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‘Your Nose Is Pressed Up Against the Ambiguity of It’
How Patrick Radden Keefe and Joshua Zetumer captured Say Nothing’s contradictory portrait of The Troubles onscreen.
Through the perspectives of several participants and victims — Dolours and Marian Price, sisters who drew international attention to the cause with their hunger strikes; Brendan Hughes, a frontline leader for the Provisional Irish Republican Army; Gerry Adams, a PIRA strategist who later became the head of the Irish republican political party Sinn Féin and a key player in negotiating an end to the violence; and the McConvilles, a family torn apart by the violence — Keefe brings the sprawling, contentious clash to street level. Keefe, Simpson, and Jacobson found their distiller-in-chief in showrunner Joshua Zetumer, the screenwriter of 2014’s RoboCop remake and Patriots Day who had developed The Infiltrator, a film script about The Troubles, as one of his earliest jobs in Hollywood. Their writers’ room included Joe Murtagh ( The Woman in the Wall); Clare Barron, a 2019 Pulitzer finalist for her play Dance Nation; and Kirsten Sheridan ( In America), with Keefe routinely dropping by.
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