00:00Lo so che molte persone non pensano a noi lassù, sulle montagne.
00:07Molti dei miei pazienti sono minatori.
00:09È un mestiere pericoloso e portano il peso di costruire un paese sulle proprie spalle.
00:15Soffrono molto.
00:16Questa gente, la mia gente, si fidava di me.
00:21È incredibile quanti di loro siano morti.
00:30Quando you publishedo Dope Seek in 2018,
00:34you had the idea of an adaptation for cinema or television,
00:39or it was a surprise to receive a call from Ulu?
00:45Yeah, it was a little more circuitous than that.
00:49I have an agent that brought in a film TV agent,
00:53and she shopped it around, and a lot of people wanted it.
00:57So I was lucky to be paired with Danny Strong,
01:01who was able to sell his vision for it to Hulu.
01:06And, you know, Hulu really took a chance, Hulu and Disney,
01:10because it's a tough subject that not everyone is like,
01:14that's going to be a TV show?
01:16You know, it's pretty dark.
01:18But Danny has such a way of bringing humanity to everything he does.
01:24And, you know, even the villains in this series,
01:27you have some sense of feeling for them.
01:29And that's what I think it took.
01:32And he just did a great job with it.
01:34You are not only a writer, but even a producer of the series.
01:39How did you work in the work?
01:41You were on set.
01:42You followed the casting.
01:45How did you work in there?
01:47Yeah, I was mostly involved in the writer's room.
01:50So there were six of us.
01:53Danny was in charge.
01:55It was me.
01:56One of the people in the room had experience, was in recovery.
02:00Two of the people in the room were from small town America,
02:03and that really helped.
02:05Danny allowed me to hire some, or he hired,
02:08but some people I recommended to come in as consultants.
02:10So we had a real Appalachian author that helped us make sure the dialogue was right.
02:16And then basically what we did in the writer's room was we broke the story,
02:20we outlined it, and then everybody kind of went off individually working with Danny
02:26and wrote the episodes.
02:27I think he wrote most of the episodes,
02:30and then everybody in the room got to co-write at least one.
02:33I got to co-write two.
02:35And that was really interesting.
02:37It was very different from writing a non-fiction, a long-form book.
02:41In the series, we see how difficult it was for Rick Moncastle to find witnesses,
02:46people who wanted to talk against Purdue Pharma.
02:51But writing and publishing the book before,
02:57and then making a series was difficult, which were the main obstacles?
03:06That's a great question.
03:07When I first started reporting in 2012 on the crisis,
03:11most families were so ashamed and so stigmatized that they didn't want to go on the record.
03:17I mean, I managed to get some just by going back and being really open and honest
03:22and trying to build trust, which takes time.
03:25You know, luckily in a book, you have time.
03:28But by the time we set about to write my book and then the show,
03:34there was almost no family in America that hasn't been touched by this epidemic.
03:38So it was easier to get victims and families to talk on the record.
03:42Now, for the show, we brought in experts and, like, there's one person, Dr. Steve Lloyd,
03:49who is loosely, the Michael Keaton character is loosely based on him
03:54and some other doctors that Danny knew of.
03:57But he actually came into the writing room with us one day for a couple of hours.
04:01And he is a doctor who got addicted himself and now is an addiction doctor.
04:05And there's no aspect of the story that he doesn't know.
04:09He's even testified in opioid litigation.
04:12He used to be Tennessee's drug czar.
04:14He knows the science.
04:16He's an avid reader and researcher.
04:18And he was fantastic.
04:20So we just kept doing our research because new documents were coming out all the time
04:27related to the litigation.
04:29People leaked us documents.
04:32Danny and I re-interviewed people who used to work for Purdue.
04:36You know, we interviewed a secretary.
04:37We interviewed former salespeople.
04:40And we were able to just keep building the story that way.
04:45You made a cameo in the third episode.
04:49How was it being on camera for the first time?
04:53Oh, harder than it looks.
04:56I think some of my lines got cut because I didn't quite nail them.
05:01Like just memorizing all that was harder than it looks.
05:04I remember driving to Richmond sort of reciting my lines over and over and over.
05:08It was really fun.
05:09And I didn't realize because of COVID, that was the only time I got to go to set because
05:13there were so many testing restrictions.
05:15and I was very much on deadline with another project.
05:18So I didn't have a lot of, I couldn't come up here and spend a week in Richmond to go
05:22through all the testing.
05:23So I only came for that day that I had the cameo, but it was super interesting.
05:27And my scene is in this VFW hall and there were like 30 extras in the room.
05:33There were 20, you know, crew members.
05:37And every take that you see, they shoot from like four or five different angles.
05:41So I was there for five, we were shooting that one scene for like five hours and I,
05:46I had no idea it was that involved.
05:50They didn't tell me it was going to take five hours to do four minutes of the show.
06:06This drug will become a world success.
