Peter Craig has co-written such recent hits as Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman, and Gladiator II, but he takes on directing and showrunning duties with Apple TV+ Dope Thief. He calls directing “the ultimate realization of writing.”
The crime drama, based on Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 book of the same name, follows two Philadelphia friends (Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura) who pose as DEA agents to rob small-time drug dealers. His experience co-writing 2010’s The Town with Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard proved useful.
Craig, the son of Sally Field and her high school sweetheart, Peter Craig, is a novelist-turned screenwriter with a special talent for adaptations. His first Hollywood writing job was revising Andrea Berloff’s screenplay based on his third novel, 2005’s addiction-action story Blood Father.
“It was fun having worked on my own book…where I didn’t care what the author thought,” Craig jokes.
But Blood Father wasn’t his first Hollywood script to make it to the screen. The film, starring Mel Gibson and Erin Moriarty, arrived on screens by 2016. By then, Craig had worked on much bigger projects.
Craig’s Blood Father work got him the job on The Town, but even before The Town he had another near-breakthrough: He also wrote a script based on his second novel, 2004’s Hot Plastic. At one point Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne owned the rights.
“He wanted to do this kind of sexy crime thing out of it,” says Craig. “It was going to be very ‘90s. That didn’t work out.”
Lyne also wanted to make The Town, based on the book Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan.
“I wrote a very long version of that script for him because he wanted to do a three-hour movie… he wanted his double-album. He was really going for it.”
When Affleck took over The Town, the process began of “trimming it into something that was doable, both in terms of scope and budget. Adrian wanted an enormous amount of money, Ben didn’t.”
The success of The Town helped Craig secure a very high-profile job adapting Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: Mockingjay along with Craig and Danny Strong. Parts 1 and 2 were released in 2014 and 2015.
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“You have to hit certain plot points,” he says of adaptations. “Some books you do, some you don’t. With that, you have to hit the major points. But there’s still an infinite amount of invention needed to connect everything. To make the characters make sense. The mediums are so different. Everyone thinks it’s like taking tennis to ping pong, but it’s not. You’re really not just boiling something down. You’re actually building a whole new ship in a totally different bottle, inspired by ideas.”
Peter Craig on Adapting and Directing Dope Thief
After his run of recent screenwriting successes, which also include co-writing 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, he’s both the writer and one of the directors of Dope Thief. (Gladiator II director Ridley Scott also handles an episode and serves as an executive producer.)
Craig saw Tafoya’s book as the perfect gateway into the story, but he felt the introspection in the second half of the book didn’t lend itself to TV. Craig preferred to hew to the “propulsive crime” element of the book in the first half, an approach that Tafoya supported.
Craig sees the main characters, Ray (Tyree Henry) and Manny (Maura), as criminals with a code: “deep down they’re moral people,” he says.
“They can have a whole moral system they’ve built for themselves that sometimes looks illogical to the outside world. But it’s worked for them to a certain point. There’s always something that completely disrupts it.”
He’s philosophical about the storytelling limitations and freedoms of the screen and the page.
“I miss writing novels a lot, because in a novel, you have just enough room to go back and explain something. If a character hasn’t made sense during the first act of a feature, you’re in trouble.
“Whereas in a series, you can have a little regression. You can have a flashback and show why that character is motivated a certain way. And who they are. Six or seven of these episodes came really quickly for me. The only challenge was ending it in a way that could resolve the whole series or have it go forward if it had to.”
Craig tried to keep things moving on set, while planning ahead of time for debate and discussion. He said he asked the actors “to argue with me before we got going, because I didn’t want to give them a lot of notes on the day.”
He explains: “I don’t think actors like a lot of notes. I think they like to be pretty precise. So, I told them, ‘If there’s anything big. let’s discuss it a week before we start.’ Really good actors are like athletes, and you don’t want to change the game plan in the middle of the shoot.”
As a first-time director, Craig loved to “have 12 to 14 hours of total focus.” Since he wore many hats as the showrunner, he appreciated those moments of directing and “just having one job.”
He also tried, he said, to “think like an editor.”
“The enthusiasm of the day doesn’t necessarily correspond to what you’re getting,” he says. “It might feel so good during the day because you’re moving so quickly, and everybody seems to be nailing it. It’s a completely different thing when you get into cutting it.”
He also relied on a team that knew Philadelphia.
“The location scouts would give notes because they knew Philly so well. The craft service lady would come and say something because she knew Philly so well. I said at the beginning that I wanted to hear from absolutely everyone, so speak up if you’re seeing something that’s in my blind spot. And people would. When you have that spirit of everyone pulling together, I think you get a more layered show.”
Dope Thief is now on Apple TV+.
Main image: Brian Tyree Henry, left, and Wagner Moura in Dope Thief. Apple TV+.