Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for DMZ.
From executive producerAva DuVernayand created for television byRoberto Patino, the HBO Max four-episode limited seriesDMZ, inspired by the acclaimed DC Comics series, follows what happens in a near future after a second American Civil War has occurred and Manhattan is now a demilitarized zone. When Alma Ortega (Rosario Dawson) ventures out on a dangerous quest to find her lost son Christian, she has to come to terms with a past that has brought her to this moment while also navigating whether she can provide hope for an uncertain future.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Patino talked about his interest in finding humanity in characters, what led him to castBenjamin Brattas gang leader Parco Delgado andHoon Leeas Chinatown’s head Wilson Lin, what led him to switch the focus of the story to Zee (who was only a minor character in the comics) why he wrote the role for Dawson and whether he had a backup plan if she’d said no, making the love story with Christian (Freddy Miyares) work, the intentional narrative approach to the ending, and that he already knows what would happen next in a possible second season.
Collider: In looking at your previous credits, withSons of Anarchy,The Bastard Executioner,Westworld, and nowDMZ, it seems as though the running theme in your world is complex and complicated material. Have you been aware of the fact that you’re drawn to pretty dark and heavy stories? Was there something specific that led you that way, or is this just where you’ve ended up?
ROBERTO PATINO: I don’t think about that too much, really. Looking back, you can find commonalities. In truth, what I really like is finding humanity in characters, most of all, and especially when that’s a challenge. In this case, you’re dealing with a pretty fractured and forgotten world, where some characters, including Rosario Dawson’s character, Alma, are contending with very human emotions, although some of those are men menacing or maybe abusive on a societal level, but they all are fundamentally human. In this story, we really built out a cast of people of color and the two ways that the immigrant story might be able to go. You have two immigrants, in Wilson and in Parco, played by Hoon Lee and Benjamin Bratt, who have always felt like second-class citizens in their backstories. Here, this war has presented itself and they’ve done this thing that you see, which you can understand. Parco has served his country. He’s done everything right. Same with Wilson, who’s worked hard. And yet, this opportunity comes where the rule of law goes away and they can puncture this glass ceiling that they’ve felt under, their entire lives, and claim it for themselves.
That’s one way. And then, the opposite is Alma or Zee, Rosario Dawson’s character, who brings everyone up as a community. She embraces that communal spirit, which is the preferable way to go when you feel like you’ve been under a glass ceiling in your entire life. Ultimately, it really just boils down to, how do you find the humanity in these characters? How do you inhabit the characters and make their actions feel understandable under their paradigm of what’s right, and what’s wrong, and what they want?
I adore Hoon Lee, as a human being and as an actor. He does such interesting work with each performance, and his work as Wilson is no exception to that. Every one of his roles is so clearly defined but so different from each other. What brought you to him? How did you end up casting him?
PATINO: I’d seen Hoon inBansheeandWarrior, and I loved him. He actually auditioned for the show and blew everyone out of the water, so I hired him. When I offered him the role, he insisted on getting on the phone with me, which was already a telltale sign of how intentional the guy is. We spoke, and it wasn’t about the logistics of, “I have this project coming up. Can we fit it in?” It was all about the character. It was about who this guy is. He’s very mindful of how he’s portraying his own race, which is something that’s top of mind for me. I think that phone call really sealed the deal, even though we had already made the offer. I was like, “This guy is a partner who’s gonna go to bat for me and gonna go down every road we ask him to go down, in an intentional way.”
What made you cast Benjamin Bratt?
PATINO: It was the same with Benjamin Bratt. It seems like an obvious choice. He’s a movie star, but he really has been typified as the exoticized, other. We see him a lot as the one-dimensional mafia boss, or the boyfriend to someone. We’ve never seen him front and center, in this very complicated, paternal/magnetic, authoritarian type of role. I credit Ava [DuVernay] for that. She was like, “Imagine subverting everyone’s expectations with Ben Bratt.” Every single person in the show, showed up to play, in an incredible way.
I just feel like, with a character like Parco, you have to have a certain level of charisma, and Benjamin Bratt has a charisma that can be both enticing and terrifying, at the same time, which is a rare thing.
PATINO: Yeah, it’s true. He was an incredible talent to work with and to play with. All of these people showed up so ready that you can find things on the day. They can micro-calibrate. You can throw them lines and try new ideas because they knew the material so well and because they had done their own deep dives.
How did you end up taking a secondary character from the graphic novels and making that character the lead character in the series? What did you see in Zee that made you want to bring that character front and center?
