"They made lying an art: They lied to each other, they lied to the people above them...
...they lied to the people below them."
Craig Mazin's Years-Long Obsession with Making 'Chernobyl' Terrifyingly Accurate
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wbq4/craig-mazin-interview-about-chernobyl-hbo-miniseries-on-how-accurate-and-what-really-happened
Craig Mazin wasn’t born in the Soviet Union. He doesn’t speak Russian. He wasn’t there, in 1986, when Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded, spewing an unprecedented amount of radiation into the air and killing anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of people—a toll that's still being debated 33 years later. He wasn’t there to see the blast render entire cities uninhabitable, accelerate the collapse of the USSR, and forever reshape our collective relationship with the terrifying power of the atom. But somehow, in his five-part HBO miniseries Chernobyl, he has managed to capture this disaster, its fallout, and the lives of those affected by it so forcefully, it's hard to believe he didn’t live through it himself.
Mazin, Chernobyl’s creator, writer, and executive producer, tells much more than the story of what went wrong at the nuclear plant that powered roughly 10 percent of Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s. His dramatization is about the failings of the Soviet system, and the unique set of unsolvable problems that system created. It is about “the cost of lies,” a phrase we encounter in its first scene, and the danger of a world without truth. But more than anything, it is about humanity: In Chernobyl’s exploration of the people responsible for the disaster, the first responders who died combatting it, and the everyday citizens whose lives were irrevocably changed by it, the series gives us a portrait of humanity in all its complexity—one as terrible, and beautiful, as the real thing.
Chernobyl accomplishes this, in part, by adhering as closely as it can to historical fact. Every major character save one—a nuclear physicist played by Emily Watson—has a real-life counterpart, from the scientist in charge of cleanup efforts (Valery Legasov, played by Jared Harris), to the wife of a firefighter at the scene of the explosion (Lyudmilla Ignatenko, played by Jessie Buckley). The clothing Chernobyl’s characters wear, the cars they drive, the cigarettes they smoke, the glassware they drink from, the wallpaper in their homes—all of it is staggeringly accurate, a product of more than two and a half years of research.
So how is it that Craig Mazin, a 48-year-old screenwriter from Brooklyn, managed to tell the story of Chernobyl so well? Why was he so drawn to it, and why was he so committed to getting the details right, down to the rivet on a firefighter’s uniform? These questions are, I imagine, on a number of Chernobyl viewers’ minds; they have been on mine since his name flashed across the screen at the end of the first episode.
more at link...
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if you haven't had a chance to see HBO's Chernobyl, do so. It should be required viewing of everyone in the world. Find some way to view it.
and given our current climate of our liar in chief, you can see how we are devolving as a nation into a dictatorship of lies.
