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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's happening? It's Todd McShay and I'm back with a new home and a new show at The Ringer and Spotify. The McShay Show. It's a video and audio podcast coming to you year round with all my NFL draft information, big boards, mock drafts and player movement. Plus, I'll be chatting with some of my best friends in football, including some of your favorite football analysts. During the week, we'll have episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays that'll include discussions about my player rankings, who's rising, who's falling, and who your NFL team should be keeping an eye on. Plus, we'll be reacting each week to the college football playoff polls and giving you previews and picks for each Saturday slate. In addition, I'll have episodes on Saturday nights with my immediate reaction to the full

• 0:44Speaker 00

  day in college football every week. So if you love the college game, the NFL, the draft, or all of it like me, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and get ready for The McShay Show on The Ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts.

• 1:03Chris Ryan?

  I need support staff to clear the room.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Stand up and walk now.

• 1:08Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com and not joining me in the studio or on the other line is Andy Greenwald. I'm still recording in England, but without Andy, it's a special show today because The Watch has Patrick Raddenkeefe, 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

• 1:51Chris Ryan?

  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, 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 announcements

• 2:36Chris Ryan?

  over the years about Rian Johnson doing his trilogy, or Benny Alph and Weiss are gonna do a trilogy, or Patty Jenkins is gonna do a Rogue Squadron movie, or Taika Waititi is gonna do a movie, or Kevin Feige is gonna do a movie, and all these things are kicking around, and it seems like Star Wars, outside of the Filoni stuff, and obviously, our beloved Andor that's gonna 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 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

• 3:16Chris Ryan?

  up for major movie and television blockbuster releases, because this was announced with, you know, some fanfare this week, that I'm recording, that Kinberg is gonna come in, that he's gonna 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 scripts, that was supposed to be the continuing Rey movie, so there's, 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

• 3:58Chris Ryan?

  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 the 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

• 4:41Chris Ryan?

  shoot it, that 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 exposes about what's going on with Star Wars than 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's it's 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

• 5:25Chris Ryan?

  it, innovate it in the way that they did with a show like Andor, than 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 Ken Berg or about signing Damon Lindelof and then having Stephen Knight and then having, you know, all these things that happen with these 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.

• 6:11Chris Ryan?

  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, and in retrospect, those movies seem like the model of stability now, even

• 6:53Chris Ryan?

  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 with the second film, the second sequel. And it just is like, outside of the Filoni 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 the films that we've seen have been all over the place. I liked Rogue One a lot.

• 7:37Chris Ryan?

  I, in retrospect, Solo even seems like a pretty decent movie compared to like, the nonexistent 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 Filoni 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, I, because you can just look online, fans don't care. I, or if they, they're, 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.

• 8:21Chris Ryan?

  Simon Kinberg 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, 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 Raddenkeev'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 Zedimer, 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,

• 9:04Chris Ryan?

  but he does an excellent job marshaling this project, which could easily have gone wrong, because I think you could be, it's a, 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 achieved that is they have this story engine in 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, in 2001, way after the events. And so as the series goes on, it's starting to become a bigger issue.

• 9:48Chris Ryan?

  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 Raddenkeev's sprawling book. Brendan Hughes, who is played by, honestly, like, a very hot and upcoming actor in Anthony Boyle, who is 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 Callum 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 Brendan Hughes character does a lot of the dirty work for the IRA. Jerry Adams is also a major character in the show.

• 10:32Chris Ryan?

  Who a lot of people know as the public face and leader of Sinn Fein for more than 30 years, but really the stars of the series are these two sisters, Delores and Marion Hu Price, who are our kind of way in to 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

• 11:14Chris Ryan?

  social context and the granular detail and 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 Say Nothing to throw stuff out. You know, it's, this is not some super popular mass market paperback. This is a work of really, really astonishing research and journalism by Rad and Keefe. So you, you want all the divvies 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

• 11:59Chris Ryan?

  the IRA was evolving from the 50s through the 70s and on. And to do that, you, 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 the 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 Jean 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...

• 12:44Chris Ryan?

  You understand where Jean is gonna 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'd wanna 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 fire-ran 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 that the face of that response is Rory Kinnear's performance as Frank Kitson, which

• 13:29Chris Ryan?

  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, 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.

• 14:13Chris Ryan?

  After the young Price sisters experience violence at the hands of Protestant loyalists and police officers during a peace march, they become radicalized and join Jerry Adams and Brendan Hughes' 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 Nighy takes over for Michael Lennox. Michael Lennox directed all Dairy Girls and obviously has a real feel for the area. Mary Nighy brings like this very... Handheld intimate style to the show and I enjoy both equally. I think they both did wonderful things with this.

