Name: Filmmaker Tiller Russell on Turning "Silk Road" Story Into a Movie
Uploaded: 2021-03-03T18:07:33.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Filmmaker Tiller Russell on Turning "Silk Road" Story Into a Movie' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Filmmaker Tiller Russell on Turning "Silk Road" Story Into a Movie' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-03. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Hey, I love your fucking movies.
I love The Seven Five and I really enjoyed Silk Road.
It was really good.
And you did a great job of taking something
that is a real story and laying it out
in a movie format where you only have
like a certain amount of time with actors.
But even the guy who played the bad cop,
what is his name?
- Jason Clark, I love that guy.
- He's great, he's been in a bunch of things.
- Yeah.
He was in Chappaquiddick, he was in First Man,
he's been in a bunch of stuff and he's just,
he's a beast, you know, so interesting.
When I got there on set with him and it's like sort of,
you know, day one, you don't know what you're getting into.
And I was just standing there next to him and I was like,
dude, this guy is like a thoroughbred racehorse
and he is at the Kentucky Derby.
I can't wait to see what this cat does.
- He's so good as a bad guy.
- Yeah, and he's game for it.
- Yeah, yeah, he's intense.
I've seen that guy in so many movies.
He's just one of those guys, like you see him
and you're like, "Oh, that guy."
- Well, you know, it's so funny when you're like,
you know, I sat down, so I had written the script
for Silk Road several years ago.
And, you know, I have done all these documentaries.
That's my background, right?
Which is kind of where you dive into the, you know,
you do the deep dive on these, you know,
crazy crime stories.
That's my whole, that's my whole racket, you know,
from Michael Dowd forward.
And then you, you know, go into the world,
suddenly going from the doc thing into the movie thing,
and it's like, well, who are the people
that are gonna inhabit this?
So I sat down and I met with, you know,
all these amazing actors, and you sort of are looking at,
okay, what if it's this version of the movie?
What if it's this kid?
What if it's this, you know, what if it's this guy?
And then suddenly, Jason Clarke,
who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like,
"Dude, I'm hip to that."
You know, I wanna do it.
- Was he playing a real guy?
- It's a composite, basically.
What happened is there were a couple
of corrupt law enforcement officers.
There was a DEA guy, there was a Treasury guy.
And so what I had done is kind of combined them
into that character, because I've spent a lot of time
in the documentaries hanging out with guys like that.
And also people who have relationships,
long-term relationships with informants.
So I was able to kind of take the work
that I had done in the docs and put it into the movie
so that it's drawn from real life.
It's drawn from people I know, but it's, you know,
kind of a hybrid between the two.
- Yeah, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along,
you know, and condensing it without having
too many different moving parts,
'cause you've got so much going on.
- Well, and with something like that,
like a story like this, there are the people that,
like I was one of the people that was fully geeked
on this story.
I remember the day after Ross Ulbricht was arrested
in the San Francisco library,
in the sci-fi section of the Glen Park library.
I was off shooting some crime doc or another.
And I remember vividly opening the newspaper,
and it just had kind of like the shadowy headlines
of the story.
It was like dark web, Bitcoin, you know,
"Dread Pirate Roberts."
But we didn't, none of the stuff was in the zeitgeist yet.
We hadn't even like really heard of Bitcoin.
- Right.
- I remember thinking like, "Man, there's like,
"there's a story there.
"It's maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a doc,
"but like there's something."
And I was just kind of fascinated from the get-go.
And then obsessively tracking the story
as new pieces of information would come out.
And then eventually, there was this Rolling Stone reporter,
this guy by the name of David Kushner,
who's this brilliant writer and reporter,
has like a nose for story,
and is able to get to people.
And he had gotten to Ross Ulbricht's girlfriend
in Austin, and then the family.
And so he wrote this profile of Ross
that was this very kind of relatable humanist portrait.
And suddenly when I read that piece,
I was like, "Ah, okay, now I can like connect with this guy
in some fundamental emotional way."
But at the time, none of the stuff
about the corrupt cops had broken.
None of that stuff was in the public.
Nothing had been reported on.
And I think that the feds deliberately kept
that information under wraps,
so as not to screw up the prosecution of Ross, right?
But I was, knowing people in DEA,
knowing people in US Attorney from making,
US Attorney's Office from making the 7-5,
from making Operation Odessa, whatever,
those guys would call me and they were like,
"Man, there's a whole 'nother amazing half of this story."
