GREAT DRAMA
The idea seemed to fit a limited series – too big for a feature and the wrong basis for a volume drama. It was good timing as HBO was revisiting the world of short-run series. “HBO stood for the highest quality,” says Mazin. So he ran the idea past co-creators of HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones, Dan Wise and David Benioff, then talked to GoT executive producer Carolyn Strauss and wound up in the office of Kary Antholis, former president of HBO Miniseries. There was a thumbs- up all the way.
But no-one was pretending that this wouldn’t be a hugely ambitious and expensive production; it needed more than a following wind.
The way forward The wind blew in the right direction “Every step of the way, when things could go wrong or right, they went right,” says Mazin. First stop, a European partner with clout. By now it was 2015 and Jane Featherstone was launching new venture Sister Pictures in the UK. She picked up the phone to Antholis on day one. “It was the best treatment I had ever read,” said Featherstone, speaking at a BAFTA TV session in July of this year. “It was the way it was structured. It was a horror film, a war movie, a character piece. It just had such epic scale. I thought it was staggering.” With Sister Pictures on board, a co-production deal with Sky was settled in 2017 and production began.
Swedish director Johan Renck, who Mazin describes as “crazy, brilliant” took on the whole project, treating the five-episode production as if shooting a series of movies. The series earned him an Emmy, as it swept up a bunch of further Emmys on the same night. The series features 102 actors with speaking
Chernobyl, Sky Atlantic/HBO
roles. Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris took the leads. Harris, in particular, worked closely with executive producers Mazin, Featherstone and Strauss. “We were very supportive of each other,” says Mazin. “It felt like
IT WAS A HORROR FILM, A WAR MOVIE, A CHARACTER PIECE. IT JUST HAD SUCH EPIC SCALE
if the four of us weren’t on the same page, then maybe there was a problem with the page and we should fix it. .. It was the most ego-less, ulterior motive-less, pure kind of collaboration because we cared primarily about making something meaningful, beautiful and impactful.”
The shoot The five month shoot for the drama series included shooting at an actual Soviet era nuclear power plant in Lithuania, a location that took the team a full 18 months of negotiation to land. Recreating a nuclear disaster meant that the crew were charged with some spectacular feats of behind-the- scenes creativity and ingenuity “The kind of people we were hiring by and large were at the top of their game,” says Mazin. The result was another raft of awards for the craft behind the series, including gongs for music, sound, editing, costume design, production design, make-up, cinematography and vfx. “We had the best of everything.”
Special Supplement Spring 2021
televisual.com
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