“I Saw This World As a Terrifying Possibility”: ‘THR Presents’ Q&A With ‘DMZ’ Stars Rosario Dawson, Benjamin Bratt and More

HBO Max’s new dystopian drama DMZ is based on the comic book series of the same name. Although the source material was released early in the 21st century, its themes are still relevant in the COVID landscape. 

The Hollywood Reporter’s Hilton Dresden moderated a conversation with the cast and creative team, including actors Rosario Dawson, Benjamin Bratt, Freddy Miyares and Hoon Lee, as well as executive producers Roberto Patino and Ernest Dickerson, who served as writer and director, respectively, for THR Presents, powered by Vision Media. 

Each member of the creative team had a different relationship to the original text. Patino bought the comic back in 2005, when it first came out. He explained: “I instantly became hooked. It was a very captivating very terrifying world. I read every episode, all 72 issues, and then about 2016, 11 years later, I came back to it, and thought, ‘There might be something in here.’”

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“It needed to be updated to our time and place,” he added. “You take that concept, which, in 2005, felt akin to aliens invading the Earth, and fast-forward 17 years, and it’s a lot closer to home.” Patino plucked a secondary character, Z, out of the comics, and made her and her plight to find her missing son the focus of the four-part series’ narrative. 

Dickinson had been working on another show when he was pitched directing DMZ. “I was immediately captivated,” he said. “I saw this world as a terrifying possibility of where our country could possibly go. And me being a student of speculative fiction, I just thought it was essential to do this show to point out the dangers that could possibly lay ahead for our country. And it was a chance to work with Roberto and Ava [DuVernay, another of the show’s directors and EPs].”

Rosario Dawson had a personal connection to the comics as well. “I actually just got sent [a photo] from my friend of me reading DMZ with my dad in the hospital; he’d just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He’s luckily still with us,” she said. “He’s staying with me right now. I had heard of the comic when it had come out. But I hadn’t read it. I just remember it was one of the comics that made a ripple.”

When she did read the books with her dad, she immediately connected to the story: “​​My dad and my mom very tenaciously moved us into the Lower East Side when my brother was born, and moved us into a squat, an abandoned building. And so reading that comic at that time with him was quite a revelation, and [had me] really thinking about remembering that time when we were living in a community that wasn’t expecting anyone’s help from the outside.”

The show follows a world in which America has broken into large-scale war, with the island of Manhattan becoming a demilitarized zone. Creating the show during the COVID pandemic led to eerie parallels between the fictional and nonfiction worlds. 

“We filmed the pilot in March 2020,” Dawson recounted. “When you see that evacuation scene we had 900 extras a day with 100 crew. So Ava’s like the conductor of this symphony of chaos. It’s hard to even imagine or fathom that being something we could witness on a set again, for a long time to come.”

The team then waited about a year and a half to resume filming: “[We] actually experienced the isolation that a lot of these characters have been going through for a really long time,” Dawson said. “And the friction — I’d be texting with Roberto in the middle of it with just everything that was going on politically, the division within the country. The attack on our democracy in DC, all of this was happening in that interim time.”

“I typed ‘the end’ on the finale, and I got a ping on my phone saying a bunch of people had stormed the Capitol building,” Patino recalled.

The overlap between reality and story inspired many of the actors. “I think at a personal level, sometimes when these events happen in the world, we’re all left with the question of ‘How can I answer this? What can I do?’” Lee said. “Sometimes you’re kind of like, am I actually making a difference by putting on this costume, walking around? And to work on a project where you’d never have that question. You never wonder what it’s for, or whether you believe in what you’re doing. I think that was sort of a hidden gift, in that dark time.”

Bratt commended the triumph of each of the different creative departments on this series for rising to the challenge of telling this story in a thoughtful and elegant manner. “All this intentionality behind this collective effort to tell this important story … that’s all wonderful and terrific, but it really fails if the various artistic departments involved don’t complete the work, don’t secure the bag,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, you have to compel people, you have to entertain them, you have to grab their attention and hopefully provoke some kind of emotional reaction, and afterwards, some kind of thought about it. This is one of those rare examples where it’s certainly, to people that I bump into on the street or in the supermarket, who have seen DMZ — by and large more than almost any other project of late that I’ve been a part of, they really had an emotional response to the work of everybody.”

The nature of the filmmaking process being delayed by COVID, and working on a program that every cast and crew member believed in so deeply, made the community of creatives all the more close, Miyares said. ​​”It’s beautiful that we have a story that has a woman at the helm and shows how power doesn’t exist just with authority or force,” he said. “It’s also an empathy, and in the courageous nature of women to take care of those that they love. Here we have one of the strongest characters in Z, you know, really telling this tale of a mother in pursuit of her son, and then we see her transform not just herself, but the whole community. The journey, at least speaking individually, from beginning to end of this project, on and off set … was a collective effort. And these individuals, by the end of it, I felt like they were family.”

This edition of THR Presents was brought to you by HBO Max.