54 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
she added. “He’s not good at juggling a
lot of balls in the air.”
I was thinking of myself, sadly, as one
of those balls when Haynes’s director’s
assistant, Lucas Omar, suddenly mate-
rialized with a large black leather port-
folio. “Todd wanted you to see the Image
Book,” he said, and disappeared. The
incident was proof of Haynes’s atten-
tion to detail; even in the early-morn-
ing hubbub, he’d kept my
presence on the set in mind.
Haynes is renowned in the
business for his preparation:
rigorous shot lists, hundred-
page editing notes, and his
Image Books, which remain
close at hand throughout his
shoots. These books are key,
Haynes has said, to his “psy-
chic process.” Before begin-
ning each film, he distrib-
utes a magazine-size version to the head
of each department, to insure that all
his collaborators have a sense of the
film’s emotional terrain.
The “Dark Waters” Image Book con-
sisted of forty-six laminated pages that
followed the linear and thematic trajec-
tory of Bilott’s crusade, a sort of map of
Haynes’s ideas for the movie’s visual lan-
guage. The images, many of which were
shot with foreboding lighting or from
unsettling angles, included derelict West
Virginia landscapes, DuPont billboards,
and screen grabs from other movies
(“Silkwood,” “The Insider,” “The Paral-
lax View,” “Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers,” and “All the President’s Men”—a
primer for the postures of fear and frus-
tration in Bilott’s battle against corpo-
rate corruption). Into this visual stew,
Haynes had mixed photographs of Bi-
lott as a boy, and of his family (his grand-
mother lived in West Virginia, not far
from DuPont’s most toxic dumping site);
a wall of boxes holding the hundreds of
thousands of pages of relevant correspon-
dence and documentation that Bilott had
extracted from DuPont; the worn faces
of West Virginia farmers; the severed
head of a wild-eyed contaminated cow;
polluted streams. The album also included
a list of the painters and photographers
Haynes had chosen to inform the film’s
palette and perspective, among them Ger-
hard Richter, Gordon Parks, Andreas
Gursky, William Eggleston, Stephen
Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz. Haynes’s vi-
sual challenge in “Dark Waters” was to
elevate the legal offices, storage rooms,
and middle-class homes where most of
the drama of the movie takes place to an
expressive backdrop for Bilott’s internal
struggle, which, he said, was infused “with
anxiety, dread, futility, and despair.”
Around noon, while Robbins and
Ruffalo were horsing around between
takes—Robbins: “You were horrible.”
Ruffalo: “Wait till I’m off
camera. I’m gonna be horri-
ble to you”—a slight mid-
dle-aged man, in a plaid shirt
and jeans, slipped into the
conference room and took a
seat against the back wall. It
was Rob Bilott. I introduced
myself. Ruffalo, in his round-
shouldered, restrained per-
formance, seemed to have
uncannily captured Bilott’s
trout-lipped solitude, a standoffishness
that made him seem permanently braced.
The one physical quality that no actor
could capture was his sunken, forlorn
eyes. Bilott said that he was nervous
about the next scene on the schedule. I
asked why. “Neurological issues,” he said.
In the scene in question, which takes
place thirteen years into Bilott’s legal bat-
tle, Bilott’s boss tells him that he has to
wrap up the suit and take a pay cut. “Tom,
that’s my fourth. I’m down a third now,”
Bilott replies quietly. Terp says, “You don’t
have any clients. No one will take your
calls. What am I supposed to do here?
Now, I’m on your side, but, Rob... ” A t
this point in the script, Bilott starts to
stand up, his legs give out, he grabs at the
desk and collapses. Haynes went to work
on the choreography of the fall.
During the next four hours, with the
three-page scene in hand, Haynes kept
popping out from where he was crouch-
ing behind the door, to explain the mo-
tivation of the moment. “You think he’s
going to get up,” he said to Robbins at
one point, then, turning to Ruffalo,
“You’re fighting waves of nausea.” They
explored the scene’s dynamics, then,
satisfied, moved on to the next beat.
Systematically, Haynes ramped up Bi-
lott’s tension: his blinking eyes, his
twitching hands, his juddering feet, his
fumbling for the chair, and his flailing
spasms on the floor. By the fifth take,
Ruffalo’s portrayal of Bilott’s psycho-
logical struggle to contain his collapsehad become as sensational as the phys-
ical one. Afterward, in the conference
room, I turned to the real Bilott, who
had been joined by his wife, Sarah
(played by Anne Hathaway in the film),
to ask what he thought of it. “Hard for
me. Disturbing,” he said, adding, “I’m
not being very articulate.” He scratched
his forehead, searching for more words.
“Never realized I didn’t smile,” he said.
The caravan of lights and cameras
moved down the partitioned corridors to
the next location. The dark passageways,
the contrasting bright sources of light,
and the outside vistas with no direct hori-
zon all served Haynes’s effort to create a
landscape of obfuscation and menace.
“Barrier upon barrier upon barrier. It’s so
smart,” Ruffalo said later of what he calls
Haynes’s “geometrics,” as he waited to be
filmed from another disconcerting angle,
below a stairwell. “He’s laid the music
down, and I’m the piano player. I can
move within the structure. It’s a complex
game. He’s challenging you, and he won’t
walk away until it’s impeccable.”T
he first of three children, Haynes
was born in 1961 to Allen and Sherry
Haynes, who had married at nineteen.
Haynes grew up amid the suburban buoy-
ancy and abundance of Encino, Califor-
nia, just a few miles from Hollywood,
during one of the industry’s most vital
periods. At three, ravished by the movie
“Mary Poppins,” he fell into what he
called “a total imaginative rapture”: he
didn’t just want to rewatch the movie;
he wanted to enter the story through “a
fanatical, creative, obsessional response
where I had to replicate the experience,”
he said. He drew hundreds of pictures
of Poppins, performed the “Poppins”
songs, even persuaded his mother to dress
up as Poppins. (“You gotta put the flower
hat on, Mom.”) “I had to satisfy the hys-
teria I felt for this experience creatively,”
he said. In “Dottie Gets Spanked” (1993),
Haynes’s remarkable thirty-minute map
of his boyhood inner world, he depicted
his spellbound self, sitting cross-legged
in a bathrobe in front of the TV with a
pad and colored pencils in hand. In the
background, his parents contend sotto
voce with his fixation. “I could feel my
parents behind me, worrying about what
this might mean, or worrying whether
they should be worried, and I always felt
defiant of their concerns,” he said.