Which is the crooked cop side of the story.
Suddenly, when I saw that, I thought,
"Okay, now that's a movie."
'Cause I can imagine these two sort of people,
I always thought of it, it's almost like they're missiles
on a collision course flying right at each other.
And so suddenly when I had that in my head,
I was like, "I can make a movie out of that."
- The stuff with the corrupt cop's wife and daughter,
was that fictionalized as well?
- Yeah, so it's interesting, you know,
at a certain point, I remember like on set
and kind of going up to it, people were like,
"Okay, so what's factual and what's fictional?
What's factual and what's fictional?"
And I, at a certain point, I was like,
"I need to pour myself into this."
Because there wasn't, you know, when you're making a doc,
you're going out and you're harvesting people,
and you're harvesting information,
and you're harvesting photos, videos, news footage.
This was like, there was a limited amount of information.
And so then when the information ran out,
it was like, "Okay, what am I gonna pour in here?"
I can research it the way I would do a doc,
but really if I'm gonna make this something that's true
and authentic to me, I kind of poured myself into it.
So that's what I ended up doing, you know?
- So when you say poured yourself into it,
did you create this story with the daughter
that needed the money for school and--
- Yeah, I mean, what it is is it's a combination.
So there was a limited amount of information.
This guy, one of these cops had family members,
had, you know, a background where he was jacked up
in Puerto Rico and sort of thrown off track.
So I took the pieces that were in the public record
that were in Rolling Stone articles
or in the Wired article or whatever.
And then I was like, "Okay,
I'm gonna put my own biography into this.
I'm gonna put, you know, maybe my relationship
with my daughter or my relationship with my wife."
And so kind of build out from what's there
with a personal story to it.
- Is that a difficult thing to do?
Like, do you tiptoe through that?
Because here you are, you have this story, right?
The story for folks who don't know,
we should probably let them know what the story is,
they don't know. The story of Silk Road is a spectacular story.
Because he created this marketplace through the dark web with, you know,
using Tor and encryption where, and Tor is a browser, it's an encrypted browser.
- Yeah, it's basically like, it's like the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
You know, you go into Tor and it conceals usage and location.
And he developed this Silk Road platform where you could buy all kinds of drugs.
And then ultimately, you could buy guns as well, and a lot of other illegal
things.
And his, the way you portrayed him is really fascinating too.
And I wonder how much of it is accurate.
Because you portrayed him as this sort of really intelligent, idealistic young
man who ultimately
believed that people should have the freedom to buy, sell, use, choose,
whatever they like.
And that the people who support Silk Road, that's how they felt.
And people that are proponents of a lot of these, particularly psychedelics,
which I'm one of
them, they like that. Like, yeah, who is a grown adult to tell another grown
adult what they can't use?
Wouldn't it be great if there were some online marketplace that was free from
the tentacles
of the American government, and you could buy whatever you wanted?
Well, there was, and he created it. And it's, in the sense that it's, it's an
important American
story. It's an important internet story. It's an important worldwide story.
But then you're also adding fiction.
Well, it's, it's, um, yes. And his story, what fascinated me about his story
was,
you have this guy that starts out as a very kind of naive, innocent guy. He's
somebody who wants to
make his mark in the world, wants to change the world, and goes into it with an
open heart and good
intentions. And there was a lot of information about him. When I first sat down
to write the script,
there was, he was locked up in MCC New York, actually, exactly where Michael
Dowd from the 75
had been locked up years earlier.
Oh, wow.
And so I sat down and I wrote, um, I wrote him a letter. And he was in, in
awaiting sentencing,
I think, at the time. But I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access
to him, right? For,
rightly so, because it would potentially screw up his defense. But I felt like,
you know, I owe it to
this guy in some fundamental sense, if I'm going to tell his story, to try to
connect with him. And I'm
a doc guy, that's my process, you know? And so I wrote him a letter, and I
never heard back. And,
but then he had left this kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past.
You know, he had
written all of these public posts on the Silk Road website, as Dread Pirate
Roberts, where he's putting
out his philosophy, his ethos, his, you know, convictions. And then at the same
time, he had
been secretly keeping a journal, long before he had launched Silk Road, all the
way through it,
up until the bitter end. And so when he got busted, they confiscated his laptop.
