Pain Hustlers follows Liza Drake, a high school dropout and struggling single mother. She manages to find a job at a bankrupt pharmaceutical company in a dilapidated strip mall in Central Florida. However, her life takes an unexpected upswing when sales skyrocket, sending Liza into the high life, but it also puts her in the center of a criminal conspiracy with dire consequences.
Pain Hustlers is directed by David Yates from a script penned by Wells Tower based on Evan Hughes’ book of the same name. Yates and Lawrence Grey produced the Netflix movie. Pain Hustlers features a star-studded cast led by Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O’Hara, Chloe Coleman, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, Amit Shah, Aubrey Dollar, Willie Raysor, and Andy García.
Screen Rant exclusively interviewed David Yates and Lawrence Grey for their new movie, Pain Hustlers. Grey revealed the truth about the pharmaceutical and medical systems that shocked him. Yates shared what drew him to the script and discussed working with Blunt to craft her character, Liza Drake.
David Yates & Lawrence Grey On Pain Hustlers
Screen Rant: Pain Hustlers is an eye-opening amazing film that is a complete human story. David, this film has you returning to your roots with social drama issues; it tells a very human story. What attracted you to Pain Hustlers?
David Yates: Well, what I love about this story, first of all, Wells Tower, who wrote the screenplay, is such a beautiful writer, great with character, great with tone, very subversive, slightly cheeky. So, it’s Wells’ writing that was hugely appealing. And then the fact that we were making a subject which is a state of the nation subject, something that’s touching so many lives, and Lawrence and I, very early on, decided we wanted to create an experience for the audience. It’s a bit of a Trojan horse in the sense that what it says on the tin, it could be weighty and heavy, but we wanted to bring the audience in to connect with these human beings, to really go along with their ride, and be kind of entertained and seduced to a certain extent, before we get to some of the finer messaging of the movie.
So, that’s what appealed to me. I’ve been making these big movies for theaters, which are designed to bring global audiences into the cinema, and I wanted to do the same with Pain Hustlers, we wanted to make a film that people would enjoy and come to and talk about, but at the same time dealt with a state of the nation issue that is ongoing, and unresolved, and is a big issue and a serious one.
Absolutely. Lawrence, this film is an eye-opening look at the inner workings of American medicine. When researching Pain Hustlers, what surprised you the most about this subculture?
Lawrence Grey: I think probably what was most shocking about it was just the unlimited ability to be able to financially incentivize a doctor to prescribe a medication. When you experience it as a patient, you really think a doctor is matching a patient to the best medication, and that happens in a very objective process that’s really just about the best interest of the patient. As you get behind the curtain of how it really happens, there’s so many factors that go into that.
There are quite a few regulations, but there is this giant loophole that a doctor is an independent prescriber who can write whatever medication he or she deems right. So, that just creates this unbelievable incentive of bribery, to be able to incentivize the doctor to write that drug, and I think just the extent to which people will go to get a doctor to write their medication was pretty astonishing.
It’s pretty wild. David, Emily plays Liza, and there’s this fantastic scene where Liza is talking about feeling exactly the same, despite her success. Can you talk to me about crafting the character with Emily, because she is extremely relatable, but flawed, and takes accountability for her actions.
David Yates: Yeah, of course, we love the notion of a character who is flawed, and who is on this journey, and is capable of doing a few shady things. That appealed to Emily enormously, and to us as storytellers. We didn’t want her to be perfect, we wanted her to get deep into this moral maze, and do some things that were questionable. But you use the word — which I love — accountability, and the thing about accountability is, and why I think audiences relate to her very much, by the end of the movie, she’s the one person who stands up and goes, “I know I did wrong, I couldn’t help myself, and I’ll take the hit for it.” That’s one of my favorite moments in the movie. It’s so simple, it’s so elegant in the way that Emily does it, but it is so powerful.
There’s something really simple and beautiful about that notion of accountability. In a world that is complex, where everybody is dodging things, and sort of doing shady stuff, there’s one human being who stands up and says, “I did wrong, let me take the jail time.” Emily is an amazing actress, she comes to work so prepped, she has a really strong concept of how she wants to explore a scene. So, when you start the day with her, she’s already got things figured out in her head, and you do two or three takes, and then I’ll come in maybe with one or two notes, but you want to keep out of the way, so she can just explore what she’s already prepared, and then we’ll fine tune a little bit as we go through the day. But it’s a great process, because she’s so inside that character’s head, she brings so much to the floor when she turns up for work, it makes my job so much easier.
About Pain Hustlers
Liza dreams of a better life for herself and her daughter. Hired to work for a bankrupt pharmaceutical company, Liza skyrockets with sales and into the high life, putting her in the middle of a federal criminal conspiracy.
Check back for our other Pain Hustlers interview with Colleen Atwood.
Pain Hustlers is available now on Netflix.
