Filmmaker Tiller Russell on Turning "Silk Road" Story Into a Movie

Hey, I love your fucking movies. I love the 7-5 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. Jason, first man. He's been in a bunch of stuff and he's a beast. So interesting. When I got there on set with him and it's like sort of 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 guy does. He's so good as a bad guy. Yeah. And he's game for it. 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 going to 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 Clark, who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like, dude, I'm, I'm, I'm hip to that. You know, I want to do it. Is 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, 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, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along, you know, and condensing it without having too many different moving parts. Because you got so much going on. Well, and it's 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 and then 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. But 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 is 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, oh, 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 and knowing people in US Attorney from making US Attorney's office for making the seven five for making Operation Odessa, whatever, those guys would call me and they were like, man, there's a whole nother amazing half of the story, which is the crooked cop side of the story. Suddenly when I saw that, I thought, okay, now that's a movie. Because 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. 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 at a certain point, I was like, I need to pour myself into this because there wasn't... 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 going to pour in here? I can research it the way I would do a doc, but really, if I'm going to 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. So when you say poured yourself into it, did you create this story with the daughter that needed the money for school? 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 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 going to put my own biography into this. So I'm going to put maybe my relationship with my daughter or my relationship with my wife. And so kind of build out from what's there with the personal story to it. Is that a difficult thing to do? 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 if they don't know. Tor of Silk Road is a spectacular story because he created this marketplace through the dark web using Tor and encryption. And Tor is a browser, it's an encrypted browser. Yeah, it's basically like the Harry Potter invisibility cloak. 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 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 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 and can't use? Would it be great if there was 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 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, 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 Seven Five had been locked up years earlier. And so I sat down and I wrote him a letter and he was in awaiting sentencing, I think, at the time. But I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access to him, rightly so, because it potentially screwed up his defense. But I felt like 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. And so I wrote him a letter and I never heard back. But then he had left this kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past. 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 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 his, I guess, accidental self-portrait in some way or another. And so when we got into your question of how much of this is journalistically accurate, so every piece of voiceover in the movie 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 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. Did you communicate with him at all? No. So what happened was, so I couldn't, I couldn't get to, I wrote him a letter, never heard back. But what ended up happening was his ex-girlfriend who's here in Austin, Julia V, who's portrayed in the movie by the 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 weigh in in an emotional sense, right? How old was she when all was going down? 20s, you know, in her 20s. And what year is this? It's basically 2011 to 2013. And so, you know, is she in college? Is she just out of college? Just out, right? So there are like young people knocking around Austin. 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, him and the website. And eventually the website kind of eats him, you know? Yeah. Well, you did a great job of portraying the obsession that he had with all the inner workings of the website 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 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. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.