moment that stands out the most, from the entire five hours. Did you know that it would look like it ultimately did, in the finished product?

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Image via HBO

MAZIN:  Yeah. First, about the firemen, the audio that you hear, early on in Episode 1, is the actual recorded audio. That is what was passed along that night. “There is a fire between the third and fourth blocks, on the roof.” Those men – and when I say men, many of them were really just on the other side of being boys – were sent there with no protective equipment against radiation, no understanding that there was going to be radiation, and no understanding of what this incredibly deadly graphite rubble in the ground would mean for them. But what blows my mind and breaks my heart, and also feels me with deep admiration for them, is that somewhere along the course of that night, they did know. It became clear to them. Their skin was turning red, and then it was turning brown. They were beginning to vomit and they were swelling. Some people who had touched this rubble were experiencing burns, and they just kept going. That wasn’t a moment where they said, “That’s it, everybody get back in the trucks!” They went closer, and that is so remarkable to me. I’m so proud, to be honest with you, that I can help tell their story to people because people should know.

Similarly, the people on the bridge were part of a story that has been recounted many times, by people who were there in Pripyat. It is said that none of them survived, and it’s hard to parse something like that from oral traditions of storytelling. Has it been embellished? Has it been made worse than it is? But there are quite a few sources that describe that bridge and those people on it, and there’s no question that a lot of people from Pripyat got really sick and died that don’t get listed in the official count. (Series director) Johan Renck directed that and shot it essentially as I had always imagined it, but not only did he make it more beautiful, surreal and disturbing, but he did something, editorially, that I thought was incredible. In my initial script, you see what they’re seeing, fairly early on in the sequence, and what he chose to do, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, was just make us wait and have them talk for a bit, before showing it. When I saw that cut, it took my breath away. I was so startled and upset.

One of the realities that we know is that, even though this was a town that was built to support the operations of a nuclear power plant, very few people who lived there understood the dangers of radiation, and very few of them understood how a nuclear reactor works, at all. 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. For us, we think, “Oh, my god, a nuclear power plant is fire! I don’t care if it’s just the roof, I’m not going outside and looking at that.” But, they didn’t know. It just was not a part of their culture. They were not told.

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Image via HBO

This is a horror film, it’s a war movie, it’s a political thriller, it’s a courtroom drama, and above all, it’s just a very human story. What were the challenges in juggling all of that, and doing so in this time frame? Was it overwhelming to try to balance all of that?

MAZIN:  It wasn’t, and I wish that I could tell you it was. I wish I could make myself sound better. Sometimes you just see something, and it becomes clear. It’s just the weirdest thing. It all arranges itself in your mind and it feels like that is correct. In this case, it was one of these things where I just looked at this Rubik’s cube and went, “I know what to do.” You’re right, every genre you just picked there is accurate. I didn’t necessarily think about writing towards any genre. I just wrote it as it seemed to want to be, and that is the beautiful complexity of Chernobyl. It is all of those things, and all of those things are only really understood through the lens of humans and humanity, and how people related to this terrible incident. But look, it took awhile. Don’t get me wrong, it took years. I saw it and I knew what to do, and I did it. Then, I saw what Johan did, and what Jakob Ihre, our director of photography, did. I also looked at what Jared Harris, Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgard did, in those moments, and I thought, “How do they do that?” That’s one of the great joys of making movies and television. It can be a punishing business, but having a sense that everybody has this unique role to play, for which they are uniquely suited is a joy, and especially was a joy on this project

As a writer, you never really quite know what’s going to happen with your work, once you write it. Obviously, with this, you were very involved and it was a very different kind of process. But then, you’re listed as just one of the writers who’s worked on Charlie’s Angels and Cowboy Ninja Viking. As a writer, how do you get over something that you write maybe never coming out, or it then getting passed on to somebody else to write, only to see their version get made? How do you cope with that?

MAZIN:  I’ll tell you, I don’t know how I’ve coped with it. Some of these things that I do, I’m just helping on. For Charlie’s Angels, I just came in for awhile and helped (director/actress) Liz [Banks] out for a few weeks. My name isn’t going to be on that, in the final process. I was just helping a friend do something, and from all accounts, she did a fantastic job. Other times, I have written things where I cared deeply about them, and you won’t see them even listed on IMDb because they’re just sitting there in a drawer, and it’s infuriating. Then, there are things that I’ve written, where I thought, “They shouldn’t make this,” and then they did. I’m not sure I can do it much more like that because of this experience and the way that I was treated, in the end. In television, the writer is charge. It wasn’t so much about being in charge, as it was about being treated the way that I should always be treated. I don’t pull rank. I’m not big on authority, or any of that. I just want to be listened to, regarding a script that I’m writing, that’s out of my mind. The fact that movies aren’t done the same way, I look at it now and I just think, “That’s insane!” That is not in any way, shape, or form meant to be an insult to directors. I am eternally impressed and amazed by what directors do. But I think it’s just as important that writers be treated as full authors of the things they author, so I’m gonna keep doing this. This is working out pretty well for me. I like this better. I think I’m going to stay working in television, doing stuff like this, because it’s just that much more fulfilling.

Do you already have something lined up next? Do you know what you’d like to do, or are you working on something?

MAZIN:  I do have something lined up next, and it’s also for HBO. They’ve been an incredible home for me, and I see no reason to leave that home right now. I can’t talk about what it is, but it’s also based on a non-fiction work, and it couldn’t be more different from Chernobyl, in the sense of the story it’s telling and what’s it about. I’m really proud of what it is, just even in its ambition. Hopefully, when it actually gets done, it will live up to that.

At the end of Chernobyl, we get a lot of information about what’s happened to these people and what’s happened since this took place, and it’s frightening that we’ll never know the actual human cost of all this, especially when you hear the best estimate is somewhere between 4,000 and 93,000 deaths. As a result of that, do you think it’s more important for people to just learn about how and why this happened, and the role that truth and lies played in the outcome of it all, rather than the specific numbers?

MAZIN:  Yeah, I do. In terms of the specifics of what happened at Chernobyl, it’s extremely unlikely to be repeated, in that way. I always want to be clear about how the lesson of Chernobyl, and certainly the lesson of our show, is not to be frightened of nuclear power. Nuclear power has been generated extremely safely in the West for decades. The kind of reactor that they were using at Chernobyl was not a reactor that we would have ever used, nor was it even covered by a containment building. I don’t think the warning here is being scared of nuclear power. The warning here is to be scared of lies and of narratives. Question everyone that is feeding you something that you want to hear. I don’t know how else to put it. You have to think critically. Really, I want to know that the nuclear power plant three kilometers away is flawless and nothing can happen to it. I want to hear that. Right now, in the United States, we are experiencing this war on truth. I don’t know what else to call it. People increasingly seek out stories that are masquerading as truth, that make them feel good. How something makes us feel is completely disconnected from the actual substantive truth. The truth doesn’t care what we do. We can tell each other stories about climate change, but the climate doesn’t care. It will keep raining, it will keep flooding, and the ice will keep melting because it doesn’t care. That is the lesson of Chernobyl. We ignore this truth and we gravitate toward comforting stories at our own peril.

Chernobyl airs on Monday nights on HBO.