Danny Strong Q&A: 'I liked starting with emotion'
The creator of 'Dopesick' unpacks the process of bringing the sprawling opioid crisis to TV
Dopesick, the Hulu limited series about the origins of the Opioid epidemic, scored a remarkable 14 Emmy nominations this year, including writing, directing and producing noms for creator Danny Strong, who previously won a pair of statues in 2012 for his work on Game Change.
Dopesick is partially based on journalist Beth Macy’s book of the same name and it deals smartly with the challenges of adapting non-fiction for the screen: How do you compress time and characters for storytelling efficiency? Should you use composite or fictional characters? What’s the value of having the author or expert in the writing room?
As the Emmys approach, I chatted with Danny about all that, plus consolidation in the streaming wars, why he doesn’t keep a notebook of ideas, and his thoughts on the possibilities for a Trump/January 6th movie.
Where you were when the book Dopesick came into the picture?
I was looking at my computer and I saw that Fox 21 had bought the book, and I was baffled because I'd already sold an opioid crisis show to 20th, the sister studio. So it was like, what just happened? Obviously, the two studios didn't know what the other was doing. So they asked me if I would team up with [producer[ Warren Littlefield and [author] Beth Macy. Beth wanted to be in the writer's room — that was important to her. I thought having an expert in the writer's room on the opioid crisis sounds great to me. I met with her and just loved her so it was a fast yes.
Take me back earlier. How did you get interested in the opioid story?
[Producer] John Goldwyn had seen a movie I'd done and asked to meet. He pitched me this idea of writing and directing a movie about the opioid crisis. This had come off of the New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe about the Sacklers and their role in the opioid crisis. I started researching. I reread the article. I bought a couple books and thought that the whole thing was fascinating and enraging and maddening. I came up with this way into the story by having these prosecutors bring a case against Purdue, so I could do it as a crime story. I wanted to do it like Traffic and have a story with victims and a story within Purdue Pharma. When I came up with that version, it felt it would be way too long for a movie, so I pivoted to a limited series and John loved the idea.
Did you not pursue any underlying IP?
I was not looking for IP because I had read two books. There was so much information in those two books, and I knew that there were two others — this was before Empire of Pain and Dopesick came out. There was just gonna be so much information out there. And I knew that I was gonna do this composite character, a doctor and his patient as one of my major storylines. So I wasn’t planning on pursuing anything.
You already were thinking of interweaving facts and fictionalized characters?
Yeah. The reason why I knew I wanted to do that was because I had written a movie, The Butler, that was part real-life, part fictional characters. I loved working that way. You get the best of both worlds. You get the best of history, the best of true life, and then you get to manufacture storylines so that you're not handcuffed to exactly what happened. Very early on I thought, oh, I'm gonna have this fictional doctor and patient. It's gonna really free me up story-wise so that I could do personal relationship stories. There were so many anecdotes of addiction that were so similar. I thought I could use all these different anecdotes, which could create these more universal characters than if I was beholden to the path that one person had taken.
I make a distinction between a story that's true, and a story that's honest.
In the case of dramatizing, you're turning years into hours. In some cases, I have found that, through dramatization, you're able to oddly make it even more true sometimes than if you were just stuck with the facts. I don’t know if the words “a more universal truth” work — but something that can really capture the spirit of what people were going through. Sometimes it is hard to capture that when you're having to tell the facts, beat by beat, as they exactly happened. Aaron Sorkin sums it up really well. He is the master of the genre and he says, ”It's a painting, not a photograph.”
Beth Macy is a journalist who comes at it from the photographic point of view, so to speak, and you're a screenwriter, who comes at it from the painting point of view. I'm wondering what that intellectual tension was like.
There was no tension. I did Recount and Game Change — those are very journalistic, even though they're movies and there's fictionalization in them. This was the same approach. I wanted this to feel as real as possible, as accurate as possible. I completely embraced her thoughts on that. One of the great things about having her there was having a journalist constantly finding new stuff. She was very deft at it too. She would just find stuff very quickly at times. Once people started hearing we were doing this, they would start leaking documents to her and then we would start doing new interviews and get new information. I would be able to get people to talk to me that weren't willing to talk before. Then I could go straight to Beth — her being a real journalist and me being a fake journalist — and we would sort of talk it out. It was great having someone like that in the swimming pool with you.
You mentioned Traffic. Was that the model that most influenced you?
Not visually, but structurally. Traffic was one of my first inspirations when I started thinking I want to do multiple stories.
One thing distinctive about Dopesick is that it takes place over a long number of years, and you intercut the stories in a non-linear narrative. How did you decide you wanted to do that?
