David Yates has directed some of the biggest movies in the world. While he was initially known for smaller character-driven miniseries like 2001’s The Way We Live Now, 2003’s State of Play, and 2004’s Sex Traffic, in 2007, he directed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and, from that point on, became the guiding director of the Wizarding World franchise. He closed out the original series with 2009’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and the epic two-part finale, 2010’s Harry Potter and the Death Hallows Pt. 1, and 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2.

In 2016, he helmed two big-budget Warner Bros. productions, The Legend of Tarzan and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. He ushered the Wizarding World into a new era with two more films, 2018’s Fantastic Beast and the Crimes of Grindelwald and 2022’s Fantastic Beasts and the Secrets of Dumbledore. After more than a decade in the Wizarding World, Yates was looking for a break, and then came along producer Lawerence Grey with Pain Hustlers. The Netflix film focuses on a pharmaceutical start-up in Florida and deals with the opioid crisis, a far cry from wizards, wands, and wonder. Still, it was just what he was looking for, while Grey wanted to get the stylist behind some of the most acclaimed BBC miniseries.

Yates and Grey spoke to us about Pain Hustlers, which stars Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman, and is in select theaters now. It will stream on Netflix Oct. 27.

How the Project Began
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Grey has had an interesting career in Hollywood. He had been a studio executive for years. His run at Fox Searchlight Pictures from 2000 to 2006 was incredible, as his accomplishments included finding the script for Juno (which would later win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards), packaged with Jason Reitman, and overseeing the production. He also developed Tyler Perry’s directorial debut, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which has since launched the successful Madea franchise. His production company, Grey Matter Productions, was formed in 2013, and one of their first hits was the 2016 horror film Lights Out by David F. Sandberg.

Pain Hustlers marked a big step for Grey, as the film was acquired by Netflix in May 2022 for $50 million. By the time that deal was made, Grey had been working on Pain Hustlers for years, developing the film after he discovered the article “The Pain Hustlers” by Evan Hughes in The New York Times Magazine. He explained:

“Our screenwriter, Wells Tower, was already intrigued with the material. Wells and I had known each other for a number of years and wanted to work together. He had written this incredible book of short stories titled Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, that just stuck with me.”

“We got on a phone call early on, and in this 37-page article, responded to the exact same kernel of what we thought would be interesting,” Grey said about working with Wells Tower on the script. Then, a friend at the agency suggested David Yates for the project. Laurence’s response was, “How many lotteries do I have to win to get David to do that?” Grey was already looking at Yates’ past work, like Sex Traffic and State of Play, as points of reference for the material, so Yates was a natural fit.

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Yates jokingly responded, “I was looking for something that didn’t have wizards in it.” Yet there was more to it than just that. “In this case, because I come from a country where universal free healthcare is just a given, this particular story intrigued me. I wanted to get under the bonnet of why for-profit care for people is so accepted and embraced, and it does not make much sense to me.” He continued:

As I read the article, I found the characters fascinating and the world intriguing, and it was a contemporary drama in America without green screens. It said something about the American system of doing things that rightly or wrongly was hurting people, so that is why I jumped in.

Tone Was Everything
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Pain Hustlers has a more comedic tone than expected from a film dealing with the opioid crisis. “It was a conscious choice right from the get-go, from the first treatment,” said Yates. The director wanted the audiences to have a good time with the film and treat it in a different matter than a traditional drama. “If we are going to tell this story, we don’t want it to be the ‘eat your vegetables’ version. We want it to be involving.”

This decision though is intentional, as it is designed to get the viewers to really think about the material. Yates explained:

“This subject matter is quite heavy, and we want as many people to see our movie and be entertained by it but also provoke them into thinking about this issue. Making it fun and making it entertaining is like a Trojan Horse in a sense. As Eliza is pulled and seduced into this world, we wanted the audience to as well, so by the end, you lay out the tragic consequences of the story.”

Grey, from the get-go, wanted Yates’ style for the project. He wanted Pain Hustlers to be “a film about a complex criminal conspiracy, but that was entertaining, relevant, and exciting,” said Grey. “We then spent years calibrating it and finding the balance of the excessive comedy that is true to this world but also the reality of the situation and what the victims have gone through, and our own naivety of what is going on in this world.”

Healthcare Differences Between Countries Informed the Story
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One of the most fascinating aspects of Pain Hustlers is it is a look at the American healthcare system but told through the eyes of a British filmmaker from a country that provides Universal healthcare to its citizens. This is a sharp contrast to the United States, where Americans are often paying large amounts of money out of pocket to see a doctor, while some forgo medical treatment because they fear they cannot afford a hospital bill. This is one of the aspects that drove Yates to the project and also helped inform the tone. “I wanted a story that spoke to a state of the nation in a way. That revealed something about the American healthcare system,” said Yates. The British director continued:

“We come from a place of privilege. We have a national healthcare system, and we all complain about it, by the way, in the UK. We bemoan that it’s not good enough and the waiting list is too long, but if anyone else were to point a finger at it and say it’s not very good, we all go, ‘No it’s the best health service in the world!’ We are very proud of it as well. It’s a bit like the BBC. We love the BBC, but we love to criticize the BBC.”

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This particular contrast between the American healthcare system and other parts of the world, like the United Kingdom, is a key factor in making Pain Hustlers work. An American who only knows this system would see it as the way it just is and might make a tragedy, but an outside perspective points out how absurd it really is to have healthcare be a profit-based industry. Hopefully, Pain Hustlers draws in enough viewers to hopefully spark some real change.

Pain Hustlers streams on Netflix starting October 27, 2023. You can watch the trailer below: