Haynes, in T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, sat down on the office sofa to discuss the morning’s scene with his stars: the towering Tim Robbins, who plays Bilott’s boss, Tom Terp, the head of the firm’s environmental group, and the shortish, stocky Mark Ruffalo, as Bilott, the saga’s unlikely hero. (Additional personal-injury claims against the company are still in progress.) For Haynes’s eighth feature film, “Dark Waters,” Bilott’s battle had been broken down into a two-hundred-and-forty-six-scene jigsaw puzzle that the director was now painstakingly piecing together. In 2017, Bilott won a six-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar settlement for thirty-five hundred of the people who had filed claims relating to illnesses linked to the PFOA in their drinking water. A herculean, eighteen-year legal struggle followed. Bilott’s fight pitted him not just against DuPont but against his own firm he was the legal insider turned outsider, a poacher turned gamekeeper. In what became a class-action suit on behalf of seventy thousand residents of West Virginia and Ohio, Bilott pursued the company for having knowingly dumped in those states more than seven thousand tons of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic, nonbiodegradable chemical used in making Teflon-thereby poisoning hundreds of acres of land, deforming and killing hundreds of animals, contaminating the water supply, and doing long-term, irreversible damage to the health of the community. It was from here, in 1999, that Robert Bilott, a partner in the firm and a specialist in helping corporations negotiate environmental regulations, switched sides and sued DuPont, a chemical leviathan, whose plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was thirty-five times larger than the Pentagon.
#Montage portland established windows#
Haynes, a trim, boyish fifty-eight, with dishevelled brindle hair, was standing at the epicenter of his newest drama: a small corner office, whose west-facing windows looked out on skyscrapers and a sliver of the Ohio River.
on a frosty March Saturday in downtown Cincinnati, the director Todd Haynes was on the sixteenth floor of the corporate law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, and he was already, as he puts it, “in the weeds, dealing with every little piece in every shot in every scene.” The firm’s lawyers and secretaries had been banished for the weekend, and the maze of cubicles and passageways was cluttered with cameras, cables, extras, and a drowsy crew.
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