Joshua Zetumer has been a working screenwriter for many years, working at every major studio with credits on numerous films, including 2014’s Robocop, Patriots Day, and as an in-demand script doctor. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is a 2018 book by writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. It was a bestseller and received widespread critical acclaim.
Zetumer adapted the book and researched The Troubles in Northern Ireland. This conflict was the basis for the book and the limited series, which was produced by FX Productions and released last November to great acclaim and impressive viewership. Zetumer spoke with Immersive via Zoom, detailing the long road to this remarkable achievement.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
Tell me about how you first got involved with this. First impressions of the book.
The book was brilliant, and it quickly became my new favorite. I also thought there was no way it’d ever get made as a film or show. The idea of doing an ambitious period show set in Northern Ireland, the odds of getting a greenlit was extremely slim. No matter how good the book was, I was cautious.
Thoughts on being an American adapting such an Irish story…
I’m not Irish, so I knew I’d be an outsider, and adapting very complex material would require a ton of research. I got in touch with Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson at Color Force. They’re marvelous producers with a really good track record of bringing true-to-life material to the screen.
Why did they seem to be a good fit?
I’ve been friends with Brad for a long time. He knew I spent a while developing a screenplay about the IRA partially set in Belfast. I was already steeped in the Troubles and the history of Northern Ireland. I did a ton of research about how to write in a way that would feel authentic to the story. I wanted to make Say Nothing accessible to a global audience who’d never heard of The Troubles.
Your background has primarily been in film; what was the switch to TV like?
I’ve been doing features for about 15 years. I have always admired writer-directors; this was a significant opportunity to feel that sense of authorship. It also meant much responsibility because the show was such a big canvas.
FX cares deeply about thematic stuff. They wanted the show to have a message and to have deep themes. The show is very concerned with the price of peace and the cost of silence. That was integral to pitching the show to John Landgraf (FX Chairman) and was also essential to me.
What was your approach to this in terms of genre?
I wanted to ensure we were capturing both the radical politics and the cost of those politics. It isn’t a thriller, but it has the propulsive energy of a thriller in parts. That was important because you want people to watch, and in that regard, nailing the dark humor was also really important to me.
Can you talk about being a showrunner for the first time?
I loved it. It’s exhilarating and stressful in equal measure. I obsessed over every detail, down to the exact shade of color of the characters’ sweaters. I spent hours and hours and hours in color correction with Vanessa Taylor, our colorist, going over the color. I wanted the colors to pop and be vibrant because the show is told through the prism of memory. When we’re in the past, particular memories should be extremely vivid.
What was casting like? Since this is based on a real story, how did that affect the process?
The casting process was intense and very detailed. We had over 200 parts to cast for nine episodes—so many parts that Nina Gold, the casting director, and I lost count of how many people we were casting. Director Michael Lennox, in particular, was very rigorous about ensuring the IRA gunmen felt authentic to the world of Belfast.
The key was getting the four young leads and then building it from there. Mike had been a long-time collaborator with Lola Petticrew, who plays Dolours Price. They had done some very charming anti-drug PSAs when Lola was a teenager. Lola has the kind of grit, fire, and vulnerability you need for Dolours.
Hazel Doupe, who plays Marian Price… I had seen Hazel in a small Irish horror film called You Are Not My Mother, and Hazel was a miracle on screen in this particular film. She held everyone’s attention throughout the movie by doing almost nothing. That’s tough to pull off, especially as a young actor. Hazel has so much soul, and her superpower is using silence and quiet to convey deep emotion.
Some of the most powerful moments in film and television are when you see an actor take in a moment and pause, and you just see what’s going on in their face.
It’s some of the most powerful stuff. After we cast the sisters, Anthony Boyle came next. He had so much charisma and rockstar swagger that he was a natural fit for Brendan Hughes. He also needed a deep well of vulnerability to draw from, and he could do that very effortlessly.
Josh Finan, who plays Gerry Adams, had the most challenging job out of anyone because he was playing somebody who everybody in Ireland knows who this guy is. He has a very distinct way of speaking, a low booming voice, a particular cadence that he uses, a role that could have easily slipped into caricature.
Josh was able to nail this duality of awkward outsider charisma. He also understood that Gerry could turn on a dime and crush you with a look or a few words because he was often the smartest person in the room in those IRA circles.
What was it like shooting on location? Did you match any of the places where some of these things actually happened?
We shot on location in Belfast for a decent chunk of the show. We needed an environment that we could really control and one where we wouldn’t harm the people who lived there. We also had a 135-day shoot, so we were not going to be able to leave rubble in the streets for weeks and weeks in any neighborhood without being run out of town, frankly.
We used a combination of on-location shooting in Belfast and shooting in Liverpool, which actually looks more like Belfast in the early seventies. It looks more that way now than Belfast does. We also shot in Sheffield.
I’ve been to Sheffield, there is an excellent atmosphere of new and old architecture.
They had a building there that looked exactly like Divis Flats in Belfast. The Brutalist architecture is the same. We only filmed one thing there, which was these gigantic apartment blocks. So we had Sheffield, Liverpool, and Belfast, and then we filmed a good deal on the lot that our incredible production designer, Caroline Story, built in a parking lot an hour north of London around Watford. So when you see armored personnel carriers moving down the streets, that’s a set. I didn’t want to build a set because often they look fake, but she did a fantastic job.
Being a showrunner means you have to think globally about the emotional architecture of the show, and you’re also making sure the props are correct because if the prop isn’t right, it will ruin the shot. So you’re writing and shooting and editing at the same time.The sheer number of daily decisions is vast, especially if you have the personality type that cares about the details.
For a show like this, the details are everything. So when it came to shooting on the back lot, there were a ton of conversations with the producers, the production designer, and me about how we would shoot on the back lot without it looking like a back lot.
This has been a wildly well-received show. You spent years on it. What’s it like being on the other end of that now?
I’m hugely relieved that people like it. When you’ve been working on a show like this for a while, you don’t know what you have. You make a show three times: on the page, on the stage when you shoot it, and then in post.
All you can hope for your work is that you feel affected by it. We put it out into the world, and I just had no idea what people were going to think. I didn’t know if people in Ireland would hate it or if people in England would hate it. The fact that it’s been embraced critically in the way it has… it’s more than I could have hoped for.
All 9 Episodes of Say Nothing are streaming at FX on Hulu.
