THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER11, 2019 61
“Remember when this used to be an Italian restaurant, and we weren’t
people who knew what every storefront used to be?”• •
“Dark Waters” was Haynes’s first film
developed by a studio had him on edge.
They were tweaking a scene in which
Bilott first tells his wife about DuPont’s
dumping drums full of toxic sludge into
the Ohio River and the Chesapeake Bay
which soon began to wash up onshore.
“So DuPont starts digging ditches,”
Ruffalo’s Bilott says. “Huge open pits on
the grounds of the Washington Works
plant. And, in those pits, they dumped
thousands of tons of toxic CH sludge
and dust.”
“I don’t know if this is gonna track,
Fonz, but try ‘started digging ditches,’”
Haynes said. “We’re cutting out ‘huge
open pits.’ It’s not much, but try it.”
Fonzi reran the scene with the few
words scrubbed out. “He’s emphasizing
‘ditches’ so much,” Haynes said. “You
could do ‘so DuPont started digging
huge, open pits on the grounds of their
plant, Washington Works.’ Try that.”
Haynes thought for a moment. “Maybe
‘ditches’ is better. He says ‘pits’ in the
next sentence.”
“Let me show you,” Fonzi said, swiv-
elling back to the console.
“No, no, the other’s better.”
“The way we just had it?” Fonzi said.
“Yeah, I think that’ll work.”
Fonzi reinstated the previous trim,
then briefly left the room. “I have more
fun with Fonzi than I ever do on set,”
Haynes said. He compared the intimacy
of editing to the process of painting to-
gether. “You’re producing results. You’re
problem-solving,” he said. “You have to
be surrendering all the time, letting go,
looking at what you have in front of
you, which is not what you imagined.”
Haynes, who is concurrently editing his
documentary on the Velvet Underground
and developing a twelve-part TV series
on Sigmund Freud, has contrived to
keep himself almost continually in that
climate of surrender.
As part of their process, Fonzi first
edits a version of the film without con-
sulting Haynes. Meanwhile, Haynes as-
sembles his detailed notes to form a sort
of outline of the film as he sees it.
“What’s really interesting is that he and
I find our own favorite takes separately,
and they’re often the same,” Haynes
said. Once the two are in the editing
room, they start again from Scene 1.
From then on, the collaboration is more
or less a mind meld. “Are you feeling
what I’m feeling?” Haynes asked at one
point. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Fonzi said.
Haynes subscribes to Rainer Wer-
ner Fassbinder’s contention that rev-
olution belongs not on the screen but
in the world. “To provide an audience
with a solution—to give them the rev-
olution—is to deprive them of creat-
ing their own,” Haynes said. His films
ask viewers to contend with ambiguity,
which is part of their sly subversiveness.
In “Dark Waters,” Bilott is not only an
unlikely hero. He’s an unlikely messen-
ger for one of Haynes’s most deeply held
Freudian convictions: “There is no re-
solving of conflict. The conflict is the
process of life.” Haynes considers the
movie “a primer on how to live with as
much knowledge and awareness as pos-
sible.” He added, “There’s no silver bul-
let, no magic solutions. There’s no way
to just end corporate greed and corrup-
tion. But there are steps to take, and we
just have to keep taking them.”
Bilott’s struggle to take those steps
was what Haynes and Fonzi were try-
ing to punch up next, in a terrifying
scene: after deposing DuPont’s C.E.O.,
Bilott walks slowly through a brightly
lit underground parking garage to get
to his car—Haynes’s homage to the Deep
Throat garage scene in “All the Presi-dent’s Men.” As the camera tracks Bi-
lott through the concrete pillars, for a
split second a stranger appears against
the back wall. “I don’t think Rob liter-
ally had death threats,” Haynes said. “But
he really did have that experience in the
parking garage. Rob said that, once the
New York Times article came out, in
2016, he knew that he would at least not
be killed. The cat was out of the bag.”
On the screen, Bilott sits at the wheel
of his car, looking around with dread in
his eyes, as he cautiously inserts the key
into the ignition and turns it.
“Stay in the same low angle of him,
intercutting with the key,” Haynes said.
“Going to another angle then back to
the first angle breaks the tension for me.”
“I think the tricky part is where he’s
closing his eyes,” Fonzi said. “Because
once he closes his eyes it’s done. I’m
using an extra shot to stretch the mo-
ment, delaying that action.”
Haynes’s cell phone flashed with a
“Breaking News” alert, and Haynes, a
news junkie, couldn’t resist peeking at
it. “‘The E.P.A. will not ban a widely
used pesticide associated with develop-
mental disabilities in children and other
health problems,’” he read. “There you
go!” He tossed his phone on the sofa
and got back to work. ♦