Craig Mazin

If you organize your life around some political party's list of things you should believe, or an individual that you think is going to come and save you, you are disconnecting yourself from truth. And there is a price to pay.

Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.

For me, I've been doing comedy for a long time, and I love it and have no regrets, but 'Chernobyl' expresses a side of me that is far more true to who I am on a day to day basis.

In my opinion, where comedy sequels tend to go bad is that they get sillier and lighter.

Comedy, unlike drama, demands surprise. You can't quietly and thoughtfully enjoy a comedy.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

At some point, and maybe it's a function of age, you've had enough of it. You start to slide in other directions. A lot of comedy writers begin to turn the dial. With me, it was a switch. Comedy off. Drama on.

I'm a big believer in comedy writers. I've always defended the honor of all comedy writers. It's extremely difficult, but I've always felt that comedy writers far more easily can move toward drama than vice versa.

We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It's within ourselves as well here in the West.

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

Chernobyl' is a human story. It's not a disaster movie. It's not about explosions. It's about people and truths and lies.