If Mark Ruffalo is playing you in a movie, it's easy to imagine what you would be like. One of his best-known roles is Bruce Banner aka The Hulk, so it's tempting to imagine that the person on the other end of the phone line might turn green and smash things. Even when Ruffalo plays real-life characters like Boston Globe reporter Mike Rezendes in Spotlight, his outbursts are often highlights of the movie.
With Dark Waters, however, Ruffalo tones down emotional eruptions, and from listening to lawyer Robert Bilott, whom the actor portrays in the movie, it's easy to understand why.
The film from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven) recounts how Bilott has fought for two decades against DuPont for polluting waterways in West Virginia with perfluoro-octanoic acid or C8 (PFOA), a chemical compound that was used to seal the Teflon no-stick surface on cookware.
According to Cancer.org, it was burned off during the production of Teflon products, but it can stay in the environment and in humans indefinitely. At least some small trace of PFOA is in most people's bodies, and significant exposure can lead to cancer of the thyroid, testicles or kidneys.
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Because of the potential harm to animals and other people, it's tempting to think that Ruffalo would re-enact the Cincinnati-based Bilott berating opposing counsel. From watching the movie or listening to the lawyer-speak, that's not what happens.
In his recently published book, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, Bilott recalls he became a partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP because of his skills as a researcher, not for his courtroom pyrotechnics.
"That's just not my personality," he says. "I am still a firm believer that if you present the facts in a way that people could look at them and actually see what transpired, the truth comes out and people will do the right thing."
TRYING TO HIDE
To demonstrate his point, the sequence in Dark Waters where Bilott deposes a DuPont executive draws its tension not from Ruffalo bellowing fury but from watching the chief executive officer trying to hide how the plaintiff's counsel is getting under his skin.
"I was trying to make sure that this individual would actually look at the information. He walked in that day saying he wasn't aware of certain health studies, and I wanted to make sure that by the time he left that day, he had seen them and that he had looked at them and that he was paying attention to them," Bilott says. "I wanted to relate to him in a way that he would not just ... shrug it off as another angry plaintiff's lawyer yelling at him. I wanted to really make sure that he listened and that he was seeing what I was showing to him and to do that in the most professional way, in a way that I thought would connect best with him. It's not the approach that most folks would be used to seeing in a movie."
One group of people who won't be in line for tickets to the movie or copies of the book are some of the brass at DuPont and Chemours, a company that makes compounds like PFOA since DuPont spun it off in 2015.
CEO Marc Doyle recently told the Los Angeles Times, "It's certainly not the company any of us know. I've been with DuPont for 25 years myself. The behaviors you might see in there are certainly not the behaviors I witnessed at any point in my career."
Bilott has heard this argument before.
"I think people can take a look at the film. Obviously, it's a movie. It's condensing 20 years of facts into two hours. The book provides a lot of background and the history of this. People now have that information, and they can take a look at that and decide who's actually telling the correct facts," he says.
Actually, PFOA predates Doyle's tenure, and that might explain why the EPA hadn't regulated it. Richard Nixon created the agency in 1970. PFOA predates it and didn't make the agency's list of forbidden compounds.
THE BIG READ
In digging through mountains of company records, Bilott recalls DuPont came up with a bizarre way of testing the long-term effects of PFOA exposure.
"Actually, there was a study in the early '60s where cigarettes were laced with Teflon to see what kind of reaction you would get. Unfortunately, what they learned was that this stuff would actually cause what you would call the Teflon flu. If you heated up the Teflon material to a certain temperature, it created chills, fevers, flu-like symptoms in the workers," he says.
In Dark Waters and Exposure, Bilott says that he made similar discoveries because he had to read millions of pages of DuPont documents and put them in order. One legal memo he wrote was accompanied by 12 pounds of supporting information. These days, he says the discovery process is somewhat easier because computer files are easier to search than reams of paper.
Still, he's adamant that he would not have learned about PFOA if he had not read the physical records.
"It was a lot of time spent going through documents, but for me to that was absolutely essential and critical to actually go through these documents myself," he says. "Now there's a whole process before you even get the documents people have to identify what the search terms would be upfront. If that had been the case in those days, I probably would not have found those documents because I didn't know I was looking for PFOA."
He adds that finding potential smoking guns is essential because plaintiffs' attorneys have the heavier burden of proof. Before taking on the case of farmer Wilbur Earl Tennant, Bilott defended chemical companies to make sure they were complying with EPA superfund requirements.
"If you're pursuing a case like this -- at least in the U.S. legal system -- it's the plaintiff who has the burden to prove whether the chemical you believe you've been exposed to was causing any of the harm. You have to prove what the chemical is and that it's causing you harm," he explains
"This was one of those rare circumstances frankly where people who are exposed to a chemical like this were able to actually confirm that their exposure was causing them harm and actually get compensated for it. That doesn't happen very often."
Careful viewers can spot Bilott, his wife and some of his clients in Dark Waters, and Haynes has shed the stylized approach he used in movies like I'm Not There, his symbolic journey through Bob Dylan's music and personas.
"We really wanted to make sure that the folks working on the movie had the opportunity to meet as many of the real people as they could and really have the chance to sit down with them and talk with them and understand what they went through," Bilott recalls. "A lot of the movie was actually filmed here in Cincinnati, even in our offices so what you're seeing are about as close to to the actual locations as you can get."
FAR FROM OVER
Dark Waters doesn't shy from depicting the toll that Bilott's cases have taken on him and his clients. Bilott experienced an attack like a stroke, and Tennant lived to see a settlement, but the farmer and his wife both died from cancer.
PFOA is "forever chemical" in that it outlasts the people who have it in their bodies. Bilott and the makers of the film are involved in a campaign called FightForeverChemicals.com (darkwaters.participant.com) to educate the public on where exposures have occurred and to list which companies are moving away from making these compounds.
"Up till now, all of us have been exposed without any choice in the matter," Bilott says. "I filed a new case just last year trying to require the companies that are putting these new chemicals into our environment to pay for whatever studies are necessary to confirm what (the chemicals) are going to do to us.
"I'm hoping with the book and the movie, at least people will know they're being exposed and hopefully be able to choose whether they're going to be exposed."
MovieStyle on 12/06/2019