Say Nothing: Patrick Radden Keefe on adapting his book on the Troubles into a series on Disney+
Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price in Say Nothing, on Disney+.
Four decades of The Troubles in Northern Ireland are brought to life in Say Nothing, a new series based on the best-selling book by Patrick Radden Keefe. Featuring a large Irish cast that includes Lola Petticrew, Hazel Doupe and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, the series opens with the shocking disappearance of Jean McConville, abducted from her home in 1972. The series also focuses on Dolours Price and her involvement with the IRA.
Now adapted into a nine-part series on Disney+, Say Nothing was released to widespread critical acclaim and became a bestseller. The author is also an executive producer on the series. Keefe says he first became interested in telling the story of The Troubles after reading about the death of Price.
“I am Irish-American. I grew up in Boston, but the Troubles was kind of in the background,” he says. “I came to this really in the context of my day job. In 2013 Dolours Price died, and I read her obituary in the New York Times. Because of what I knew of the Troubles, I thought of it as a very male story. And I was just startled to learn that there had been this young woman who had been a soldier in the IRA, and that she and her sister had gone on hunger strike."
The obituary also mentioned the Boston Tapes, the recordings made by academics at Boston College of republican and loyalist paramilitaries talking about their actions.
“The last detail in the obituary was Jean McConville. It was never designed to be a comprehensive history of the Troubles, but that you could look at the Troubles through that lens, seemed really intriguing to me, and it's hard to believe, but my first trip to Belfast was 10 years ago. I've been working in some fashion or another on this story for a decade now.”
Keefe made the first of many trips to Belfast to carry out hundreds of interviews as part of the book. At first, he feared it would be a big disadvantage being an outsider - but quickly found that the opposite was the case.
“I found it was an advantage in two respects. One was when I was actually on the ground, if you were to go to Belfast and start talking to people and doing interviews, you'd open your mouth and you'd say a few things, and people would hear your accent, and they'd start drawing conclusions about you, and they'd plot you on a grid.
“I was kind of an alien, and I think that it meant that I was a little bit harder for people to draw premature conclusions about. I could come in and say: ‘I’ll find the story where it is. I want to hear from everyone, and then I’m going to make my own judgments and tell my own story. But this won’t be any one side’s story’. I wanted to do something a bit more nuanced.
“Then when I was actually writing the book, I think that I was able to draw certain conclusions and say certain things with a freedom that I might not have had if I lived in West Belfast, and my kids went to school in West Belfast, my wife went to work. There's a luxury that you have in being able to leave and tell the story as you see it.”
Initially wary of the book being adapted for the screen because of the real stories and lives involved, Keefe began to come round to the idea having spoken to a good friend who was a producer. “It’s sometimes the case when I finish an article or a book that I'll have my agents send it out and you see who's interested in Hollywood,” he says. “I didn't do that with this book because the material was so sensitive. It's about people who are still alive, and I worried that in the wrong hands, it could be told in a way that felt tawdry or exploitative.
“I’d known a producer named Brad Simpson for about 10 years and he was a friend of mine, and he asked to read the book. He and his partner, Nina Jacobson, had made a really terrific series called The People vs OJ Simpson, also for FX. That, to me, was the best possible version of the adaptation of a book where it was really good, it was high quality. It was complex. It was about a very sensitive issue, which was race in America. I thought they handled it beautifully."
After they read the book, the producers came back with a tantalising offer. “They said: ‘We’d love to do this, but if you do it with us, it won't be a situation where you give us the rights and we go off and make the show. It would be a thing where you were actually very engaged, and you can help protect it’. I never entertained any other offers or even really showed the book to anyone else. I wanted to make sure we got it right.”
Keefe was involved throughout the process of making the series, and was one of a close council of advisors that show runner and writer Joshua Zetumer turned to during production. That included a casting process that saw several Irish actors including Love/Hate’s Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, and Lola Petticrew who plays the young Dolours Price, join the series. There are over 200 speaking parts in all, and many Irish actors involved. Filmmaker Michael Lennox, who previously directed Derry Girls, came on board as a director. Although it’s a very different subject matter to Derry Girls, Keefe feels Lennox has storytelling qualities that lend themselves to the new series.
“It might seem odd that you would get a guy who directed a comedy to direct a drama like this,” he says. “But what I loved about Derry Girls was that it’s this very specific story, these teenage girls growing up in Derry, but it's also so universal. People in France and Florida and Korea could watch Derry Girls and actually find that they related to these teenagers in Derry.
“I wanted Mike, in part because he's able to do that. He's able to tell a story that's highly specific, but in its specificity, it actually is something that lots of people can engage with.”
- Say Nothing is now on Disney+
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