Dennis Lehane says his goal with ‘Smoke' was to ‘look at chaos chaotically'

Boston Globe

4 hours ago

(Lehane also says audiences are 'way too smart now' for late episode reveals. He originally showed Dave starting a fire in the pilot, but that was too soon. Then he tried the third episode, but that was too long. 'It was like Goldilocks — the second episode was just right.')
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The 59-year-old Boston native is best known for his literary crime novels like 'Mystic River,' 'Shutter Island,' and 'Gone Baby Gone,' and for depicting his hometown in all its complexities in 'The Given Day' and '
But Lehane, who broke into TV when he was recruited to write for 'The Wire,' has been returning to the screen more frequently of late, writing for 'Mr. Mercedes' and 'The Outsider' before developing '
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Still, Lehane isn't jumping into any old story, saying he turned down producer Kary Antholis four times for 'Blackbird.' When Antholis pitched a podcast about a serial arsonist that he'd hosted called 'Firebug,' Lehane wasn't that interested, in part because there'd previously been a poorly received HBO movie about the same man called 'Point of Origin.'
'But I loved the pathology of the real guy, John Orr, and the absolute insanity of being an arsonist who's also an arson investigator who's writing a book about an arson investigator chasing an arsonist with facts that only the real arsonist would know,' Lehane says. 'There was something so beautifully American about that.'
(Note that Lehane speaks almost as profanely as his characters, so, for realism, you can periodically insert your own enthusiastic expletives.)
Lehane kept one more detail from Orr's story: As a firefighter he'd once been trapped in a fire and he ran toward his own reflection, thinking it was another firefighter. 'I said, 'That's our opening, man.' That's the whole story, metaphorically speaking,' he recalls. 'Almost everything else I threw out. I just wanted to tell this story about emotional and psychological chaos, because that's the time we're living in right now.'
The story is one of a white man with a grievance lifestyle, who loses himself to his own petty frustrations, something Lehane says he saw in friends growing up in Boston. 'I have friends who were angry about their life after being passed over for becoming a police officer and I'd think, 'Have you looked at your psych eval' and I'd want to say, 'You always ask everybody else to take ownership, so take ownership of who you are.''
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Lehane fleshed out the story with wholly fictional characters. Dave's unwelcome new partner, Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), is a dogged police detective with scars and ghosts of her own, who follows her instincts but also her own rules.
Greg Kinnear in "Smoke."
Apple TV+
Dave's boss Harvey (Greg Kinnear), who can be a charmer or a bully, is pressuring them for results, but he has blind spots of his own. Esposito (John Leguizamo) is Dave's former partner who now makes 'tasteful porn for discerning customers,' Lehane says wryly.
And, most significantly, Freddy (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is the second arsonist Dave and Michelle are chasing. While Dave's fires are typically set in supermarkets (Orr was dubbed the Frito Bandito arsonist) in a way that allowed people to escape, Freddy's rage propels him to attack individuals who seem happy, aiming to harm.
'There's this weird part of me that creates sympathetic monsters,' Lehane says. 'Freddy commits acts of pure evil and needs to be in jail. But he's a tragic guy, the loneliest man on earth. Dave is running around with his white victimization narration that I can't stand, where he's the victim. But Freddy truly is the victim of our society. He was vomited out into the world and never had a chance.'
Freddy is loosely inspired by a Washington D.C., arsonist who said that working in fast food as an adult is akin to slavery, Lehane says. 'I kept that and the fact that he's African-American, so he's a perfect counterpoint to Dave.'
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Amid the show's life-and-death stakes and explorations of racism, misogyny, and injustice is plenty of humor, especially in the banter between Egerton's, Smollett's, and Kinnear's characters.
'We need humor right now,' Lehane says. 'How else are we supposed to deal with the madness we're living in, with politicians being arrested for speaking out. We're watching the death of the Republic, literally. So you laugh because you don't want to cry. That's the best you can do.'
Lehane, who emphasizes his collaborative approach to creating, says Kinnear kept encouraging him during the writing to deepen Harvey. 'He'd say, 'I don't feel Harvey yet,'' Lehane recalls. 'When I came up with his character's daughter, that's when we found him.'
He views Egerton, who also starred in 'Black Bird,' as a 'creative partner. We push each other. We're a dangerous combination.'
He points to a sex scene that might evoke (nervous) laughter if it didn't quickly become so shocking. Lehane says Egerton called one weekend and said the kinky scene 'needs a bit more. I said, 'More? Dave lights somebody's belly on fire. What the…''
Inspired, they went 'so far beyond the pale that we had to dial it back,' but the final result, with Dave dancing self-indulgently above his bound partner, captures something essential about the character. 'When we were trying to pick the song, Taron said, 'Since I was a little boy, my dream was to dance to David Bowie on screen.'' The song choice, 'Heroes,' further enhances Dave's delusions.
Lehane says that his team really dove into how 'whacked out this story was.'
'People rarely embrace tonally wild shows, but we just decided to go for broke,' he adds. 'We're looking at chaos chaotically.'
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It all started with that sex scene, when his producing partner's research uncovered the idea of 'streaking' or setting someone (safely) on fire. 'I said, 'No way,' but that's when the show really came into its own,' Lehane says. ''Seinfeld' became 'Seinfeld' with 'The Pony Remark' episode [where Jerry mentions hating anyone who had a pony and his cousin, who proudly had one, gets angry and soon dies]. We feel like 'Smoke' really becomes 'Smoke' with the streaking scene.'