Mark Ruffalo and Rob Bilott on DuPont and “Dark Waters”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Do you believe, Mark and Rob, still that the system is rigged? And what can be done about it?

MARK RUFFALO, ACTOR, “DARK WATERS”: Look, we’re seeing this happen through all the different industries, whether it’s pharmaceuticals and being lied to about how addictive opioids were to Monsanto and the harmless chemicals, harmless, that they’re putting on our foods, to even the fossil fuel industry telling us that fracking doesn’t harm water. It’s everywhere. And both sides feel this in America. You know, part of Trump’s whole appeal was that the system was rigged against those people and that he was going to drain the swamp, OK? That’s the same concept. What we’re sensing is, is we have a government that isn’t responsive to the needs of the people and has become slavish to a corporate system where our democracy is in service of an economic capitalist system, instead of that system being in service to our democracy. And so, yes, it has been rigged. It has been rigged because there’s so much money in politics. I’ll tell you one thing, if you wanted to fix this problem really quickly, you have the state have a stake in our health care. If the state had a stake in our health care, then this stuff would get cleaned up really fast, because right now, we’re getting poisoned. We have to pay to make ourselves healthy. And the state just keeps taking money from both sides to keep that vicious circle going.

AMANPOUR: So, let me follow up with you, then, Rob, on that. Because, here we are in a real world where this contamination, as you point out, I think the company knew about it for decades and did not remove people from harm’s way and moved the dumping of the sludge from one place to another and kept harming people until you came into this story. But before we had Erin Brockovich and that famous story about the contaminated ground water there, and since we’ve had Flint, Michigan, and the lead in the water. This keeps going on. And let’s not forget the brave whistleblowers for the tobacco crisis, where the tobacco companies knew for decades that this was poisonous and addictive and did nothing about it. So —

RUFFALO: Not to mention Exxon and climate change.

AMANPOUR: All of that. So, Rob, as a litigator and as an activist, because you got involved to try to fix this, how does the system change, beyond what Mark just said?

ROB BILOTT, LAWYER, PORTRAYED BY MARK RUFFALO IN “DARK WATERS”: Well, I think the first step is people have to be aware of how the system really works. And I think one of the things that you see with the film and what I try to explain also in my book is how this system has been set up.