Creators Michael D. Fuller and Graham Gordy Share Their Quarry Origin Story

The series’ creators and scriptwriters discuss inspirations, setting the series in 1970s Memphis and creating a land of believable misfits.

Cinemax: How did you come about writing this show?

Michael D. Fuller: Graham and I are both from the South, and we were really interested in doing something that was about Southern criminality in the ’70s. The “palm-of-your-hand” pitch that we were working with was “gritty Dukes of Hazard,” and simultaneously to developing ideas for that, we were looking at various books or series that might strike our interest. We found [Max Allan Collins’] Quarry books by happenstance, and saw a real opportunity to put — and I’m stealing Graham’s line here — the “Quarry books chocolate” in our “gritty Dukes of Hazard peanut butter.”

When you meet the main character in the books, he’s a fully formed hit man. But what was most interesting to us in terms of starting a show, was his backstory — the experience of a soldier coming home at a time when there wasn’t a support system in place. So we thought, let’s start this show with this character’s origin story. And we found a great character, and a great hook, in terms of The Broker and his system.

Graham Gordy: Doing research into the time period was another big catalyst as well. The ’70s have always been fascinating to us because it’s kind of an amorphous decade. When you think of the ’60s, you think of revolution, assassinations, and certain political ideas falling by the wayside because of the Vietnam War. When you think of the ’80s you think about aggrandized self-interest, Reaganomics, a move towards a greater narcissism. But the ’70s was for exploration and self-reflection.

Cinemax: Besides the books, what were your other sources of inspiration?

Michael D. Fuller: Graham and I are research junkies, so to speak, and that fueled our interest in telling this story, and setting it when we did. That specific era of filmmaking is, for our money, the best it’s ever been. So there were a lot of films set in or from that era that we looked at, like The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Straight Time, Scarecrow, Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, and Coming Home. Book-wise, Nixonland was a big one for us in terms of history of the era, and Karl Marlantes’s What It Is Like to Go to War for insight only someone who has done it can offer. He served in Vietnam and wrote about the experience and how it changes you, and helping people suffering from PTSD. That informed us tremendously. So it was a combination of great films of the era, and doing the actual historical and psychological research.

Cinemax: How important is music to the storytelling?

Michael D. Fuller: There’s no more musically important place in this country, particularly during this time, than Memphis, and that was part of the appeal of setting it there. We’re people who hook into things via the music, and we felt that was something great for Mac’s character, and all of the characters in general. It’s just such an amazing era for music in this country and culturally, it was fun to be able to play in that sandbox.

Cinemax: What else about Memphis appealed to you?

Michael D. Fuller: It’s such an intriguing and tragic city. So although the books were set in Iowa, to us, being Southern and knowing the research we had already done, it was just moving the setting a little bit down the Mississippi River.

Graham Gordy: The river does play a role in the novels, and it played a big role for us, as well. In the middle of this country there is this thoroughfare that has given way to a lot of great literature and a lot of great things, but is also a thoroughfare for criminality.

Cinemax: Can you explain the significance of water to Mac’s character?

Michael D. Fuller: We started with what the river represents for America and its history, and specifically, what it meant for Memphis to be a city on the river. And we made a connection to the Mekong River in Vietnam. Like any symbol it’s open to interpretation, but for us it’s very much about Mac being able to find himself again, and define himself. The water becomes the turmoil we all experience in some way or another, and how we tread, much less swim, and how it becomes so much harder the more trauma you experience — the more bad things happen to you, and the more bad things you do. The river literally had a role in this show, but it also informed us figuratively.

Graham Gordy: And Mac’s love of water has been undermined in a way. He grew up as a swimmer, and as the season goes on you find out more about that. He built his pool himself, and there’s this aspect of the distinction between the kind of water you can control versus the kind of water you can be submerged in.

Michael D. Fuller: When he’s growing up, water is a source of joy. But what does that come to mean? And what does that represent in terms of his hope and idealism, and, like the river itself, how does that become more and more polluted as he moves forward?

Cinemax: Can you discuss the many different — yet still connected –environments that Quarry takes us into?

Graham Gordy: It built a lot as we went along, especially once we chose Memphis as a backdrop. Good writing for us is always about specificity, and a lot of it is based on the research and the people of the time. For instance, showing Ruth’s world, especially in 1972, just four years after Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in the city… and showing the ways Memphis had changed because of that.

It was very much a concerted effort to create a group of people that you could believe would get involved in a world like this, who would do the same thing that Mac is doing. And each of them has their own sort of “dignity answer” and their own narrative to justify why they’re doing it. So we’re creating a kind of land of misfit toys — you don’t get into this business unless you’re a damaged individual. Part of what we were doing was exploring the ways in which these people are variously damaged, and then showing the moments in which their actual humanity breaks through.

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