For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our article interviewing Krysty Wilson-Cairns about Netflix’s The Good Nurse from Backstory Magazine’s issue 47 – now available to read! This is not the full article – so, if you enjoy what you’ve read in this free excerpt – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by by subscribing to Backstory Magazine so you can read the rest of the piece and so much more!
Current Cinema
Screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns details the almost decade-long saga to get this story to the screen.
By Danny Munso
Krysty Wilson-Cairns is one of the best and most in demand screenwriters working today, with an Oscar nomination and WGA Award to her name for co-writing 1917 and an upcoming co-write on Taika Waititi’s untitled Star Wars film among her credits. Back in 2014, she was a young writer coming off her first appearance on the revered Black List when she was hired to adapt a nonfiction book about a nurse who was secretly killing some of his patients. What followed was a long and winding road that eventually saw Wilson-Cairns’ script attract top-level talent including Danish director Tobias Lindholm and Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne in the lead roles. But even that wasn’t enough as the film underwent false starts and delays. “This was my first paid job as a writer,” Wilson-Cairns says. “It went through years of development, and then it was all gone.” Now that has all changed, as The Good Nurse finally hits theaters and Netflix. “It’s been quite a saga.”
The story of how The Good Nurse came to be starts with an inexperienced writer who didn’t want to offend her new agents. After her sci-fi thriller script Aether made the 2014 Black List, Wilson-Cairns signed with reps who mentioned an open assignment they thought would be a good fit for her. Director Darren Aronofsky’s production company—Protozoa Pictures—had acquired the rights to Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder, which told the tale of Charles Cullen, a nurse who went from job to job as his patients kept dying under odd circumstances. Cullen has 29 confirmed victims, but experts believe he may be responsible for as many as a staggering 400 deaths. “They asked if I wanted to read it and pitch on it,” Wilson-Cairns recalls. “I didn’t want to do another murder film because [Aether] was about murder. So I sat down to read the first chapter just so I could politely decline, and I ended up reading the whole book in one sitting because it’s so amazingly written. Charles is so aware of how to present truth and how to let you lead yourself to this outrage and horror and making you instantly repulsed by it. It’s quite an incredible read.”
The chapters that really spoke to Wilson-Cairns actually centered on Cullen’s friend and fellow nurse Amy Loughren. After being approached by the police during their fruitless investigation into Cullen, Amy started to look into the deaths her own and slowly realized her friend was indeed guilty of killing a lot of people. She not only helped the officers acquire the evidence they needed to take him down, but she got Cullen to confess in the interrogation room after he wouldn’t talk to the cops. “She’s this working-class mom superhero,” Wilson-Cairns says. “She shouldn’t have to stop a serial killer, but she does. So the story became this thing where I decided I’m really going to fight tooth and nail to get it.” Wilson-Cairns wasn’t the only writer pitching their vision of the adaptation to Protozoa, but she was the only one approaching it as Amy’s story, not Charles’. “I kept turning up and telling them they’re crazy if they don’t tell it from this point of view. Eventually they went, ‘Okay, fine, write it.’ ” What followed was the then 24-year-old writer being flown to New York to meet with Graeber, who eventually introduced her to Loughren and the two officers involved in the investigation. The producers also had her shadow nurses for two weeks on night shifts at a Connecticut.
Krysty Wilson-Cairns with author Charles Graeber on set
Though The Good Nurse is about a serial killer, one of the first things that stands out while watching it is the lack of the true-crime tropes. Wilson-Cairns says that is completely intentional, but she also admits it was a long process to get to that point. “One of the first drafts I did was like The Silence of the Lambs and really leaning in to making it a thriller,” she says. “A lot of it was invented, and it just wasn’t right. There are so many expectations for these stories, and I was a baby writer at the time, and I think I felt the weight of those expectations.” She began whittling down those cliches on her own and then went even further once Lindholm became attached to the project. “When Tobias came on board, he said let’s divorce ourselves from anything that didn’t happen and make it all feel real. Let’s let the fact that it’s a true story be the terrifying thing. It was a lot of paring stuff back. The realer it is, the more frightening I think.”
Wilson-Cairns and Lindholm had no interest in shining too much of a light on Cullen the way that some films and TV series have done with other serial killers. “I’m not a fan of the more modern true crime because I think it’s all very salacious,” she says. “It glorifies killers, and I think it’s a very dangerous thing. I also think weirdly it makes them feel safer because it makes them other. You think of them as monsters and demons, and sometimes they’re glorified as these antiheroes and presented as these pets of evil and darkness. Actually, the truth is much scarier, and that’s that they’re a lot closer to us than they are to demons. That’s much harder to live with and rationalize. So I feel like there’s a power in making these people human because that is what they are and that is what I think generates real fear and real terror. And that kind of stuff will stay with you much longer.” That comes across in the film through both the script and Redmayne’s performance. Though Cullen is killing these patients, his caring affection for both Amy and her two young daughters feels completely genuine.
