We’re living in a moment for urgent, quickly made political storytelling in Hollywood—and Dark Waters, the new thriller from Todd Haynes, is a case in point. Based on a 2016 New York Times Magazine feature by Nathaniel Rich, the film tells the story of Rob Bilott, a corporate defense attorney who makes the stunning choice to work on behalf of the little guy—local farmers in West Virginia—to sue DuPont chemical company, the kind of company his law firm usually defends.
In Haynes’s hands—with the help of actors like Mark Ruffalo (who plays Bilott), Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman, Bill Camp, and Mare Winningham—this legal and political drama becomes a more pointed examination of class difference, social ties, and the intricacies of domestic life. It becomes a Todd Haynes movie, in other words, despite being of a genre Haynes has never explored before.
I recently spoke with Haynes to discuss the origins of this project, the challenge of making a film more quickly than he ever has before, and why his body of work this decade has so much variety.
Right now, critics are in the middle of thinking about the decade in movies. So I’ve been thinking about your decade: from HBO’s Mildred Pierce, to Carol, to Wonderstruck, to Dark Waters. You’ve been changing it up quite a bit.
Well, one thing that’s marked this decade is that I’ve started to direct movies that I didn’t write and develop myself. That’s been an amazing experience for me. It’s crowded up and diversified the process of filmmaking, but also it surprised me, and it’s alerted me to different modes of practice.
And then in other ways, it makes me think, wow, every time I write my own script, it’s almost—not discardable, but it’s the blueprint. It’s the thing you use to make the movie. One has to know and remember that what you end up shooting is going to shock the bejesus out of you, because it’s not going to be what you pictured, whether you wrote the script or not. What you start to cut is going to change and shift. It’s this constant; you have to keep discarding.
Maybe in some ways, that’s something that also happens through a career—that I feel like I do something, immerse myself in it, open myself up to learning fresh about the medium through that particular genre or story or setting or period of history. Then, it’s out of my system, and I can then humble myself in front of the next thing and. I’ve talked to some of the most extraordinary people I’ve worked with who say, “I always feel like I’ve never done it before when I start something new.” You don’t feel more equipped. You feel naked. If you didn’t then why do it? In a way, if it’s not going to test you, challenge you, make you rethink things, that really is a goal. That is a goal.
How did Dark Waters challenge you? Because it feels adventurous in the sense that it diverges from the stories about queer people and women that have defined your career, but on the other hand, it’s still very much interested in characters’ interiors and social environments, to say nothing of intimacy.
Yeah—and isolation and space and class in a really, really distinct way. That really attracted me to the story, among other things. Well, no—on the one hand, I saw through lines, and on the other hand, I was doing something very different. To me, it was really like, Wow, what is it about these movies? What is it that I love so much about movies like this? Because I do.