[Editor’s note: The following does include some spoilers for We Own This City.]From executive producers George Pelecanos and David Simon, and based on the book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton about the corruption that led to the collapse of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, the HBO six-episode limited series We Own This City illustrates what happens when results are prioritized over actual police work. After decades of a relentless drug war that resulted in mass incarceration, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) was at the center of the unit that went rogue, brutally pursuing citizens and drug dealers for their own gain.

During this interview with Collider, co-creators Pelecanos and Simon talked about why they wanted to tell this story, the levels of dystopic corruption in the drug war, their mutual desire to take on projects that are more than entertainment, how their collaborative process has evolved, getting to shoot this on the streets of Baltimore, what made Reinaldo Marcus Green the perfect partner to direct this project, and the importance of letting actors breathe in their characters.

Collider: Thank you for talking to me about this. Anytime I watch something that you guys do, I always feel like I learn something by the end of it. I feel smarter, but at the same time, I feel angry and frustrated, and sad. What led you to this story? What made this a story that you wanted to tell and did it just feel like now was really the right time to tell it?

DAVID SIMON: I encountered the material because I read Justin [Fenton]’s articles in the Sun. I live in Baltimore and it’s the hometown paper. I was so taken with the depth of the scandal and his coverage that I actually called my book agent and called Justin and said, “You’ve gotta write this as a book.” I thought about it only journalistically, about how it was another dark milestone in the drug war. And then, subsequent to that, [George Pelecanos] came and talked to me because he’d had a conversation with HBO.

GEORGE PELECANOS: Somebody at HBO called and asked me if I would be interested in doing this as an adaptation. I read it and I thought it was really good material, but I said, “I will, if I can bring in David Simon and our other partner, Nina Noble, into it, and maybe a couple of the other writers from The Wire, just for karma.” I thought we should get everybody back together again and do it one more time. David and I both felt like it was a good opportunity, not to make a show about corrupt cops, but as a launching pad, to talk about policing in America and why something like this can happen. What creates the opportunity and what are the conditions that this is allowed to happen in an American city? The answer, of course, was the ongoing drug war.

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Is there a frustration when you spend so much time digging into a story like this and you tell this story, and it isn’t resolved? There isn’t really much that’s been done. We’re still here. We’re still having these same issues. Is that frustrating for you, as storytellers or even just as human beings in the world?

SIMON: If waiting for change in the world was what was getting us up in the morning to tell a story, we wouldn’t get up. We spent five years on The Wire. We showed you a police department where the metrics were all fucked up. The mission had been lost. Cops were putting cash into their rain jackets from Season 1. There was routine brutality that was written off, throughout. We thought it was pretty indicative of where police work had gone in the city and what they valued and what they had ceased to value. We made the argument directly.

Come back a generation later, 14 years later, and now the police are not just stealing some. Now they’re stealing from regular people and from working people. Now they’re not just stealing cash, they’re stealing drugs and putting the drugs back on the street. I don’t know how many more levels of dystopic corruption and disaster the drug war has to demonstrate before somebody finally says, “Enough,” but nobody ever says enough, or not enough people.

To credit The Wire, and other narratives and other reporting that has happened, I think the drug war is in more disfavor now than it was in 2002 and 2003, so maybe we had some effect on the general consensus, but not enough because politicians still see the efficacy in being tough on crime and hard on drugs and ready to fill a prison. I’m not sure what it’s gonna require.

Are you guys always looking for possible material to turn into a TV series, or do you not think about making a TV series until you come across material that you just can’t shake?

PELECANOS: Probably both. The one thing that we always ask each other, in the beginning, when we’re deciding whether to do something or not, is what’s this about? It can’t just be about entertainment. Although I think something that’s compelling is entertaining by nature. The other thing is that these shows take a big chunk out of your life. We’ve been on this for about four years now, and that’s a lot of time to spend on something that’s frivolous. It doesn’t mean that we think we’re gonna change the world with shows like this, but we at least have to be passionate about it, to even just embark on a long journey like that. We happen to have similar interests, in terms of the kinds of stories we wanna tell.

