There's an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it's called 'Come and See.' Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.
My hope and my intention was that people would experience the tragedy of what Chernobyl was in every regard: a scientific tragedy, a political tragedy, an emotional and personal tragedy, all of that.
The planet is heating; the climate is changing. We know this. We have not just one scientist, or two, but thousands screaming this at us at the top of their lungs. And we have a government full of disinterested, stubborn people who are going to cling to their denial and their nonsense.
Chernobyl happened in April of 1986. A few months earlier, in January 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. It did not have the impact on the environment and the amount of lives that Chernobyl did, but it was the result of the same exact problem: a failure of a lot of people and institutions over a long period of time.
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.
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.
I am eternally impressed and amazed by what directors do.
In the case of 'Chernobyl,' we're telling a story of a government that runs on lies the way cars run on fuel, and there are people who ultimately end up paying the price for those lies - and a certain culture of denial is in place, and the degradation of expertise is in place.
Of all the bad things Internet has done for us, one of the good things is exposing us to people that were our neighbors, and now we're at happy to ask questions about things that we were otherwise willing to just walk by and not notice.
At some point, and maybe it's a function of age, you've had enough of it. You start to slide in other directions. A lot of comedy writers begin to turn the dial. With me, it was a switch. Comedy off. Drama on.
'Chernobyl' is a human story. It's not a disaster movie. It's not about explosions. It's about people and truths and lies.
When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.
I really hate people that spoil stuff by putting scripts online. I don't mind so much people that do movie spoilers when the movie is out in the theater. If you haven't gotten there the first weekend, it's on you to not read reviews or anything. But to put up screenplay reviews just kills me.
Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.
Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.
If I don't know who I'm writing for, I make it up and pick somebody I'm writing for. That's really the only way to do it.
When I'm writing stuff, I need to watch the scene in my head, like a little movie, or else it just feels stupid. It just feels very written. There are things that actors do and faces they make and pauses they take and their rhythms. You need that.
Sometimes critics disagree with the audience, and that's fine. I make movies for the audience. I guess I hope that the critics like it, but on the other hand, I just really want the audience to like it.
I grew up on lovely Staten Island, which is the forgotten borough of New York City.
Basically, the last 30 minutes of 'Goodfellas,' that was my neighborhood... literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that's what I thought being an adult was.
