The Screenwriter’s Process
With 2012 Nicholl fellow Michael Werwie
In 2012, Michael Werwie entered his 29th script into the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting — and won. His project, about serial killer Ted Bundy’s crimes, told from the perspective of his longtime girlfriend, has since turned into the Netflix film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron and Lily Collins.
We caught up with Werwie to discuss his unexpected fascination with Bundy, his writing process and how becoming a Nicholl fellow altered the course of his career.
When did you realize you wanted to become a writer?
I wanted to work in storytelling from a very young age. Before I knew how to spell, I was drawing a lot. My favorite movie as a kid was Jaws. I saw it when I was way too young, and I was just so fascinated by sharks.
I was drawing shark attack stories when I was five years old.
Then, as I learned to spell and actually write words, I would borrow the neighbor’s typewriter and make the stories look like novels. I made movies as a young kid with my parents’ camcorder and bought screenwriting software when I was 11 years old. I wrote three features screenplays in high school.
When I moved from Milwaukee out to LA to go to USC, I majored in business, but I kept writing on the side.
I don’t think I had the courage to call myself a writer in college.
I didn’t think I had a lot to say, but it was always my secret passion. For 10 years, I bartended and wrote a lot of really bad scripts, but it kept my days free to work on that. If I had any meetings pop up, I could go. The bartending was a nice counterbalance to the solitude of writing, though. It was a very social and fun experience.
Where do you find inspiration, or motivation, for writing scripts?
In the early days, there were many scripts that I spent way too much time on. There was a particular script that I spent three years on, and people kept telling me I should give up on it and move on to something else. I didn’t.
I stuck it out, and this was the script that finally attracted the interest of a manager.
The lesson I took away from that is: If I’m really passionate about what I’m writing about, that will typically yield better results than trying to write something more commercial, which is a lesson that has repeated itself several times in my writing life and now in my professional career.
That applies to Extremely Wicked, too. When I pitched it to people, I was told to just forget about that concept.
My first paid job, which is now my second produced movie, was another case where nobody saw the potential in it, but I knew on a gut level that it was something important.
I think it comes down to a feeling. It’s not always inspiration.
It may begin with inspiration, but because writing a feature is such a long, agonizing process, that disappears very quickly. It has to be more of a belief in what you’re trying to do.
How did you come up with the idea for “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile”?
I never intended to write a movie about Ted Bundy. I was writing what should have been a much more commercial, big action movie that seemed like it would be a better play for a young writer trying to get recognition. It just seemed formulaic and like the smart decision on paper, but it was something that I kept putting off. I just didn’t feel like doing the work each day on this project.
That’s when I picked up a book about Ted Bundy.
I was just going to read about him to procrastinate from writing. I picked up The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule and I was captivated by the story. It was so compelling to read about the very domestic details of his life. I had never seen a serial killer movie told from a perspective that didn’t include any violence. I thought that was an interesting way into otherwise familiar territory.
After reading that book, I read everything that I could find about him that was written by a primary source: friends, his girlfriend, reporters, cops, lawyers. There were commonalities in all of their stories about how normal he seemed on the outside.
That was an interesting way in. It’s a story of seduction and manipulation and, ultimately, betrayal. But it just began with an obsession about learning everything I could possibly learn about the case and about him and about the people in his life.
Take us through your writing process.
If it’s based on a true story or some world that I don’t know a lot about, then I will research until I feel proficient enough to enter that world. With Extremely Wicked, I spent three or four months reading and watching and listening to everything I could find and just immersing myself completely. But at a certain point, you have to put that away and start to make sense of it all.
At that point, I spend a lot of time pre-planning. Sometimes that’s an outline. Sometimes it’s just doing a lot of just free-form writing. I start gathering material until there’s this critical mass and I feel like it’s time to start writing.
But I do like to know the skeleton of what I’m trying to do. That way, I don’t ever get that stuck. I know what the next milestone is that I’m trying to get to in the story.
It’s really helpful to know the ending so I can write towards something.
I’m kind of a perfectionist when I’m writing too, so I’m constantly rewriting as I’m working that first draft. I’ll go back from the beginning and just iron it out over and over again. By the time I get to the end of the first draft, the first half of the script is pretty well polished, and then it’s about making sure that everything works structurally.
How about the rewriting process?
The true art form, I think, is the rewriting phase. Once I get those first couple of drafts done, then the real work begins.
I like to re-outline my scripts after I’ve done a few drafts. The story can change a lot in rewrites. With Extremely Wicked, because the events are the events, and I always knew where I was going to start and end, structurally, it was always the same. But you start to understand the characters on a deeper level. You start to understand certain themes that maybe you weren’t aware of when you set out to write.
More often, you think you’re writing about one idea, but it’s really about something else, and it takes a long time for that to emerge.
