How Screenwriters Faced the Challenges of Adapting a Living Person’s Life for the Big Screen
Most biopics persuade you to empathize with the main character. But as actress-turned-writer/director Kristen Stewart explains, her screenplay adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir “The Chronology of Water” allows you to virtually become the protagonist.
“[Lidia] invites you to project yourself into her book,” she says. In a similar way, the film presents the thoughts of a woman (Imogen Poots) overcoming childhood abuse and adulthood addiction through sound design that places viewers inside her head. “Some of the emotional triggers are specific to her life, but I think they’re [also] invitations to remember your own. I wanted to make a movie that was not just about one person, but was kind of about all of us.”
“Water” is one of several fall features with scripts adapted from the lives of real protagonists, down-to-earth and extraordinary in equal measure. Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) explores the tortured soul of a musical icon in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Derek Cianfrance (Oscar nominee for “Sound of Metal”) and Kirt Gunn portray a criminal with a heart of gold in “Roofman” and David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) and Mirrah Foulkes show the determination and survival skills of a female boxing pioneer in “Christy.”
Stewart’s feature writing/directing debut, which premiered as a Cannes Un Certain Regard selection in May and hits U.S. theaters in December, is the most impressionistic film of the bunch. The project has consumed her thoughts for the past eight years, in part due to the time she needed to raise “purely independent” financing. “I reached out to Lidia [and] told her, ‘Please don’t give this to anyone who’s going to voiceover it to death or provide a three-act structure that’s much easier to finance than the movie that we could make.
“I always wanted to make sure that you could watch this movie with your eyes closed, because I wanted it to feel like a haunted house,” Stewart says. “I wanted [the protagonist] to feel like she was sitting next to you in a theater whispering in your ear, giving you a little more emotional context.”
Writer/director Cooper is proud of his Bruce Springsteen biopic, based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Cooper was a fan of the stripped-down, non-commercial 1982 album that paints stark portraits of the dark side of America. “Like Warren, when I was reading Bruce’s autobiography ‘Born to Run,’ I recognized that most every chapter was quite lengthy except for the chapter on ‘Nebraska.’ I wanted to understand why Bruce was reluctant to talk about it and the process behind writing it. As it turns out, it was too painful for him to put into his autobiography.”
Cooper met with Springsteen and his manager, Jon Landau. “Out of that, I received Bruce’s blessing to write the screenplay,” Cooper says. “I realized that the film had to echo that stripped-down, brutally honest [tone of the LP], and to get that, I needed to go straight to the source … That really opened up a conversation between Bruce and me,” that led to “countless hours” of deep conversations with the musician about his life.
“I just said, ‘I’m not interested in myth or nostalgia. I want to explore this man with a four-track recorder [‘Nebraska’ was made on] and nothing left to prove.’ And I think that resonated with him. I said, ‘I don’t want to dramatize your pain. I’m asking to explore the courage that it took to face it.’ And once he knew that there wasn’t going to be a jukebox or a celebration of celebrity, it actually relaxed him.”
The script Cooper wrote focused on Springsteen’s severe depression, a romantic relationship based on a composite of women he dated at the time, and his efforts to reconcile with his cold, hard-drinking father. “I wanted to know, ‘Bruce, what’s it like when you’re driving down a country road 92 miles per hour experiencing suicide ideation? Tell me why you couldn’t connect with someone [romantically]. Tell me what it felt like at 8 years old when your father’s roughhousing turns into violence.’ It was about trying to get to the truth of Bruce’s most painful moments, ones that he’s never expressed before in an interview or biography.”
Aside from licensing rights to his songs, Cooper says Springsteen had no screenplay or casting approval. “Our trust and respect for one another turned into a deep and abiding love for one another,” he says.
“The film is not a biopic. It’s a psychological portrait of an artist at one moment in his life. He kept saying, ‘Please give me a Scott Cooper movie. Don’t let the audience off the hook. The truth about yourself isn’t always pretty.’ Bruce wanted this chapter to be told, and he’s now seen the movie 13 times,” Cooper says.It’s rare to find a feel-good true crime story, so perhaps it was no surprise that “Roofman,” the misadventures of Jeffrey Allen Manchester, a robber who drilled through the roofs of numerous McDonald’s and hid inside a Toys “R” Us, would find its way to the screen.