SIMON: This took us a while because of the pandemic. We knew it was six and out, but even so, we ended up spending years on it. If it’s just an entertainment, then we wasted our shot. You should have seen us, we were really determined, when we were doing The Deuce together, that if we were gonna spend three years doing a show about porn, it better be about more than porn. It better be about misogyny and sexual commodification, and a lot of things. We had to put on our thinking caps, otherwise we were really gonna feel bad, at the end of three years.

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Image via HBO

When you start out telling a story, do you know the exact number of episodes that you’ll be run, and then you figure out how to adjust the story to that time frame, or do you have a bit more freedom in the sense that this could have been seven or eight episodes, if you needed that to tell the story?

PELECANOS: I like the fact that it was six because it disciplined us to tell a story in a concise manner. Honestly, sometimes it’s, “Can we sell eight? Can we sell six? What does the network want?

SIMON: Sometimes you make a promise, “Look, I’ll get out three seasons of 10. I swear to God, I won’t need 12.” And then, you’re stuck because you need 12. A lot of it is what the network’s needs are. That’s the reality. But sometimes, you’ll have a little too much for six and you need eight. Sometimes you end up at seven because of the way things break. There’s a lot of give and take with the networks.

How has your process of developing and writing projects together changed, over the years? Has it changed? Do you guys have a set way that you approach doing things together?

PELECANOS: It’s not formal. We’ve just figured it out, over the years. There are things that I like doing more than David does, and he likes doing more than I do. We give each other a lot of breadth. We don’t have to talk about it too much anymore because we just know.

SIMON: I think our understanding of what a good room is has matured. When we started The Wire, I was of the impression that all argument was good. I still think that argument is essential and necessary, but I think we’re much more sophisticated about channeling argument and about the limits of argument. There come moments where all the good points have been made in the room, and then a decision has to be made. More than that, when we begin, I can look around the room and catch George’s eye and know that it’s time to go to the next point, or it’s time to make a decision and begin expanding upon what we decide. So, I think we’ve become much smarter about what a good writers’ room does and about staffing a good writers’ room.

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Image via HBO

David, what does it mean to you to be able to have a project like this actually be shot in Baltimore and do it in the locations where the story is set? That seems very rare, these days.

SIMON: Yeah. So much revolves around where the film incentives are now in a given state. It’s problematic. Thank goodness Maryland still has a program, although don’t get me involved in that nonsense. All I’m saying is that there are a lot of decisions that have nothing to do with the aesthetic. For me, it’s more emotional, and George felt the same. I worked on Homicide, The Corner and The Wire with this crew, and then I went away for 14 years, not to go away, but because the projects went to other places. I live [in Baltimore], so to roll outta your own bed and stagger up to the caterer to get your eggs and bacon, and then go be around people who you’ve known since they were 20 years younger, it feels like family. There’s a lot of camaraderie. And then, you go out into these neighborhoods and there’s a reservoir of goodwill from the time of The Corner and The Wire of, “You guys made high-end TV about the world I know and about this part of America.” We didn’t see that a lot on TV, so there’s a lot of affection for the process. A lot of comedy and banter comes with shooting in a real place, and that makes it special.

One thing that I find so interesting about the work that you do, in general, but really with this show, in particular, is that this story is told without judgment on these characters. It’s told with an honesty and an authenticity, and everything seems very real, but you’re not presenting the characters in any one specific way. Is that something that just comes from the work you do, in telling stories like this, or do you ever catch judgment creeping in and have to stop yourselves?

PELECANOS: It’s in the writing. It’s in our worldview, too. We don’t really believe in villains. We try to give everybody their voice in this show, including the police. It makes it much more thought-provoking, if you lay it out like that. I’m glad you said that. I’m really proud of that fact in the show, that it’s not didactic. We let people speak as they would.