It is a discovery process, and that’s the exciting part to me. It requires a lot of time and energy and hard work to get to that point to then reevaluate it and start to do the fun stuff. But that’s when the project really elevates to the next level.
Do you look for outside feedback throughout?
I think feedback is essential. I wait until I get a draft that I feel is functional and doesn’t have any glaring problems that I can’t solve on my own, and then I have several different readers that I’ll cycle different drafts through to get their perspective.
It’s really helpful to me to get to understand how other people are experiencing the story.
I lose all objectivity once I’m working on something for a year or more, and I can start to get a little bit of that back when I get the reactions of different readers. Then I can go back to it with fresh eyes and start to see the story not as the original writer but as a re-writer. I can be a little more ruthless with what I need to cut or add or change.
What is a typical day of writing like for you?
I’m freshest in the morning before I’ve done any emails or phone calls or read the news. I’ll wake up early. Once I make coffee, I try to get to work. If I can get a good several hours in, say, from 8:00 a.m. to noon, I consider that a great day. Sometimes it’s only an hour or less. Especially when I was bartending and I didn’t have the whole day and night to get back into it, sometimes I would go out for an hour to a coffee shop. That helps too, to get out of the house a little bit.
Lately, I’ve been going back to work again at night. The middle of day for me is dead time. I’m not very prolific in the afternoons. I’ll do more business-related things or run errands.
How do you get out of a rut when you have nothing on the page one day?
I get stuck all the time. I think it’s part of the process, but I don’t think about it as writer’s block anymore.
I don’t really believe there’s such thing as writer’s block.
I find myself prejudging the material before it’s time to do that. That can be paralyzing. That’s typically one of the symptoms. Otherwise, it’s just laziness. A lot of times I just don’t feel like doing it. If I don’t have willpower that day, maybe I’ll skip that day of writing.
But I’m also a firm believer in taking time off now. I think it is important to recharge. As long as I’m honest about what I’m doing and not being lazy about it, it’s really helpful to me to maybe take a day here and there to do something completely different or read a book or watch a movie or go to the theater or some other artistic endeavor.
The subconscious is really powerful, and I think it’ll unlock something if I’m not directly thinking about a story problem. There are little tricks to get through those things. If those don’t work, I’ll go back and I’ll re-outline the story. That might trigger something. Or if I’m outlining something, I might try to write a scene, and that might unlock something in the outline. I’ll just do a lot of different writing exercises, as any early career-writing student would do. It’s a way to stay productive.
What was it like to win the Nicholl Fellowship?
It had been like a dream of mine to win the Nicholl since I was a kid. By 2012, I had been entering for 10 years at that point. I had written 13 scripts that I had finished. I had maybe 20 or so that were unfinished. I was in a tough spot. I was wondering, “Did I have any more to say? Is this really the career for me? Am I good enough?”
Winning the Nicholl was the validation I needed in that moment.
It was a major boost of motivation and that changed my life literally overnight. It wasn’t even winning it — it was the finalist announcement. They announced the top 10 scripts that year, and all of a sudden, emails and phone calls started coming in.
For the next couple of months, I went to a hundred meetings, and I met a lot of producers and executives and directors and actors. It was a dream come true. It was very exciting, but it took me another year before I got a paid writing job.
During the time I was taking all of those meetings and being treated really well as a brand new writer, I was still working at the bar.
I’ve worked mainly on features that whole time since. I realized the first big struggle is just breaking in. An equally big struggle is staying in.
What was your first project after winning the Nicholl?
My first paid job was writing a movie that I brought to Warner Brothers. It’s called Lost Girls. It’s based on a true crime book by the same name by Robert Kolker, and it was sent to me by my agency. I set it up at the studio. I wrote a few drafts, and it went from Warner Brothers to Amazon and eventually to Netflix. That’s going to be my second movie.
That was also produced the same year as Extremely Wicked. It’s now in post-production and will be out later this year. But again, that was a passion project that I believed in from the start. It took a long time, but we got some really talented people involved and it finally got to the starting line last year. We shot it last fall.
That’s when I feel like my career started. The Nicholl was getting the attention, and then Lost Girls was actually making a profession out of it.
What advice would you give to a first-time, or 29th-time, Nicholl applicant?
My advice is to worry about the things that are in your control. Once you submit the script to the Nicholl, it’s up to the readers to push it along. But as far as what you can do before that: write what you care about.
Write what you’re passionate about and just follow your curiosity.
If you don’t care about the material, if you’re trying to game the system, people can feel that in the writing. It’s not as lively as it should be.
If there’s a lesson that I’ve learned repeatedly in my career, it’s that the projects that I care about on an emotional level are the ones that have always done the most for my career. Be a little less strategic in selecting what to focus your time on, and listen more to what your instincts tell you. I think that always results in the best work.
