#1614 - Tiller Russell

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Are we rolling? Oh, we are, we're up. Yeah, this is a Kill Cliff CBD, 25 milligrams of CBD. Jalapeno pineapple.

Tiller Russell (0:24)

Jalapeno pineapple, strong, I like it, it's good.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

It's called Flaming Joe, that's my face, bro.

Tiller Russell (0:29)

It's flaming.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Hey, I love your fucking movies. I love The Seven Five, 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 a certain amount of time with actors. But even the guy who played the bad cop, what is his name?

Tiller Russell (0:50)

Jason Clarke, I love that guy.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

He's great. He's been in a bunch of things.

Tiller Russell (0:54)

He was in Chappaquiddick, he was in First Man, he's been in a bunch of stuff, and he's a beast.

It was 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 cat does, you know?

Joe Rogan (1:14)

He's so good as a bad guy.

Tiller Russell (1:16)

Yeah, and he's game for it.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Yeah, 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.

Tiller Russell (1:27)

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 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 Clarke, who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like, dude, I'm hip to that. You know, I want to do it.

Joe Rogan (2:14)

Is he playing a real guy?

Tiller Russell (2:16)

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 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 kind of a hybrid between the two.

Joe Rogan (2:55)

Yeah, it's a great vehicle for moving the story along and condensing it without having too many different moving parts. Because you got so much going on.

Tiller Russell (3:07)

Well, and it was 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 in 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, Dread Pirate Roberts. But none of the stuff was in the zeitgeist yet. We hadn't even really heard of Bitcoin. But I remember thinking like, man, there's a story there. It's maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a doc, but 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, he's this brilliant writer and reporter, has like a nose for story and is able to get to people. And he had gotten to Ross Ulbrich's girlfriend in Austin.