Scott Z. Burns has tackled some of the weightiest subject matter in a series of movies made in concert with Steven Soderbergh—movies like The Informant!, Contagion and Side Effects—in ways that are…
a year and a half later. It’s funny, because initially I had an idea to doas kind of a very dark comedy, and yet it became clear to me, as I started my research, that the story was so upsetting that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it in a darkly comic back-to-school kind of way. So that ended up going down a different path.
DEADLINE: Cutting through the headlines when it comes to a report into torture practices by the U.S. Government and the mass data dump of the Panama Papers can’t be easy. How do you find the humanity?: What works for me is, I go through this process that I’m very aware of when I’m doing my research, which is racking focus between the micro and the macro and back again.
The situation politically in the U.S. has evolved since I wrote the movie, and this issue of transparency and accountability has become more and more resonant. I think you can connect the early oughts and the fact that Bush and Cheney and the CIA were not held accountable, to what we’re living through now, where there is no transparency and there is no accountability, and we’ve turned the tables to such a degree that suddenly the press and the truthtellers are the bad guys.
So, there’s that aspect of it, and when I was writing the script, I wanted to find a way to have all of these things ripple across the world and find the victim. And when Meryl Streep became involved in the project and was going be Ellen Martin, I decided that the comic idea would be to have all of these things sort of cross her threshold.: I’m glad that moment landed for you.
When you’re in that kind of relationship where there isn’t a lot of space for human emotion, you realize that you don’t have to do much to actually make something really resonant. Even at the end, when she comes to his office and says thank you, when I was talking to Annette Bening about it I said, “You’re going to his office. That’s the only time in the movie where you are going to his office. And that in itself is such a huge gesture. I don’t know that we need to layer in a lot more emotion.
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