He also talks about how he’ll be directing soon, why ‘American Son’ never happened, and toxic masculinity.

With Black Bird now streaming on Apple TV+, I recently spoke with Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone) about writing and creating the fantastic new series. Inspired by the true-crime memoir In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption by authors James Keene and Hillel Levin, Black Bird follows a convicted felon (Taron Egerton) who is given the chance to reduce his 10-year sentence by entering a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane and befriending a suspected serial killer (Paul Walter Hauser). If he can manage to find out where the bodies are buried, he can have his sentence commuted. But if anything happens in the maximum-security prison, he’s on his own. Black Bird also stars Sepideh Moafi, Greg Kinnear, and a phenomenal Ray Liotta, who plays Egerton’s father.

During the wide-ranging interview, Lehane talked about what drew him to the material, why it’s six episodes, what it was like working with Ray Liotta and watching his performance up close, how he worked with Paul Walter Hauser to add things to his character that weren’t in the script, what happened to American Son (his adaptation of A Prophet), and why he loved working on The Wire. He also talked about how he’s finally going to direct some episodes of his next television project, what he’d love to make if he could get the rights, and what someone should read if they’ve never checked out his novels.

Check out what Lehane had to say in the player above, or you can read our conversation below.

COLLIDER: I'm a fan of your work for a long time. I have a lot of questions. Let's see how many I can get through in my time. If someone is actually never read anything that you've written, what is the book they should start with?

DENNIS LEHANE: Mystic River or The Drop. Those are the two that are the closest to my, the voice I grew up hearing around me, everywhere in Boston.

If someone has actually never seen any of the films you've worked on or any of the things that have been made or TV, do you have a favorite? Do you have a thing that you want them to start with?

Exactly. Good answer. If you could get the financing to make anything you want, adapt anything, what would you make and why?

LEHANE: I don't know. I think maybe, to be honest, the thing that I think a lot about is one of the last books I read, The Silent Patient, but I know the rights are tied up, but I think that might be something I would love to take a crack at otherwise an adaptation of my book, The Given Day, which is just too expensive to do.

That's another thing, a lot of your work has been adapted, but there are obviously some that haven't been, is there one that's closer to being made or is there one that you would really love to see made?

LEHANE: My next book, which doesn't come out until next spring, I'm determined to make that myself as a limited television show.

I don't believe you've directed anything. Is directing something that you're interested in?

LEHANE: Yeah. It's been impressed upon me that I should do it. So I'm going to, the next TV show that I run I'll be directing the first two episodes, I think.

Will it be what you just mentioned?

LEHANE: No, probably not. There's one TV show in between then that.

You worked on The Wire a little bit.

What does it mean to you to have been part of one of the greatest television shows ever made?

LEHANE: It's great because look there's no ego involved for me. I was a cog in the wheel. I was there to advance the vision of David Simon and Ed Burns and what a vision it was. And we had a blast and we were just left alone because to be honest, nobody watched us. We were not The Wire until the fifth season. The Wire as you now know until the fifth season. That's a wonderful place to be. I wish other people, other writers, I wish that's on other writers, as opposed to we have a viewership of 33 million people and they're expecting this meat and potatoes week after week, after week and you got to deliver it. I have no desire to work for that type of show.

That's the thing that no one remembers is that HBO to their credit kept that show on the air.

Because they knew how good it was.

LEHANE: Exactly. And allowed us, by the time we got to season four, which is our best moment, they allowed us to do something. I remember when David walked in the room and said, we're going to do middle school and I thought, wow, those are the least two sexy words in history and that was our season and they let us do it.

All props to HBO. I'm so thankful that they allowed that show to get on the air and kept it on the air like I said. Jumping into why I get to talk to you today. First, I want to start with, I've seen all six episodes. Congrats on the season.

How did you end up with six episodes? Was it ever going to be four or eight?

LEHANE: No. At one point I knew I could never get more than six out of it. I knew that, but originally it was five and then everybody pushed really hard. All my fellow producers, even the actors, they wanted me to do this one episode that I didn't want to do and I'm so glad I did it and that was episode four. Everybody wanted an episode that slowed everything down and showed who these guys were. So we came up with the riot. The riot's the most fictional thing in the show. There never was a riot, but we came up with the riot so that these guys could really slow their role and have a major dance with each other to discover who each other was and each plays the psychiatrist to the other, which I thought was fascinating.

When you are writing and working on a show like this, how much are you thinking about budget in the writing process because you've worked on so many different things. And how much is it sort of like you can't think about that?

LEHANE: Nope. Don't think about it. Don't think about it until they tell you, you have to think about it. I just don't. I don't because I know that once I write to production and that means what you're saying, which is they say, no, you can't have a bus. No, you can't shoot out on our... If you shoot that out on a boat at night it's going to add three days to our schedule and we don't have those three days. Then you write to production. But until that moment I'm writing that scene on the boat at night.

I loved Ray Liotta. Just loved his work and he is exceptional in this series.

He just delivers. Like that diner scene, I could keep on mentioning things.

What was it like seeing what he was giving, his performance on this because it's so good?

LEHANE: It was a dream come true. I can't say it any other way. I had wanted to write for Ray Liotta since as a 20 year old I saw Something Wild and was like who is this guy? And so when I wrote the script, I wrote it for him specifically. No other actors were in my head for any of the other parts, but for Big Jim, I only wanted Ray Liotta and then we got him and he came on set and he was a consummate pro and I'll tell you one little detail which I thought was just perfect. Ray was there, he was a pro. He was there to work. He wasn't there to make friends, he wasn't there to, he was just there.