A mid-level-budget comedy released by a major studio is almost as rare as a story like this. But writer/director Cianfrance and screenwriter Gunn managed to sneak one into theaters last month with the Paramount feature “Roofman,” based on a criminal who was nice to his victims.
Other scripts about Manchester had been floating around, but Cianfrance hadn’t read them, so he called his longtime producer, Hunting Lane Films’ Jamie Patricof, to say that he wanted to start doing his own research and bring in Gunn. They got on the phone with Manchester in maximum security prison back in 2021.
“He was like no one else we’d ever met,” Gunn says. “We talked to him on the phone 400-plus times for several years between the two of us. … He was a character with contradictions. He was locking people in freezers but giving them jackets. He was bad at being a criminal because his humanity kept kicking in, kind of foiling his criminal enterprise.”
After a year and a half, the pair called Manchester’s pastor and one-time girlfriend to validate his stories. “We thought they’d have bitterness, but they told us he was the greatest adventure of their lives and that he left their lives better than when he found them,” Cianfrance says.
Truth can be stranger than fiction, and that’s definitely the case with “Christy,” the wrenching story of female boxing pioneer Christy Martin. “When you consider how almost unimaginable Christy’s story is, the fact that it happened is part of what makes it so powerful,” says director Michôd, who co-wrote the screenplay with Foulkes. Sydney Sweeney, who signed on as a producer, plays the West Virginia woman who became one of the most prominent female fighters in history. Pressured to break up with her girlfriend, she was coerced into marrying her boxing coach (Ben Foster), only to face years of domestic abuse that nearly killed her.
With Martin’s life rights secured, Michôd and Foulkes spent many hours interviewing her via Zoom from their Australian home. “We got the script to a place where we felt really happy. She was very happy with it quite early on, which was a great relief,” Foulkes says. “We watched all of her fights, spoke to [her wife] Lisa a lot. And because she was at the pinnacle of her sport, there was a lot of research material to draw from.”
“We have done this film for her and with her, yet it isn’t hagiography,” Michôd says. “Christy is accepting of her flaws. She adopted a persona that had her treating people really unkindly, and she regrets that. So she surrendered to the process knowing that it wouldn’t always be flattering.” The film is the first release from financier Black Bear’s new domestic distribution arm.
“[Lidia] invites you to project yourself into her book,” she says. In a similar way, the film presents the thoughts of a woman (Imogen Poots) overcoming childhood abuse and adulthood addiction through sound design that places viewers inside her head. “Some of the emotional triggers are specific to her life, but I think they’re [also] invitations to remember your own. I wanted to make a movie that was not just about one person, but was kind of about all of us.”
“Water” is one of several fall features with scripts adapted from the lives of real protagonists, down-to-earth and extraordinary in equal measure. Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) explores the tortured soul of a musical icon in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Derek Cianfrance (Oscar nominee for “Sound of Metal”) and Kirt Gunn portray a criminal with a heart of gold in “Roofman” and David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) and Mirrah Foulkes show the determination and survival skills of a female boxing pioneer in “Christy.”
Stewart’s feature writing/directing debut, which premiered as a Cannes Un Certain Regard selection in May and hits U.S. theaters in December, is the most impressionistic film of the bunch. The project has consumed her thoughts for the past eight years, in part due to the time she needed to raise “purely independent” financing. “I reached out to Lidia [and] told her, ‘Please don’t give this to anyone who’s going to voiceover it to death or provide a three-act structure that’s much easier to finance than the movie that we could make.
“I always wanted to make sure that you could watch this movie with your eyes closed, because I wanted it to feel like a haunted house,” Stewart says. “I wanted [the protagonist] to feel like she was sitting next to you in a theater whispering in your ear, giving you a little more emotional context.”
Writer/director Cooper is proud of his Bruce Springsteen biopic, based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Cooper was a fan of the stripped-down, non-commercial 1982 album that paints stark portraits of the dark side of America. “Like Warren, when I was reading Bruce’s autobiography ‘Born to Run,’ I recognized that most every chapter was quite lengthy except for the chapter on ‘Nebraska.’ I wanted to understand why Bruce was reluctant to talk about it and the process behind writing it. As it turns out, it was too painful for him to put into his autobiography.”