And when they opened up
his laptop, they had all of his private journal entries. So there was the
combination of his public
postings as Dread Pirate Roberts, and the diary entries as Ross Ulbricht. And
so while I
didn't have access to the guy, I had access to his words, and who, you know,
his, I guess,
accidental self-portrait in some way or another. And so when we got into, and
you're at, to your
question of, of how much of this is, you know, journalistically accurate. So
every piece of
voiceover in the movie that's, that's spoken by Nick Robinson, who plays Ross
Ulbricht, all of that
is either taken from the diary entries, or taken from the public postings as Dread
Pirate Roberts.
And then all of the chat logs, all of the back and forth, the encrypted
communications between,
you know, Knob and Dread Pirate Roberts, all of that stuff is taken from the
documentary record.
Because I felt like, you have to be true to who this guy is, in some sense,
spiritually, you know?
Yeah. Did you communicate with him at all?
No. So what happened was, I, so I couldn't, I couldn't get to, you know, I
wrote him a letter,
never heard back. But what ended up happening was his ex-girlfriend, who's an
Austin, who's here in
Austin, Julia V, who's portrayed in the movie by the actor, actress Alexandra
Shipp, she became a
consultant for it. When I was writing the script, and then when making the
movie, because I felt like
I needed somebody who knew this guy, who loved him, who had an intimate
viewpoint on who he was.
And so she became my kind of source and way in, in an emotional sense, right?
How old was she when all it was going down?
20s, you know, in her 20s. I mean, and that's, and that's kind of...
What year is this?
That's basically 2011 to 2013.
And so, you know, she's, is she in college? Is she just out of college?
Just out, right? So they're like, young people knocking around Austin. And, and
for her,
I think it was, you know, what she had told me was, initially, it was like, he
and I against the
world, you know, inside the bubble. And then little by little, the Silk Road
website became his
masterpiece. And it was like, everybody goes outside of the bubble, except me
and Silk Road. And so
eventually, she felt like she was in almost like a three-way relationship,
where it's like her,
her, and the website. And eventually, the website kind of eats him, you know?
Right. Yeah. Well, you did a great job of portraying the obsession that he had
with all the inner
workings of the website, and, and seeing it ramp up through the website's
growth and development.
When, was it Gawker that made the article about it, and then it just exploded?
I remember that article.
I remember it very clearly. Like, when you showed the image of that article, I
remember going,
wow, I remember that article. Yeah, because it like, you know, and I think that
that is true
of many of these people that are the kind of disruptor innovators, you know,
you have to
get your message into the, you have to get, get into the zeitgeist in some
fundamental way. So,
like, Gawker was the way that, like, broadcast this to the world. Hey, man,
Silk Road's out there,
like, the mailman is your dope dealer, and he's not even hip to it.
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Filmmaker Tiller Russell on Turning "Silk Road" Story Into a Movie

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Hey, I love your fucking movies.
I love The Seven Five and I really enjoyed Silk Road.
It was really good.
And you did a great job of taking something
that is a real story and laying it out
in a movie format where you only have
like a certain amount of time with actors.
But even the guy who played the bad cop,
what is his name?
- Jason Clark, I love that guy.
- He's great, he's been in a bunch of things.
- Yeah.
He was in Chappaquiddick, he was in First Man,
he's been in a bunch of stuff and he's just,
he's a beast, you know, so interesting.
When I got there on set with him and it's like sort of,
you know, day one, you don't know what you're getting into.
And I was just standing there next to him and I was like,
dude, this guy is like a thoroughbred racehorse
and he is at the Kentucky Derby.
I can't wait to see what this cat does.
- He's so good as a bad guy.
- Yeah, and he's game for it.
- Yeah, yeah, he's intense.
I've seen that guy in so many movies.
He's just one of those guys, like you see him
and you're like, "Oh, that guy."
- Well, you know, it's so funny when you're like,
you know, I sat down, so I had written the script
for Silk Road several years ago.
And, you know, I have done all these documentaries.
That's my background, right?
Which is kind of where you dive into the, you know,
you do the deep dive on these, you know,
crazy crime stories.
That's my whole, that's my whole racket, you know,
from Michael Dowd forward.
And then you, you know, go into the world,
suddenly going from the doc thing into the movie thing,
and it's like, well, who are the people
that are gonna inhabit this?
