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HBO:
What attracted you to this subject?
Scott Z. Burns:
It was a few things. When I was a little kid
growing up in Minnesota there were these
tests of the Emergency Broadcast System.
And air raid sirens would go off like the first
Wednesday of every month. And my father
had worked for Honeywell so I had some
knowledge of the defense industry and had
always been sort of fascinated by the Soviet
Union and by nuclear physics, and sort of
terrified of the bomb. I think that was always
inside of me and part of my growing up in
America during the Cold War.
And then I happened across a collection of
short stories in a book store in New York one
day called PU-239. I purchased the book and
read the short story. At the time I was
working on a television show with Peter Berg
called Wonderland. And I gave Peter the short
story, mainly because I just thought it was a
great piece of writing. And we started talking
about it and he said, Well, do you want to
write that as a movie? And I said, Sure. Peter
was attached to direct it for a while, but his
career sort of took him away from doing a
movie of that size. And I was fortunate to find
myself in a position where I got to direct it.
HBO:
The film balances dark humor with pathos.
Was that a conscious choice?
Scott Z. Burns:
It may have been the naivete of a first time
screenwriter, because this was the first
screenplay I ever wrote. I started doing
research into Russia in the early 90s, and I
found these incredibly absurd Wild West
stories. It was a place where these comically
diabolical events would transpire, and then
also truly heartbreaking things.
Chernobyl itself is frequently cited as one of
the contributing factors to the fall of the
Soviet Union because it required such
mismanagement of information and was so
indicative of the level of dishonesty at that
point in the Soviet Union.
I went to Russia as a college student in 1980
when it was still Soviet. And the Russians
weren't very good at anything. They weren't
very good at socialism and I don't think so far
they've proven to be much better at capitalism
or democracy.
HBO:
You've managed to create a likeable lead
character out of someone who's engaged in a
diabolical deed. Even the Russian wannabe
gangster, Shiv, is sympathetic.
Scott Z. Burns:
Both characters want to be good providers,
but the society is broken around them. The
normal kinds of behavior and the normal
sorts of pursuits won't get them those things.
So they start making compromises and start
having to break the rules. And once you start
it's very hard to stop.
My hope is that the personal stories and the
motivations of the characters would humanize
them and make the audience evaluate events
that are still going on in the world today. You
know, when we look at terrorist behavior and
things that are really horrible, sometimes we
forget to look at the societies and the
conditions that have fostered that behavior.
HBO:
How believable is the scenario you've created?
Scott Z. Burns:
Well, since the fall of the Soviet Union there
have been more than one hundred and ninety
cases of people illegally smuggling nuclear
material. And that's the number that were
caught. So the real number is probably much
greater. And some of those have involved
weapons-grade plutonium or uranium that
was headed in that direction.
I think it is believable and there are markets
for it. And even when we were making the
movie in Rumania, there was a news report
one day that agents had picked up someone
for smuggling a radioactive isotope out of
Bulgaria into Rumania, and that they traced it
back to a nuclear facility in Russia.
And with the amount of corruption in Russia,
when you read the experts, most of them are
more likely to say 'when' rather than 'if' there
will be some sort of use of plutonium or other
nuclear isotope, whether it's in a real bomb,
or a dirty bomb, or through some means of
dispersal.
There are many people who felt that the arms
race devastated the Soviet Union, financially,
by bankrupting them, which may have
worked as a ploy in the Cold War. But the
comeuppance of that is that once you've sort
of emptied the coffers of your enemy, you now
have an enemy that has a collapsing
infrastructure that built a lot of bombs.
And the Faustian deal that humanity has
made with all things nuclear is one that has
this incredible longevity to it, because
plutonium lasts for forty thousand years.
Have we ever known a political entity that was
going to last for forty thousand years or a
government that was going to last for forty
thousand years that could really be the
steward of that kind of power?
Another thing I wanted to accomplish with the
film was for American audiences to be able to
see how commercial American ideas have
their own sort of radioactive pulse, and that
they spread out around the world in the same
way that radioactivity does. Our music and
our commercialism have their own radioactive
pulse in the same way that nuclear isotopes
do, and that they influence and to some
degree, infect everything that comes in
contact with them.
HBO:
What do you hope audiences will take away
from the film?
Scott Z. Burns:
I hope people will have more of an awareness
of this incredible, frightening power that we
have to split atoms and, in a sense, that it's
become mundane since the Cold War. And
it's not going away. The nuclear calendar is so
long and so unforgiving that we've decided to
play with something that so outdistances our
attention span. And I hope that people pause
and focus on that because it seems strange to
me that we've lost some of our fear of that.
I also hope people are moved, entertained and
informed. And if they walk away from the
movie and hug their children, that'll make me
happy because I think the movie is about the
triumph of family. The smallest and most
meaningful unit in any society, regardless of
what the government's doing. And that's
really important to me because I think that's
what's redeeming about the characters in the
movie, if there is redemption for them.
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HBO Store
Something the Lord Made starring Alan Rickman and Mos Def. Buy the DVD now at the HBO Store!
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