Come in there and hit his marks and give you a fresh take on anything and he would sit there for 16 hours if you engaged him. He was just a pro, but here's the thing he was not a huggy or cuddly guy, which is fine. I grew up among non huggy, cuddly guys. So the first thing he did when he met Taron was hug him. First thing. And it was the first day of their shooting together and he established right off the bat, a father and son relationship and that warmth was in everything they did. That's the type of actor he was.

What was it actually about this story and material that said, I want to make this, I'm going to spend a ton of time working on it?

LEHANE: I thought there was two things. I thought there was this really beautiful, clean mythological line and I really wanted to tell my mythological story my entire life. Like I wanted the... Like Apocalypse Now is a mythological story. I wanted to tell that type of story. And this is a clean line. There's a callow young man who is sent out into the world by the village to protect them from the monster living up somewhere in the dark. He goes out, he goes down to a dark forest, into a dark cave, fights the monster, comes back out, but now he's a very changed young man.

And that was the story I wanted to tell. And then the second thing was, I was thinking a lot about toxic masculinity. It's everywhere now and I thought, how are you going to find common ground with a serial killer who is the epitome of toxic masculinity. A killer of women. Oh, you'd have to examine your own issues with women. You'd have to examine your own damage and that's an interesting story. That's not the story that Jimmy physically, the real Jimmy Keene physically went through this exact story, but psychologically and emotionally he did not go through that journey. That was the journey that I gave to my character.

Taron and Paul are both so good and they have some great scenes together. What was it like actually working with them and making sure that their portrayals, what you were looking for and just like collaborating with them?

LEHANE: Taron was the first person we brought in and then Taron was so committed that he became an executive producer on the project. And when you're number one on the call sheet is projecting that level of commitment, that level of lack of vanity, that level of professionalism, everybody else falls pretty quickly in line and we went out and committed to Paul after Paul auditioned and showed us some really amazing work on Larry and the darker parts of Larry. And from that point on there was a universal, collaborative feeling on the show for everybody, not just for all of our actors and it extended at every step for the spring and summer that we shot this show. So I would say working with them was a joy.

They were open to anything. Paul does things that are absolutely things that he and I conversed about that are not in the script. The one that I became very fascinated with was this concept that sometimes Larry's synapses don't fire correctly. Larry was allegedly had an IQ of 80, which I find impossible to believe, but sometimes his synapses wouldn't fire correctly and Paul plays that and we decided it would be at some really inconvenient times. Like Jimmy's this close to getting a piece of information and then Larry just, he vanishes, he just disappears. His brain is misfiring and then he comes back and he's like, I really like vans. So, yeah. Sorry.

I was just going to say, I agree with you. There's no way Larry had an IQ of 80 to pull off everything he did.

LEHANE: And if he did, he was a savant when it came to, you know what Larry may have been, what he may be is the only serial confessor and serial killer in history. We don't know, we can't prove it. He's never been convicted of killing. He's been convicted of kidnapping. So, if he was that then he was laying the groundwork by confessing to things that he didn't do so that when he confessed to things he did do, nobody would believe him, which I think was part of the game, which is one sick, sick game.

Yeah, and not an IQ of 80.

Obviously everything changes in the editing room and I'm curious how did this series possibly change in the editing room in ways you didn't expect?

LEHANE: Well, it actually didn't change drastically over all in the editing room, but where it completely changed was we had the pilot script and the pilot script is the only script I've ever written that was largely left untouched. Nobody touched, I barely got a note on him. Everybody was just like, well done, go write the rest of them and then I would rewrite the other ones, but everybody just left the pilot alone, left the pilot alone, left the pilot alone. We went on, we shot the pilot, had some trouble with some scenes that suddenly we were like, huh, that's an interesting morning.

I rewrote a scene of the pilot. We re-shot that scene and then we're like, oh, now we're okay. Get back, get into editing and all of a sudden we're like this pilot doesn't work. It does not work. And I had to stare at it and stare at it and watch it again and again and again, and then realize, wow, we completely screwed up the opening 15 minutes. We have to restructure the entire pilot. So the first 15 minutes work and we did, and it worked. It was like, whew. But that was two years of that thing just floating along, nobody noticing any problems with it until you're in editing.

I've heard this from so many different people. I'm about to run out of time with you. What's the status of American Son?

LEHANE: It's DOA. It's in turnaround. It was two weeks from being shot and the financing fell through when it's turnaround.

LEHANE: Well, I don't know. A Prophet stands on its own. I'm not sure we needed-

No, no, totally. But I enjoy your words and I would like to think that you have a... Anyway, what is te next thing that you are actually going to do?

LEHANE: I'm working on a project for Apple now. I can't speak to it yet. Apple TV. But I can't speak to the specifics yet.

I completely understand. I've heard this from many different people. Listen, I got to stop here. I'm just going to say great talking with you. Big fan and I wish you nothing but the best.

LEHANE: Thank you so much. Glad you enjoyed the show. Love the t-shirt.

Steven Weintraub launched Collider in the summer of 2005. As Editor-in-chief, he has taken the site from a small bedroom operation to having millions of readers around the world. If you’d like to follow Steven on Twitter or Instagram, you can expect plenty of breaking news, exclusive interviews, and pictures of cats doing stupid things.

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