Cooper met with Springsteen and his manager, Jon Landau. “Out of that, I received Bruce’s blessing to write the screenplay,” Cooper says. “I realized that the film had to echo that stripped-down, brutally honest [tone of the LP], and to get that, I needed to go straight to the source … That really opened up a conversation between Bruce and me,” that led to “countless hours” of deep conversations with the musician about his life.
“I just said, ‘I’m not interested in myth or nostalgia. I want to explore this man with a four-track recorder [‘Nebraska’ was made on] and nothing left to prove.’ And I think that resonated with him. I said, ‘I don’t want to dramatize your pain. I’m asking to explore the courage that it took to face it.’ And once he knew that there wasn’t going to be a jukebox or a celebration of celebrity, it actually relaxed him.”
The script Cooper wrote focused on Springsteen’s severe depression, a romantic relationship based on a composite of women he dated at the time, and his efforts to reconcile with his cold, hard-drinking father. “I wanted to know, ‘Bruce, what’s it like when you’re driving down a country road 92 miles per hour experiencing suicide ideation? Tell me why you couldn’t connect with someone [romantically]. Tell me what it felt like at 8 years old when your father’s roughhousing turns into violence.’ It was about trying to get to the truth of Bruce’s most painful moments, ones that he’s never expressed before in an interview or biography.”
Aside from licensing rights to his songs, Cooper says Springsteen had no screenplay or casting approval. “Our trust and respect for one another turned into a deep and abiding love for one another,” he says.
“The film is not a biopic. It’s a psychological portrait of an artist at one moment in his life. He kept saying, ‘Please give me a Scott Cooper movie. Don’t let the audience off the hook. The truth about yourself isn’t always pretty.’ Bruce wanted this chapter to be told, and he’s now seen the movie 13 times,” Cooper says.It’s rare to find a feel-good true crime story, so perhaps it was no surprise that “Roofman,” the misadventures of Jeffrey Allen Manchester, a robber who drilled through the roofs of numerous McDonald’s and hid inside a Toys “R” Us, would find its way to the screen.
A mid-level-budget comedy released by a major studio is almost as rare as a story like this. But writer/director Cianfrance and screenwriter Gunn managed to sneak one into theaters last month with the Paramount feature “Roofman,” based on a criminal who was nice to his victims.
Other scripts about Manchester had been floating around, but Cianfrance hadn’t read them, so he called his longtime producer, Hunting Lane Films’ Jamie Patricof, to say that he wanted to start doing his own research and bring in Gunn. They got on the phone with Manchester in maximum security prison back in 2021.
“He was like no one else we’d ever met,” Gunn says. “We talked to him on the phone 400-plus times for several years between the two of us. … He was a character with contradictions. He was locking people in freezers but giving them jackets. He was bad at being a criminal because his humanity kept kicking in, kind of foiling his criminal enterprise.”
After a year and a half, the pair called Manchester’s pastor and one-time girlfriend to validate his stories. “We thought they’d have bitterness, but they told us he was the greatest adventure of their lives and that he left their lives better than when he found them,” Cianfrance says.
Truth can be stranger than fiction, and that’s definitely the case with “Christy,” the wrenching story of female boxing pioneer Christy Martin. “When you consider how almost unimaginable Christy’s story is, the fact that it happened is part of what makes it so powerful,” says director Michôd, who co-wrote the screenplay with Foulkes. Sydney Sweeney, who signed on as a producer, plays the West Virginia woman who became one of the most prominent female fighters in history. Pressured to break up with her girlfriend, she was coerced into marrying her boxing coach (Ben Foster), only to face years of domestic abuse that nearly killed her.
With Martin’s life rights secured, Michôd and Foulkes spent many hours interviewing her via Zoom from their Australian home. “We got the script to a place where we felt really happy. She was very happy with it quite early on, which was a great relief,” Foulkes says. “We watched all of her fights, spoke to [her wife] Lisa a lot. And because she was at the pinnacle of her sport, there was a lot of research material to draw from.”
“We have done this film for her and with her, yet it isn’t hagiography,” Michôd says. “Christy is accepting of her flaws. She adopted a persona that had her treating people really unkindly, and she regrets that. So she surrendered to the process knowing that it wouldn’t always be flattering.” The film is the first release from financier Black Bear’s new domestic distribution arm.