It came from my original way into the story, with the U.S. Attorneys out of the Western District of Virginia. That to me was gonna be the spine of the story. And then I came across the DEA agent who also put a case together against Purdue, and I thought this is a great case. These are two great cases. They need to be in the spine, but what they were investigating happened like six years earlier. So if I had done the story linearly then the Peter Sarsgaard character, [U.S. Attorney] Rick Mountcastle, wouldn’t have shown up until episode six and [DEA agent Bridget Meyer played by] Rosario Dawson wouldn't have showed up until episode four and I didn't want [that], I wanted those cases to be the narrative spine of the show. I thought, well, I can do this in two time periods where we're in “the present day storyline” which is the prosecutor, and then one of the past, which is the victims of Purdue — Michael Keaton and Caitlyn Deaver's characters and the DEA agent.
But then it became clear to me I couldn't do the DEA agent in that timeline because the DEA didn't really know what was going on in ’96 with Purdue. So then I'm like I gotta do a third timeline — that’s gonna make this much harder. Okay, this is gonna be complicated, but fuck it. I'm just gonna go for it. I remember constantly telling Hulu when they asked, “Is this gonna be confusing?” — “No, no, no, it's gonna be great,” but I was sort of bullshitting them a little bit [laughs] because I wasn't sure myself how it would work. But then as you would read the script, it just didn't seem to be a problem. It wasn't important that you knew exactly what year you were in. What mattered is if you knew — were you in the past, present or sorta the middle? And that's when I came up with that dial of going back and forth, because I thought that's all the audience needs to know.
In terms of structure, did you have goals in mind to make the cuts work for the viewer?
I kept finding new things in post — in some ways it was less about the timeline and more about the emotionality of the story. One thing that I kept coming back to when I was cutting the episodes was I just really liked it when we started with either Keaton or Caitlyn Deaver’s story — that we start emotional and then act two would go into one of the cases, but they weren't written that way. It was just what I had discovered in post, that I liked starting with emotion and then getting more into the procedural casework as the episode goes.
You’ve talked about how making Dopesick made you more of an activist. What's the distinction between passion and activism as an artist?
I think there's an activism at the outset. But if the piece functions purely as activism, I think it won't work. The goal is that we're trying to tell a great story and there is an element to the story of trying to get a message across and themes across that could have an activist bent. That certainly was the case here.
You’ve talked about how you hoped there would be justice for the Sacklers. What does justice look like in this case? Is it jail? Money?
Yeah, I think that's gonna be different for everyone at this point. Because there's been so much suffering from the actions of Purdue Pharma. It can feel really overwhelming and unwieldy. What does justice look like? I personally feel that the people that were responsible for this — that profited from it — they’ve not been indicted individually and they deserve to be. Then from that indictment, they can get a trial in front of a jury of their peers. And that jury can decide if they truly belong in jail or not. But I do think that that trial has not happened and it should happen. Justice won't exist for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, until there is some sort of legal resolution, not just financial. That is yet to happen.
Tell me how you find material.
It's just a combination of so many things. I'm fortunate that I get submitted a lot of material. I read a lot of things myself. I’m not always actively looking for things. I'm just reading things that are interesting to me and then occasionally that will spark something. Sometimes a studio or a network has a very specific idea they're interested in and they'll submit it to me and that's always a great place to be because there's already interest in making it. There's no one path.
With all the upheaval going on right now in streaming, do you think that there will still be room for something like Dopesick, or is it all gonna be Lord of the Rings and Marvel TV?
Not everything I've worked on were things that were exactly what the studios were looking for. So Dopesick, everyone passed on. No one wanted to make The Butler. I did this movie Rebel in the Rye about J.D. Salinger — no one wanted to make that, but I was able to get it financed independently. Whenever you work on this type of material, it's usually not what people are looking for. Then the companies that decide to do it, like an HBO or a Hulu, seem to get rewarded for it over and over again. Look at this year, Dopesick was very commercially successful. The Dropout was very commercially successful. White Lotus. All these shows that are the opposite of what you're talking about. So it would be weird to me if all of a sudden these companies are deciding not to make them.
How do you approach pitching a series like that to executives skittish about alienating part of the audience with something that's politically charged?
I know what I want to do and the story I want to tell and I just go for it. If no one wants to make it, then [laughs], it doesn't get made. But usually I find that, that if you have an entertaining way in and are really passionate that, that you can find some partners that see what you see. But the truth is, everything's hard to get made, even if you're doing exactly what you think the studio or the network wants.
Considering you’ve done Recount and Game Change, would you do a January 6th or Trump movie?
I get asked that a lot and it's tough for me to talk about. Trump’s always challenging because every day is crazier than the next day. There’s a whole committee investigating whether the president of the United States was responsible for that insurrection. That feels like as crazy as it gets and now the FBI raided his home to see if he stole nuclear secrets. It just doesn't stop. So it makes constructing a story difficult, because you're constantly getting outdone by the previous event. It's a wild, pretty insane moment in U.S. history.
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