AM: Back to the story of Dark Waters, I’m old enough to remember the Barbara Walters thing, what, 20/20, where they talking about Teflon flu for the first time, and after my mom, you know, made me dinner with our Teflon pans. But reading the New York Times piece, what was staggering was learning about the full scale of how everything had unfolded, that this company has such a behemoth footprint of 35 times the size of the Pentagon, you know?

TH: And that’s just the Washington works plant in Parkersburg.

AM: Yeah. It’s so deeply embedded in everybody’s social lives. And then all this stuff is in our blood. Like in the article, there’s one line that’s like, “Everywhere scientists have looked for PFOA, it’s been there.” How did filming in these actual locations change your point of view as a filmmaker, and as a human?

TH: I mean, a thing that I loved about this story is how it crosses such a sort of delicate spectrum of class distinctions, and you even feel those quite acutely just within the Taft world alone where Rob sits in relationship to Tom Terp, in relationship to Kim Burke, his colleague, whose father was a steel worker, and the status of pedigree among lawyers, and Rob not having a fancy law school degree. In all the years that this story unfolded, Tom Terp has never once invited Rob Bilott out for a drink. I’m just like, Wow, are you serious? It’s incredible to me. I mean, one has to commend [Terp]—he shifted the direction of this firm, a corporate law firm and a defense firm, and took the risk of its reputation. And he allowed this to continue for so many years, and I’m sure many of the partners—and he became managing partner then, around the time of the recession, which was particularly hard on this culture.

But really, it was about how that world became so dependent on, and in fact the entire story started with working-class people and farmers in Parkersburg, and how the water systems link all of us. And it begins in the neighboring, downstream areas of Parkersburg, West Virginia. But it spreads through the six water districts that became the 70,000 members of the class action lawsuit that is the main second half of the film. And then it spreads through the entire country, and then it spreads through the entire world; we’re linked that way. None of us elected to have our bloodstreams compromised by the ease of non-stick cookware. We’re invaded without our permission, in ways that we are by other systemic things like, I don’t know, capitalism, patriarchy. So there’s a ubiquity to this chemical that you can extrapolate from and feel. And of course, there’s incredible success in this story, and victory, but it’s heartbreaking for the state of the world. And the story does not have a silver bullet ending. And you feel the weight of it all, and the pain of it all, in the end. And I found that pain to be important in this story. And yeah, just that’s really the truth that we have to confront.

AM: Yeah, this toxic sludge runoff that’s in our blood, poisoning us slowly, as a result of unfettered capitalism and greed. I mean, that’s a pretty good visual metaphor for everything that’s wrong with our world, right?

I just want to drill into your artistic process a little bit. You’re known for your very meticulous preparation work before and during shooting—you have your image books, which is sort of a compilation of inspirations taken from life and other forms of art. When you were here, talking about Carol with us, you and Ed Lachman described the influence that Ruth Orkin and Saul Leiter had on the look of the film. I wonder what it was like putting that process together for a film like this, that was hewn from a real-life story?

TH: It was the same. it was still looking at film precedents and film and inspirations from film and doing frame grabs. It was still collecting photography of Stephen Shore, and Gordon Parks, and a whole range of American cinematographers. And painting—Richter, and Bechtle, I love his photorealist paintings. But combined with a lot of the photography I myself took on that very first trip, and with us finding in the Taft law offices alone this kind of visual interplay of shadow and light, of corridors that were divided up, at least 45-degree angles, sort of early ‘90s architecture, probably a 1980s building that had no 90-degree angles that was all, like, askew.

We shot in the Taft law offices, and we found a gutted floor 10 floors above the actual floor that we could then build Rob’s office in as a set. Rob was working in the same building, but we could have the same cityscape views of downtown Cincinnati that were in the actual office. So it was kind of seamless. We also built the big conference room, and those triangular rooms, that conference room was a triangle that had those glass partitions with the frosted glass stripes that we shot through—all this stuff came from the actual architecture of the place. I worked with a new designer I hadn’t worked with before, the extraordinary Hannah Beachler. She, Ed, and I all agreed that were this not the Taft law offices, we still would have wanted to shoot in this place—it just yielded so much visual specificity and claustrophobia. And then strange, surprising views through to the Ohio River, through architectural sort of divides that Ed blocked and that kept interrupting your views; it sort of was a metaphor for searching and discovering.

AM: Can you talk about the decision to actually incorporate [the real-life] Bilott, and his wife, and Bucky Bailey into the film?

TH: Oh, yeah. Well, there’s a documentary that came out the beginning of 2018 called The Devil We Know that is sort of this story about DuPont and Teflon, but focusing more on Bucky and his mother, Susan Bailey. This guy is just an amazing presence, and it’s hard to find words to describe him because he’s been through so much. But, you’ll see if you see the movie, the kind of love and unconditional love that he was raised with, as a child who had 20 surgeries on his face, and was so ashamed to go out in public as a kid; his father was a pastor who was just like, “Bucky, you are beautiful, you’re so beautiful,” you know? And his mom was so devoted to him—and she worked in the Teflon line, and was pulled out and then put back right after she gave birth to Bucky Bailey... And birth defects was not even one of the six illnesses that were found as a link to the exposure to PFOA. Seven years is a long time to wait for people who are sick— and that was because of so much medical data that was accumulated. But there may have been even more illnesses and links found had it been even longer, you know?

Thank you guys so much.