So I sat down and I met with, you know,
all these amazing actors, and you sort of are looking at,
okay, what if it's this version of the movie?
What if it's this kid?
What if it's this, you know, what if it's this guy?
And then suddenly, Jason Clarke,
who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like,
"Dude, I'm hip to that."
You know, I wanna do it.
- Was he playing a real guy?
- It's a composite, basically.
What happened is there were a couple
of corrupt law enforcement officers.
There was a DEA guy, there was a Treasury guy.
And so what I had done is kind of combined them
into that character, because I've spent a lot of time
in the documentaries hanging out with guys like that.
And also people who have relationships,
long-term relationships with informants.
So I was able to kind of take the work
that I had done in the docs and put it into the movie
so that it's drawn from real life.
It's drawn from people I know, but it's, you know,
kind of a hybrid between the two.
- Yeah, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along,
you know, and condensing it without having
too many different moving parts,
'cause you've got so much going on.
- Well, and with something like that,
like a story like this, there are the people that,
like I was one of the people that was fully geeked
on this story.
I remember the day after Ross Ulbricht was arrested
in the San Francisco library,
in the sci-fi section of the Glen Park library.
I was off shooting some crime doc or another.
And I remember vividly opening the newspaper,
and it just had kind of like the shadowy headlines
of the story.
It was like dark web, Bitcoin, you know,
"Dread Pirate Roberts."
But we didn't, none of the stuff was in the zeitgeist yet.
We hadn't even like really heard of Bitcoin.
- Right.
- I remember thinking like, "Man, there's like,
"there's a story there.
"It's maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a doc,
"but like there's something."
And I was just kind of fascinated from the get-go.
And then obsessively tracking the story
as new pieces of information would come out.
And then eventually, there was this Rolling Stone reporter,
this guy by the name of David Kushner,
who's this brilliant writer and reporter,
has like a nose for story,
and is able to get to people.
And he had gotten to Ross Ulbricht's girlfriend
in Austin, and then the family.
And so he wrote this profile of Ross
that was this very kind of relatable humanist portrait.
And suddenly when I read that piece,
I was like, "Ah, okay, now I can like connect with this guy
in some fundamental emotional way."
But at the time, none of the stuff
about the corrupt cops had broken.
None of that stuff was in the public.
Nothing had been reported on.
And I think that the feds deliberately kept
that information under wraps,
so as not to screw up the prosecution of Ross, right?
But I was, knowing people in DEA,
knowing people in US Attorney from making,
US Attorney's Office from making the 7-5,
from making Operation Odessa, whatever,
those guys would call me and they were like,
"Man, there's a whole 'nother amazing half of this story."
Which is the crooked cop side of the story.
Suddenly, when I saw that, I thought,
"Okay, now that's a movie."
'Cause I can imagine these two sort of people,
I always thought of it, it's almost like they're missiles
on a collision course flying right at each other.
And so suddenly when I had that in my head,
I was like, "I can make a movie out of that."
- The stuff with the corrupt cop's wife and daughter,
was that fictionalized as well?
- Yeah, so it's interesting, you know,
at a certain point, I remember like on set
and kind of going up to it, people were like,
"Okay, so what's factual and what's fictional?
What's factual and what's fictional?"
And I, at a certain point, I was like,
"I need to pour myself into this."
Because there wasn't, you know, when you're making a doc,
you're going out and you're harvesting people,
and you're harvesting information,
and you're harvesting photos, videos, news footage.
This was like, there was a limited amount of information.
And so then when the information ran out,
it was like, "Okay, what am I gonna pour in here?"
I can research it the way I would do a doc,
but really if I'm gonna make this something that's true
and authentic to me, I kind of poured myself into it.
So that's what I ended up doing, you know?
- So when you say poured yourself into it,
did you create this story with the daughter
that needed the money for school and--
- Yeah, I mean, what it is is it's a combination.
So there was a limited amount of information.
This guy, one of these cops had family members,
had, you know, a background where he was jacked up
in Puerto Rico and sort of thrown off track.
So I took the pieces that were in the public record
that were in Rolling Stone articles
or in the Wired article or whatever.
And then I was like, "Okay,
I'm gonna put my own biography into this.
I'm gonna put, you know, maybe my relationship
with my daughter or my relationship with my wife."
And so kind of build out from what's there
with a personal story to it.
- Is that a difficult thing to do?
Like, do you tiptoe through that?