“I never met the real Charles Cullen,” Wilson-Cairns says of the serial killer, who is serving 11 consecutive life sentences in New Jersey. “I never wanted to meet him because I wasn’t interested in him. I was interested in Amy’s understanding of him. I always felt I could only trust Amy, and if she’s our window into it, what she feels has to be real. And she told me she really did believe that Charles was her friend. She really did believe that he cared for her and he loved her and he loved her kids, then that has to be the truth we work with.” The real Cullen has never admitted what motivated him to commit such horrific acts, and Wilson-Cairns wondered if she could write the character without understanding such a key part of him. “I think Eddie went through a similar thing. If can understand why, I can understand this character. After a while, you realize you can’t understand why. I can’t fathom it. It’s so beyond my understanding of the world that anything I do will be an invention.” Instead the writer leaned on ICU nurse Amy and her experience. “Because Amy was so open and available to us, we could get into her head, and we always went with that. I personally think he probably did love her and the fact that he confessed for her tells you there was some sliver of humanity in him, even though I still think he was a monster and deserved to go to jail. That didactic nature of him in the hands of almost any other actor—I don’t think this film would work.”
The film concludes with a pair of interrogation scenes. The first sees the two lead detectives—Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha)—fail to crack Cullen, though he displays odd behavior and never actually denies committing the crimes. The second is after they bring in Amy, who coaxes the revelation out of her friend. It’s stunning work between Chastain and Redmayne, and its strength doesn’t lie in the dialogue but rather the spaces in between. Wilson-Cairns admits both scenes started off as a lot longer before being whittled down draft after draft. “I think if we pulled up the first draft, those scenes would be 10 pages long,” she laughs. “Even when we went into the shooting draft, those scenes were long. But in rehearsals, I watched Eddie and Jessica do it, and I always knew less would work. That’s the luxury of working with, well, I call them ‘the Oscar winners.’ ”
Wilson-Cairns credits her time on set with 1917 co-writer/director Sam Mendes with learning to write for performers. “One of the big things I learned from working with Sam is to let the actors act. Instead of a paragraph that’s going to tell me how to feel, they can deliver that in seconds by the way they act. So a lot of it was reducing. It’s a luxury when you have actors of that caliber and understand how to really use their craft and skill. It’s such a pleasure to write for them because it means less work.” During the years when she wasn’t sure if The Good Nurse would ever see the light of day, Wilson-Cairns would often return to her latest draft to make minor changes. “It became such a labor of love,” she says. “The real Amy became a close friend of mine. She’s such an incredible woman, and I just felt this tremendous desire to have the world recognize her to see what she’d done. It’s fairly rare we get to see and celebrate people that do this. Usually they’re forgotten and never spoken about at all. It just became a crusade for me.”
One day Lindholm called and said not only would the film be happening but he wanted Wilson-Cairns on set each day as a collaborator. While it’s not often that writers are present on set, she has experienced it on each of her three feature films so far. “I’m really lucky, and full credit to the directors I work with who understand the value of having a writer on set, someone there who is just looking after the story. When we turn up in the morning, I’m not interested in if we get what’s in the script. I’m interested if we get the intention…the building block we need to make the film. I think maybe that’s one of the reasons I get asked back. I don’t care if you change the words. I don’t care if it gets cut altogether, I just care that the story is serviced. It’s an important part of the job, and it’s how you see the story through. Tobias understood that, and so did Sam and so did Edgar [Wright, director and co-writer with Wilson-Cairns of 2021’s Last Night in Soho]. It creates a really good working relationship.” Then again, that may not be the only reason she keeps getting invited back to set. “I’m relatively cheap. I was paid in free craft services and a hotel room. I think that’s a good deal.”
In addition to the secretive Star Wars film, Wilson-Cairns’ latest project has been a big one: launching her own production shingle, Great Company (“We couldn’t believe the name was available,” she laughs), which has a deal with Universal Pictures. Her aspirations for the company are much more than a vehicle to get her own films made. “Obviously I can secure things I want to do and have a bit more control in pushing stuff through,” she says, “but there are loads of stories I want to see that I’m not the person to write—I’m a privileged white woman. And there’s loads of stories I want to see that are not just about women, that are not just about people who now have privilege. What I love about the company is I can advocate for these people. I don’t want to put words in their mouths, but I want to be there as an ally and say this is a story I want to watch. How can I throw my weight behind you, and how can we get it done? That’s been something I’ve wanted for years and now to have it come to fruition and have Universal as our backer and as our co-pilot in it—we’re very lucky.”
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