The Director of Dark Waters Promises It’s Actually Uplifting

Todd Haynes’s new movie, Dark Waters, is not an easy sell. For starters, it’s an environmental law drama. Much of it is set in offices about as warm and glamorous as the law itself. So far as action goes, there’s a lot of sifting through boxes of corporate files and driving back and forth between Cincinnati and West Virginia. It’s not exactly light, and it’s certainly not feel-good escapism.

It’s also unlike anything else Haynes, a formally experimental auteur known for indies about unconventional artists (I'm Not There) and queer society (Poison), has done. It’s more structurally conventional, and its protagonist is a reserved lawyer. Adapted from Nathaniel Rich’s 2016 article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” Dark Waters follows corporate lawyer Rob Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) through a painstaking 16-year battle to expose and combat the DuPont corporation’s brazen use (for Teflon products) and abuse of the deadly chemical PFOA. The story illustrates how corporations knowingly do harm to individuals and the planet in the name of profits, and how the system largely leaves us powerless. It's also about the human cost of dedicating one's life to a cause.

I found Dark Waters utterly gripping, deeply informative, and inspiring, required viewing for engaged citizens and cinephiles alike. But I also worry that, because it’s such a tough sell, it will be destined for a life sitting idly in people's streaming queues.

Haynes does not see it that way, though. He says that the movie “speaks for itself” as “a story about the amazing ability for people to change their views of the world and do something about it.” As with any great whistleblower drama—All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, and The Insider influenced Haynes, he says—we’re moving forward with the characters: We’re learning with them, getting outraged with them, being galvanized with them. And for Haynes, that process can be “incredibly therapeutic” because it “demonstrates how change does happen, how we do think differently.” Which, really, is as close to uplifting as things get these days.

GQ: What was the goal you had in terms of the effect this movie would have on its viewers?

Todd Haynes: Films have a unique impact in making people aware of certain situations in our society. And my films have almost always set out to, at some level, look at the lives of people with the interest of calling into question our social expectations and our social practices. How they deprive people of their freedom to be themselves, to not fit into pre-existing categories, to change, to not be stable subjects and identities. This fit all of that.

But my feeling is: Films don't just make social change happen. The social change has to happen by people. Films can move you and alert you and connect to you, but they have to do all those things first for action to be taken and for what they're trying to say to have an impact. **

Right now, there are a million different whistleblower stories that you could’ve told. Why did you want to tell this one in particular?

It’s a story about a massive scale of environmental contamination of a toxic chemical. And [the story] reminds us of global issues about climate change, our policies around our energy systems, and their unsustainability. These are things that have moved into the forefront of concerns among Americans.

But I also did this as a filmmaker. It was a dramatic challenge to tell a story that I find staggering. It had a lot to do with me wanting to stretch myself in this kind of genre, with something I hadn't done before. This story is challenging because it's a lot of third-hand information, and it's about a guy, at various stages, being locked in a room, walled in by the boxes he got from DuPont after a series of lawsuits. That's not an innately dramatic situation. How to tell the story, and how to keep you remembering what's at stake, was always the challenge.

When you watch this sort of a film as an audience member, there’s a tendency to question what you're doing with your life—what kind of impact you're making, and whether you could be doing more. Have you ever had those doubts in your own career?

It's not a one-to-one correlation with the kind of content that you put in a movie and the direct action that follows. Movies have this really interesting, contradictory way of entering our psyches and our dreams and our desires, and that's what interests me. I'm a filmmaker for those reasons. Otherwise, I'd make documentaries, which are essential in our culture. But I'm interested in narrative and the dramatic and identification with characters, and what that does to us from a whole series of vantage points that don't always have a direct product. I do think [movies] enter us more deeply and profoundly than any other mode of expression.

What was it like immersing yourself in this dark story?

I loved how with this movie, there's a tremendous pain and kind of despair that hangs over it. When Rob gets the amazing news at the end that they have established links to six serious illnesses from the exposure to the chemical PFOA, that's what he needed to get DuPont on the line and make them responsible for covering in perpetuity the health coverage of every single person in the class who comes down with any of those illnesses. And it exposes the news to the world, which is maybe the most important and incalculable cost to a company like this. But when you hear that news, you go, "Oh my god, this is the saddest good news in the world."

And I love that the movie walks that nice edge. These aren't happy stories—they don't have silver bullet solutions. It puts it back in our hands. It's a grown-up movie in a world where we're increasingly infantilized, where we’re returning to our childhoods and our franchise entertainments, and where we’re sort of dumbing down the complexities that we face in our lives. And I think a lot of people—not everybody—crave this from films. They want something they can sink their teeth into, that has the nuance, the ambiguities, and the subtleties of life, but that’s the story of an amazing individual.

You don’t actually reference this, but right after the movie ends, you get the Trump presidency, and Scott Pruitt basically undoes every environmental regulation. So as all of this terrible news was coming out, was there a sense of futility?

Well, I think futility is something that happens in all the best examples of this genre of movie. Because you're fighting systems of power. You don't really see them up close. You're usually locked inside with the people who are challenging power. It's almost part of the suspense. It's like, is this going to turn into something? And the amazing thing about a movie like All The President's Men is I feel that suspense. I feel that futility hanging over the entire film, even knowing that the outcome is going to be that the Nixon White House gets exposed and Nixon resigns as a result. They succeeded in the story that they broke and took down a president. But still, you're drawn into that present tense of what Woodward and Bernstein are uncovering. I find that to be incredibly compelling. And that's true for this film. Even when you know the outcome, Rob is not going to stop pushing back. And neither are people who care about these issues.

So are you ultimately optimistic that history can bend towards justice?

I think if not toward justice, it bends towards the truth getting out. And that's the thing a company like DuPont can't afford: the truth. They can afford to settle and make people shut up and sign nondisclosure agreements and try to cover up things. They can just throw out money and shut things up and keep their practices going. But what happened in this case is they had to both settle and pay out and replace the water systems in all of the districts that were in the suit, and the truth got out. So the ultimate wish that the farmer Wilbur Tennant had for the truth to get out—he didn't live to see it, but it has happened. It's because of Rob Bilott and him. And that really did ultimately change the way we think of DuPont and Teflon.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Originally Appeared on GQ