Because here you are, you have this story, right?
The story for folks who don't know,
we should probably let them know what the story is,
they don't know. The story of Silk Road is a spectacular story.
Because he created this marketplace through the dark web with, you know,
using Tor and encryption where, and Tor is a browser, it's an encrypted browser.
- Yeah, it's basically like, it's like the Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
You know, you go into Tor and it conceals usage and location.
And he developed this Silk Road platform where you could buy all kinds of drugs.
And then ultimately, you could buy guns as well, and a lot of other illegal
things.
And his, the way you portrayed him is really fascinating too.
And I wonder how much of it is accurate.
Because you portrayed him as this sort of really intelligent, idealistic young
man who ultimately
believed that people should have the freedom to buy, sell, use, choose,
whatever they like.
And that the people who support Silk Road, that's how they felt.
And people that are proponents of a lot of these, particularly psychedelics,
which I'm one of
them, they like that. Like, yeah, who is a grown adult to tell another grown
adult what they can't use?
Wouldn't it be great if there were some online marketplace that was free from
the tentacles
of the American government, and you could buy whatever you wanted?
Well, there was, and he created it. And it's, in the sense that it's, it's an
important American
story. It's an important internet story. It's an important worldwide story.
But then you're also adding fiction.
Well, it's, it's, um, yes. And his story, what fascinated me about his story
was,
you have this guy that starts out as a very kind of naive, innocent guy. He's
somebody who wants to
make his mark in the world, wants to change the world, and goes into it with an
open heart and good
intentions. And there was a lot of information about him. When I first sat down
to write the script,
there was, he was locked up in MCC New York, actually, exactly where Michael
Dowd from the 75
had been locked up years earlier.
Oh, wow.
And so I sat down and I wrote, um, I wrote him a letter. And he was in, in
awaiting sentencing,
I think, at the time. But I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access
to him, right? For,
rightly so, because it would potentially screw up his defense. But I felt like,
you know, I owe it to
this guy in some fundamental sense, if I'm going to tell his story, to try to
connect with him. And I'm
a doc guy, that's my process, you know? And so I wrote him a letter, and I
never heard back. And,
but then he had left this kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past.
You know, he had
written all of these public posts on the Silk Road website, as Dread Pirate
Roberts, where he's putting
out his philosophy, his ethos, his, you know, convictions. And then at the same
time, he had
been secretly keeping a journal, long before he had launched Silk Road, all the
way through it,
up until the bitter end. And so when he got busted, they confiscated his laptop.
And when they opened up
his laptop, they had all of his private journal entries. So there was the
combination of his public
postings as Dread Pirate Roberts, and the diary entries as Ross Ulbricht. And
so while I
didn't have access to the guy, I had access to his words, and who, you know,
his, I guess,
accidental self-portrait in some way or another. And so when we got into, and
you're at, to your
question of, of how much of this is, you know, journalistically accurate. So
every piece of
voiceover in the movie that's, that's spoken by Nick Robinson, who plays Ross
Ulbricht, all of that
is either taken from the diary entries, or taken from the public postings as Dread
Pirate Roberts.
And then all of the chat logs, all of the back and forth, the encrypted
communications between,
you know, Knob and Dread Pirate Roberts, all of that stuff is taken from the
documentary record.
Because I felt like, you have to be true to who this guy is, in some sense,
spiritually, you know?
Yeah. Did you communicate with him at all?
No. So what happened was, I, so I couldn't, I couldn't get to, you know, I
wrote him a letter,
never heard back. But what ended up happening was his ex-girlfriend, who's an
Austin, who's here in
Austin, Julia V, who's portrayed in the movie by the actor, actress Alexandra
Shipp, she became a
consultant for it. When I was writing the script, and then when making the
movie, because I felt like
I needed somebody who knew this guy, who loved him, who had an intimate
viewpoint on who he was.
And so she became my kind of source and way in, in an emotional sense, right?
How old was she when all it was going down?
20s, you know, in her 20s. I mean, and that's, and that's kind of...
What year is this?
That's basically 2011 to 2013.
And so, you know, she's, is she in college? Is she just out of college?
Just out, right? So they're like, young people knocking around Austin. And, and
for her,
I think it was, you know, what she had told me was, initially, it was like, he
and I against the
world, you know, inside the bubble. And then little by little, the Silk Road
website became his
masterpiece. 