‘Say Nothing’ creator and director on how they created a ‘truthful’ and ‘authentic’ portrait of the Troubles
“I think for me as an outsider writing the story, it had to be treated with a ton of respect, and it meant I had to do just a crazy amount of research, a profound amount of research if I was ever going to hope to get the details right, and with a series like this, the details are really everything,” comments Joshua Zetumer, the American creator and showrunner behind FX on Hulu’s Say Nothing, which tells the story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland over the course of multiple decades. Watch our complete video interview with Zetumer and executive producer/director Michael Lennox above.
Say Nothing focuses specifically on four real-life members of the Irish Republican Army: Dolours Price, her sister Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams (who has denied ever being a member of the IRA). We follow them from their early years to their haunted adulthood, when they call into question whether their actions to free Ireland were worth the human cost. Lennox grew up in Belfast, so he’s fairly close to the subject matter. “ I know a lot of people who lived through the era. My parents lived through the era,” Lennox explains. “ Because I grew up there, I had quite a big access of people who lived through the time period.” So he was equally determined to make the series “truthful” and “authentic.”
Also important for Lennox was “ getting inside the mindset of what it’s like to be 18 years old and idealistic, and that sense where things are a bit more black-and-white and things are a bit more simple.” But as the director of the first two episodes and the last two episodes, he was also able to explore the “flip side of what happens when you live through a conflict like this, and Belfast changes and time changes, but you’re left with the decisions of youth, which have wrecked your life and wrecked a lot of other people’s lives.”
But because the subject matter could be “very serious” and “very grim,” Zetumer felt it was important “that there was a sense of humor, that this series really felt alive, that you were balancing humor and heartbreak, which is part of the Irish storytelling tradition, frankly, where comedy and tragedy are sharing a bed together.” That would “ represent kind of the attitude in Belfast, which is trying to find a way to laugh even in the darkest of times.” And it would represent the characters in their impetuous youth. That’s why it was important to bring on a director like Lennox who had experience in comedy, having previously helmed the series Derry Girls. “ Other directors might have played it a little bit straighter. Mike just was carrying the tone in his heart from the very beginning.” It’s a tight-rope walk, so ”you’ve got to find the right people in order to protect and preserve a specific tone.”