In the screenplay there are both fictional characters based on composites of people I've read about and known and characters based on actual historical figures who were involved in the Matewan Massacre. Mixing the historical and the fictional is something that has been done numerous times, but it's something you always have to do carefully. Well-known historical figures become a kind of public property and over the years lots of writers take a crack at them—think of the wildly different movie interpretations of Custer or Jesse James or Napoleon. You feel that if one interpretation does them an injustice they'll get another day in court, the record will be gone back to. Since the historical figures I was dealing with were not widely known, I felt a responsibility to stick pretty close to the verifiable accounts of their actions and shied away from their personal lives. The burden of personalizing the story then fell on the fictional characters. I didn't want the audience to be able to feel this was a story of long ago and far away, about people they could never be or know. In some sorts of movies you want the exact opposite, you want a kind of generic simplicity that can become mythic if you do it well enough. In Sergio Leone's Westerns he stripped away the specifics of place, personal history and even name, until he could make a movie appropriately titled The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But while the mythic is stirring, it can make you think "this really doesn't have anything to do with me, those are allegorical figures up there on the screen." So I tried to particularize, to humanize, to provide historical and domestic detail. The nature of the detail is often not so important as the fact of it—the dollars-and-cents amounts miners had to pay for heat and housing in 1920 may be hard to translate into modern prices but we recognize the reality of being concerned with a raise in the rent and a drop in the paycheck—we've been there counting pennies.