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"I felt like I'd kind of been to the top of the comedy mountain," Craig Mazin, who spent more than two decades as a screenwriter before becoming Chernobyl showrunner, said in an interview with Men's Health.
So how-or why-would someone with a comedy background want to develop a show about the largest man-made disaster in history?
Well, I'm not sure I did ever specifically want to," he said. "I started reading about it, and it became something that I had this connection to. It was a story that I felt I needed to tell, and it was a story I felt I knew how to tell.
That project, of course, became the miniseries that's aired on HBO over the last five weeks. It's focus is squarely on the horrifying-and avoidable-disaster that took innocent lives and left the town of Pripyat, in the Ukraine, abandoned forever. Depressing as it may be, this is Mazin's true passion project. "That writing is the most reflective of who I actually am," he said.
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Mazin began researching the Chernobyl Disaster in 2014, a year after the release of The Hangover Part III, and two years before The Huntsman: Winter's War-both movies that he wrote. The research began a year before his pitch to Carolyn Strauss, an executive producer of Chernobyl with deep ties at HBO. She had been president of the pay cable giant's entertainment division, commissioning shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Sex and the City in that time.
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Chernobyl prides itself deeply on accuracy, and Mazin went so crazy with his research that it might actually be easier to run through the types of research that he didn't do. In short, here's everything that Mazin did to make sure that he was bringing the most accurate depiction humanly possible to HBO:
- Reading books written by people who were present and involved with the Chernobyl Disaster
- Reading books by people who weren't present, but had the perspective to approach the disaster from a historical point of view
- Reading "deeply influential" first-person accounts
- Listening to audiotapes that needed to be translated
- Watching documentaries
- Reading government reports
- Looking at power plant blueprints
- Speaking with professors of nuclear physics
- Periodically checking back in with those professors to ensure proper understanding
- Checking with military advisors to make sure all of the gear was proper.
Another aspect of the research came not from looking into the disaster itself, but rather what life was like living in that setting at the time. For this, Mazin touched base with people who spent time living in the Soviet Union-more specifically, Soviet Ukraine. "I spoke with people who had lived there, and who were there at the time, and who could read the scripts and say, 'Great, except, nobody would say that. They would say that there,'" he said. "'We wouldn't do that, but we would do this.'"
Mazin wasn't the only one on set who was obsessed with the disaster, though. Odile Dicks-Mireaux-a costume designer who previously worked on movies like 2015's Brooklyn with Saoirse Ronan-worked in the same capacity on Chernobyl, and was just as detail-oriented as Mazin was, with every last detail down to people's shoelaces being based on an authentic reality. Every last detail, it seems, was of dire importance.
"That was our thing, to show respect to the people that went through Chernobyl by getting the details of their life right," Mazin said. "It was a question of respect for us.
Throughout all of his obsession with getting the details exactly right, though, Mazin never lost his sense of humor, or got uptight about anything. "He's very funny, and lovely to be around," said Stellan Skarsgrd, who, along with Jared Harris , plays one of series leads. "He is not stupidly protective about his material. You can discuss anything with him. You have to prove your point, of course, but from my point of view, he's been very open."
But in the end, not only is Chernobyl something completely new for Mazin, but it's work he's thrilled to do. "This is a whole new thing for me that I find incredibly satisfying, and fulfilling, which is-hold on to your hats-doing what I want to do," he says. "And after 25 years in the business, it's a good feeling."