SIMON: Villainous stuff happens, but if you’re just writing villains, then you’re not speaking to larger questions of who we are and what we’re doing, as a society. It becomes much less interesting, in a way. Same thing with heroes, I guess.

PELECANOS: We don’t wanna pander to the people who hate all police or who think all police are pricks, or whatever. On the other side of that, we’re not pandering to the thin blue line people either. It’s for people in the middle who want to actually think about the situation and give it deep thought.

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Image via HBO

What made Reinaldo Marcus Green the perfect partner on this? What did he bring to this material that made him the right director to take all of this on?

PELECANOS: He has an interesting background. He grew up in Staten Island and he knew where a lot of police officers lived with their families. He grew up going to the houses of the sons and daughters of cops, so he saw them as human beings, not the enemy. On the other hand, he was a young Black and Puerto Rican man, growing up in America, and he felt that part of it too, from the police. He had a very balanced approach to the material. He didn’t come in with preconceptions. And we liked what he had done before. Monsters and Men is a really good film. And he’s a good person. He’s the perfect guy to direct this, and I think it shows in the finished product.

You always have such tremendous casts in your projects, usually made up of actors who are both very familiar and some that we have may never have seen before, and this really is another great cast. What was it like to see this cast come together?

SIMON: It’s been a delight. It’s time to credit Alexa Fogel, who’s been our cast director since The Wire and has been on every project since. That’s one of those relationships where much less needs to be said now because we’ve had all of those conversations, along the way. We act and react in shorthand now, even down to the local casting level, with Pat Moran in Baltimore. There’s something of about good actors where, if you give them the spaces, you don’t overwrite, you let the characters breathe a little bit, and you’re not writing villains and heroes, the actors fill the spaces with humanity. They are places for them to deliver the things they can access within themselves. We pick good actors, and then we hope for the best. George always says there’s a lot of luck involved. There’s a little bit of luck involved, that’s true. Sometimes you get surprised by how good you are at this shit. You think it’s you, and it just happens to be the actor.

What was it like to see Jon Bernthal breathe life into Wayne Jenkins for this?

SIMON: He hit the town and he just dove into Baltimore.

PELECANOS: Jon has a lot of positive relationships with police, but he’s smart enough to know what Wayne Jenkins did. He was aware of both sides of it. And Wayne is a very complex guy. At the end, he still doesn’t really know what he did. He’s in denial. And on the other hand, he’s one of the only guys who didn’t flip on the other guys.

SIMON: One of the notes I always give actors, when they come on to play the part of a badass in whatever project, and we gave this note time and again on The Deuce, which is, “You think you’re right. In your mind, you think you’re right.” And then, you whisper stuff like, “Maybe you are right.” The vast majority of people, unless they’re sociopaths, think they’re doing the plausible and reasonable thing at the moment they’re not, so you’ve gotta give the actor the belief that they think they’re right in the moment. That’s when you get the best performances, even of the people who are being truly villainous.

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Image via HBO

Are there other subjects that you guys have discussed making a show about? Do you always have various projects in various stages of development, or do you tend to focus on one project at a time?

PELECANOS: We’ve got other things we’re working on, but when we’re actually doing this, we’re completely focused on it. I wasn’t writing anything else, when I was developing this and shooting it, and neither was David. We got down on it. That’s the only way to do it. If you’ll notice, we don’t do multiple shows at a time, like some other people do. I don’t know how you control the quality like that. We feel like we have to be there, a hundred percent.

SIMON: George has owed somebody a novel for the last few years. That’s all you need to know. No. The other stuff in development slows down when you get to the point of shooting or editing. Particularly, you can’t be writing two things at once. You write one thing to the end, and then you pick up something else. You might be able to be in a situation where you finish the scripts on one, and you start shooting another, but God help you, if you have two keyboards going and you’re trying to write different things. I don’t know how anyone does that.

We Own This City airs on Monday nights on HBO and is available to stream at HBO Max.