PATINO: Well, Zee was my favorite character of the graphic novel, and I love the graphic novel. It came out in 2005, and I devoured every one of the 72 issues. But back then, it was a different world, different time, and different place, and the graphic novel is predicated on that time and place. It’s post 9/11. Our military was in the Middle East, and it builds off of those concepts. Now, 16 years later, that concept takes on a whole new meaning. It hits much closer to home. Because it was such a foreign idea, 16 or 17 years ago, the comic really reveled in the concept of a war-torn New York. By nature of the protagonist, Matty Roth, a photojournalist who is passive at his job – his job is to take in the world – it works as a comic because he’s a proxy for the reader. You want to take in the world with him. That’s the hook of the comic. You wonder, “What does Central Park look like? What does the Empire State Building look like?”
Nowadays, reveling in destruction and a destroyed New York City felt incorrect, felt degenerative, and felt like an idea we didn’t need out there anymore. Same thing goes for the character Zee. In the comic, she was the only generative element in the story. She was also one of only two or three women. She’s woefully under-served. She’s two-dimensional, at best. And she was my favorite. She’s the only one who actually puts herself in harm’s way to help people. She’s not out for turf. She’s not out for currency. She’s just out for humanity and accountability, and that felt fresh. It was a liberating thing to arrive at, where I was like, “Let’s just reinvent this character wholesale.”
When I started thinking about her, the first person I thought was Rosario Dawson, and I wrote the entire thing with Rosario in mind because she has that gravitas. She has also been an exoticized other. She really dug her hooks into this role, as the primary Latina. There’s a whole other side of that question, which is the racial component. You take a cross-section of New York, and you’re gonna get people from every walk of life, from every color, all over the world. That’s something that I wanted to really elevate and revel in. Three of the four main leads are Latino, and there’s Hoon Lee, who is Asian. The graphic novel is so male and also so white, and that didn’t strike a chord of reality with me.
Did you have a backup plan if she had said no? And how relieved were you, when she said yes?
PATINO: We had a backup plan that I wasn’t thrilled about. To answer your question, it was terrifying to meet her because so much of this show, or at least my conception of this show, hung on this yes. So, I pitched my heart out to her, and she got it and loved it. The relief is hard to put into words.
What were the biggest challenges of making the love story work with Christian? How hard was it to balance his actions and everything he did with being worthy enough of having that redemption and having the audience want those two characters to find a way to be together?
PATINO: The concept of the character of Christian really came from a book I read, calledThe Fightersby C.J. Chivers, which is incredible. It basically follows a band of soldiers in Afghanistan in the war, and then how they come home. One of the concepts there is that war is an emotional freezer. The crux of who Christian is, he’s the boogeyman, and he’s this big muscle guy. He’s been built up to be a soldier by his father, who was a soldier, himself. He’s been molded in that light, at a time of war. He justifies who he is, or he’s been taught to justify who he is because he’s in a time of war. But in truth, Christian is a frozen 15-year-old, who still has his gripes with his parents and he’s shy around women. Just delving into that, there’s such an extreme innocence to this outwardly sinister character. That’s what drove the romance with Tenny. She sees that in him via his art. Out on the fringes of Manhattan, jutting into the Hudson River, he has this studio that he keeps to himself. It was stripping back all of those outward veneers and plugging him into who he is, at his core, which is a scared 15-year-old kid.
The ending of this feels like it’s done in three parts. You have what happens to Parco, and then Alma letting go of her son, and then Zee stepping up to give hope to the residents in the DMZ. Was that always the ending? Did you always think about interlocking those things together?
PATINO: Yeah, I wanted the entire story to be an upward-pointing vector. By nature of that, it couldn’t have ended with a nice clean bow. We needed to be looking outward. We needed to be looking to the future. That was an incredibly intentional narrative approach. I’m not interested in spinning on divisive ideas, which is why the world is so colorful and the music is so lively. We really wanted to present the DMZ as a place where life finds a way and where people of disparate walks of life are coming together. That’s why we just assume the war. We don’t really dwell on how or why we got there. We assume it and we start eight years later in it, and then we tell a story of what happens next, which is the dawn of a new civilization. It’s the story of America’s founding mother.
Did you, in your mind, think at all about what happens to Parco, after the soldiers took him away?
PATINO: Oh, yeah, I definitely know exactly what happens to Parco. If we get the good fortune to keep telling the story, you’ll find out. Knowing and spinning on the future that you’re never gonna see in, at least in this limited series, really helps land those final moments. It’s not about just landing the final moment. It’s landing the final moment with a keen understanding of where we’re going, to imbue that finale with more tension and more gravitas.
