The first step in making Joe's pacifism acceptable, maybe even attractive, was to make him seem a familiar rather than exotic character. So I made him a Wobbly. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a very home-grown, American, populist, working-stiff kind of organization. It had little of the rarefied ideological bent and European influence of the Socialist and Communist parties of the time. Lumberjacks, longshoremen, railroad men, farmworkers—the salt of the earth joined in a kind of global idealism. They struck hard and often, lived constantly on the front lines, advocated noncompliance and sabotage of the World War I effort and were broken as a major force in only a few years by the federal government and their own lack of political infighting skills. But the Wobbly spirit remained alive in fact and fiction, in the Tom Joads and Woody Guthries of the Depression, in the rhetoric of Huey Long and the selling copy of the New Deal. Joe Kenehan is not a slogan-spouting Marxist with a book education, not a little Indian guy in white robes preaching a kind of mystic Eastern acceptance, not a stranger at all but just about the most regular fella you'd want to meet, a railroad worker who's had it up to here with the bosses and their bullshit and has started to do something about it. My hope for Joe Kenehan was that the audience would be halfway down the road with him, identifying with him, rooting for him, before they could stop and realize this sucker doesn't carry a gun. What gives?

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.

The characters have an archetypal outer appearance—Joe is the stranger in town, Sid the representative of brooding violence, Few Clothes the John Henry of coal, Turley the company man—but they also have to work on a merely human level, to seem to have a life outside of the story, other fish to fry. One thing I've tried to do in all the movies I've written for myself to direct is have the world populated by more than one or two people, to present a community. The norm in star-vehicle screenwriting is to have a couple of leads and the rest of the characters there only to provide background and plot advancement. "A love story set against the turbulent backdrop of the Hundred Years War" and so on. I'm more interested in how individual or political acts affect communities of people—parents, friends, children, co workers. To pull this off, to have all these characters seem three-dimensional, they need not only more screen time than is usually provided but also more depth of character.

In Matewan I try to give even the most negative of characters something else to play besides evil. At one point we learn that Hickey, one of the Baldwin agents sent to town to stir up trouble, is a war hero with a traumatic past in the trenches. This information is meant not as an excuse or a Freudian explanation for his actions but to give him some room to breathe, to remind us that the man's life is not contained by this one incident in it, as well as to establish him as a guy familiar with killing.

Similarly, Bass, James and Doolin, three of the Baldwins brought to town for the final confrontation, are introduced as a trio of working stiffs horsing around rather than as poker-faced grim reapers bent on murder. I didn't want the bad guys shot down at the end to be totally faceless, to be easily written off as human beings.

We PAN to see Joe as he takes stage for the first time, wading into the midst of the miners, voice full of fire --

JOE
You want to be treated like men? You want to be treated fair? Well you aint men to that coal company, you're equipment, like a shovel or a gondola car or a hunk of wood brace. They'll use you till you wear out or you break down or you're buried under a slate fall and then they'll get a new one, and they don't care what color it is or where it comes from.

Joe moves among the men, looking into their faces --

JOE
It doesn't matter how much coal you can load or how long your family's lived on this land -- if you stand alone you're just so much shit to those people!

Joe points to Few Clothes --

JOE
You think this man is your enemy? This is a worker! Any union keeps man out aint a union it's a goddam club! They got you fightin white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there aint but two sides in this world -- them that work and them that don't. You work, they don't. That's all you get to know about the enemy.