• 14:58Chris Ryan?

  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 Petticrew is in many ways the point of view character as Dolores and she reflects a beautiful passion for her character's causes, well, some ambivalence about the methodology she's asked to adopt. Special shout out to Maxine Peake, who is also excellent as the older Dolores, who serves as a kind of narrator for the series. I also really liked Hazel Duke as Dolores, Stoic sister Marion. Boyle, I mentioned, top for some kind of stardom, you can see why. Every time he busts through a door to make a joke or give a warning, the camera kind

• 15:43Chris Ryan?

  of gravitates to him. And I also love Josh Fein 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 Shem Fane. Highly, highly recommended. I won't waste any more of your time because we want to hear from Patrick Raddenkeef, who wrote Say Nothing, 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 it's gonna happen, so then she's gonna 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 Raddenkeef. Andy and I will be back in some capacity in the United States next week.

• 16:28Chris Ryan?

  I hope everybody has a great weekend and enjoys Say Nothing.

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• 17:06Chris Ryan?

  Patrick Rattenke, thank you so much for joining The Watch. Andy and I have been talking 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?

• 17:39Speaker 04

  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 vs. OJ Simpson.

• 18:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  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 know, you'd be there with us every step of the way. And I was, it took five years.

• 18:29Chris Ryan?

  And so were you involved in selecting the showrunner? Or was it down to casting? Were you on set? Like, tell me a little bit about what the kind of steps were.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  It was all the above. So I helped pick the showrunner, Josh Zetmer, 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 Infiltrator, which is actually about the IRA. 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 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-month 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?

• 19:24Speaker 04

  You know, right down to the, to the edits over recent months.

• 19:27Chris Ryan?

  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

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:37Chris Ryan?

  I know people like, I mean, there's a lot of waiting.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  There'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 listened to a great, there's a terrific podcast. Ian McEwan was a guest on the Adam Buxton podcast, which 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, 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

• 20:25Speaker 04

  these different tapes. And some of this was that I, I had lived with these characters for so long that to see, you know, this young actor from Liverpool, Josh Finan, who kind of came out of nowhere, at least for me, I had never seen him in anything before.

• 20:39Chris Ryan?

  Me neither, yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  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, their different styles, you know, the way they use the camera, the way they work with the actors, all of that, I found just thrilling. I mean, and education, it was like going to film school, but also just thrilling.

• 21:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I wanted to ask a little bit about the transition. 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 the Lords. And so when you're casting, I wonder if it takes on this extra element of it's not only trying to honor the creative intention of your work, but also the historical accuracy of who these people were.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  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, you know, 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.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  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, 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, it's a kind of license that doesn't, 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.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  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?

• 23:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why I love Say Nothing, the book and your 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 feel about certain people, not even in a moral way, as much as I'm able to like, 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 Kinnear 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 is something about

• 24:29Chris Ryan?

  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, you know, 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?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was hugely thrilling. I mean, I, I am a fan of genre. And when I'm writing, 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, you know, I want, 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, 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.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  But then the amazing thing about the series is that it can do all these things in a way that, 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, we open in the show with the abduction of this woman, Jean McConville, which is also the opening of the book.

• 26:19Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  But when you're actually watching this actor, Judith Roddy, play this mother of ten kids, you know, and get pulled out of her 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 take, and it's one of these things where every single take, you'd look around and, and everybody was crying. We're all just watching it cry. And, and that kind of, um, just like in your solar plexus feeling, you know, I don't know that it's necessarily unique to film, but, but you do realize you're just in a completely different kind of affective relationship with the viewer than you are on the page.

• 26:57Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I, you know, as you're talking, I was thinking about some of the descriptions, especially early on in the book of Divas 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 warrens 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?

• 27:42Chris Ryan?

  And, 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, 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.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, all the Brendan stuff in the beginning of the book about how he seems to be a hundred 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.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah. And the thing, I mean, and the thing that's that matters a lot to me that won't, it won't necessarily mean anything to certainly a lot of people in the US 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 Pettigrew is from West Belfast. Those two have known each other since they were kids.

• 29:21Chris Ryan?

  No way, really?

• 29:22Speaker 04

  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.

• 29:35Chris Ryan?

  I was curious about, as somebody, I guess, like, let's just loosely say writer and then as a creator now, whether or not your involvement in television on a 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, as you go forward with other projects, you know, I, 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 in, among the, like, sort of Russian oligarch community, that it's just an incredible piece.

• 30:18Chris Ryan?

  And, but I was curious whether or not, like, working in different mediums starts to bleed into your work as a writer?

• 30:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean. I guess the first thing I should say, just for the sake of clarity, is I was very, very involved in Say Nothing, but I'm not a creator of the show. It really is Josh Zedimer and this amazing room of writers. I mean, he put together this room of writers. It's Joe Murtaugh, who did The Woman on the Wall, who's like his own showrunner and his own right. It's Claire Barron, who's this Pulitzer-nominated New York playwright. And then Kirsten 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. 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.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  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. 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.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  And it always feels a little to me like somebody's really desperate to get the story optioned, 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 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 check out.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  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'm pleased with. Like, I'm a big fan of film and television, and I feel as though these genres can speak to each other.

• 33:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, 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 is like, 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.

• 33:48Chris Ryan?

  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.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  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 that's based on a true story, or even something that's based on mythology. I mean, you think about the crawl at the beginning of Star Wars, right?

• 34:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  Is 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, 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 pipe 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

• 35:11Speaker 04

  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 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?

• 35:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  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 the is sort of the best possible version of that.

• 35:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  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 Dolores Price, Brendan Hughes, and Jerry Adams, the matching of those actors and their 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.

• 36:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, the relationship these characters have, and I think as people involved in that conflict, but like specifically those Dolores and Brendan have, as older people with the secrecy that their youth had to happen in.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:32Chris Ryan?

  And then...

• 36:35Chris Ryan?

  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, that 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 heartbreaking.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  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, as the writer and showrunner, he said that, you know, he said, you know, to me, I think he literally told this to John Langraff 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 inner tension between their politics and their humanity. And these things are kind of constantly in tension. And in some cases, the, 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, since the book came out and in the last five years,

• 38:00Speaker 04

  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, suddenly you turn on the news and there are protesters in American streets, young people marching and militar, 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, the show is not like an op ed.

• 38:35Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:45Chris Ryan?

  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 archival information, tapes, et cetera, 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 onto 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 paramilitary's patrol." But I do find it quite entertaining and quite gripping.

• 39:29Chris Ryan?

  And especially in the book, 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? How is this recalled? And how did the dialogue kind of come to you?

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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, 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. It's like, "And then he told me to come over there. That's what I tell you." And you would maybe write, "He said, 'Come over here,' but it's not even going to be in quotes because of that hedge," right?

• 40:25Speaker 04

  What I was really struck by when I was writing the book was, I spent four years on it, I've made 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.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  And a little bit of humor, you know, makes these people more relatable and it and it 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.

• 41:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  At first of all, you know, picking up on the stuff in my book, in a bunch of cases, I gave them underlying research material. Where there's 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 banterish way of talking. And then we had Michael Lennox was one of our lead directors. So Mike Lennox is from Belfast. He directed the the first two and the last two episodes, last two as well. And he was a producer on the show. Mike directed every episode of Dairy Girls.

• 41:53Chris Ryan?

  Oh, I know that. I should have clicked on that.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Totally. So so he brings to it this kind of natural wit. I mean, in addition to sort of, you know, it's the it's the old idea of Francis Ford Coppola being able to smell the spaghetti when he made The Godfather, right? It's like, Mike can 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 who've seen parts of the show who are from Belfast.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And what's wonderful is they're like, I don't know how you did it. Like, I don't know how you guys captured that voice, that particular music.

• 42:42Chris Ryan?

  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.

• 42:57Chris Ryan?

  And the, 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.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  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 casted, it was really important to me that we not cast 30 year olds playing 20. You know, the woman who plays Marion Price, Hazel Dupe.

• 43:44Chris Ryan?

  God, she's good.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  I think Hazel's like 22 now. And Marion, the character, was 17 in the show. So like there's, 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, it's almost like a heist episode, you know, it's a sort of a, 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, go to the theater, they go to a play, some of them go out drinking and get, and get really loaded. Like the night before, they're gonna 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.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  That like 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, Belfast. And they go to London to bomb it, but then they're also like, it's London. It's this super fun town.

• 44:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  And so they, 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.

• 44:56Chris Ryan?

  Especially at that time.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for joining me. I don't want to take too much of your time.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 45:03Chris Ryan?

  It was, uh, 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.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  Oh, that's amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 45:13Chris Ryan?

  Thanks so much for joining me.