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Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA Award-winning screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns was born in Glasgow, she attended the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, where she earned her undergraduate degree in Filmmaking, and the National Film and Television School, where she earned her MFA in Screenwriting.
- Writer
- May 26, 1987
- 2 min
Krysty Wilson-Cairns: 5 Movies That Made Me. After Krysty Wilson-Cairns earned an Oscar nomination for her feature debut — the staggering World War I drama 1917, which she co-wrote with director Sam Mendes and for which they became Best Original Screenplay nominees — the screenwriter followed it with something totally different, scripting ...
Nov 22, 2021 · Screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns co-wrote “Last Night in Soho” with director Edgar Wright. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) By Krysty Wilson-Cairns. Nov. 22, 2021 9 AM PT. All...
Nov 4, 2021 · November 4, 2021 3:30 pm. Krysty Wilson-Cairns attends the UK Premiere of "Last Night in Soho" Associated Press. Share. [Editor’s note: The following article contains some spoilers for “ Last...
- Get A Formal Degree
- Make Really Bad Movies
- Writing Can Be A Viable Career
- Get Weird with Your Stories
- Write Spec Scripts
- Be Open to Collaboration
- Understand That Sometimes You Have to Write Badly at First
- Take Risks
- Don’T Be Afraid to Stretch Reality
- Employ Many Different Storytelling Methods
Wilson-Cairns says she was good at math and engineering, but when she got into University to study those things, she had second thoughts. “I told my mom I wanted to keep working in film and TV and she said, ‘Go for it!’ Her only thing was I had to get a degree. So I went to the Royal Conservatory in Scotland and got a degree in film and TV.” She lo...
While in school, she says, “We would just take cameras out everywhere. I mean, the movies we made – dear God – if they ever come to light, I will set fire to people’s homes,” she says with a laugh But there was a learning curve. “I directed the first screenplay I wrote, and it looks like a tribute to The Cure. I didn't realize it until after someon...
Then she went on to the National Film and Television School in Glasgow, but still didn't know she wanted to be a writer. “I had no clue. I didn't really fully understand [screenwriting] existed because on [the set of Taggart] the scripts just show up. There were no writers on the set. So I had no real idea that that was a plausible career.”
Wilson-Cairns loves going to dark places with her storytelling. “I had this teacher, Richard Smith who now lives out in L.A. – he's a great writer – he gave me a task. He said, ‘Go away over the weekend and write a story, it can be anything. Try to make it weird and surreal.’ I wrote a story about two guinea pigs watching a man die. It was really f...
After film school, Wilson-Cairns wrote a spec script called Aether which she wasn’t able to sell in Britain, but her agent was able to sell it in America. After that, she was hired to adapt the novel The Good Nurse for Protozoa Pictures, Darren Aronofsky’s company. Then she was asked to write on season 3 of the TV show Penny Dreadful. That’s where ...
“Sam came to me with this idea,” says Wilson-Cairns. “1917is based ever so slightly on his grandfather’s experience in the war… Sam essentially asked if I wanted to sit and write with him and I said, ‘Yeah, you’re Sam Mendes, absolutely!’ She says she and Mendes hit it off and felt comfortable being vulnerable with each other. “Writing is meant to ...
To write with someone, she says you also have to feel safe enough to be able to throw out really bad ideas. “So much of writing is being wrong. The trick to being a good writer is to be a terrible writer at the beginning and just keeping at it until you fix it. Nobody makes a good pancake the first time!”
Telling a war story in real-time is so risky, she and Mendes wrote the script on spec because they weren’t sure it would even work. “So, we didn’t set it up [at a studio]. It had to be proof of concept. We had to, in this story, show that a real-time war movie could be interesting enough to get all these other people on board. That was a big burden...
She says the first thing you have to do as a writer is to see how far you can stretch reality in a movie. “That’s a real fine line because you have to pack in enough to entertain, there has to be an ebb and a flow, there has to be action, there has to be breathing space in every scene, and you can't ever cut! It’s a pain in the ass.”
Because the story couldn’t jump to a new location or use a flashback, she had to get really creative to give a sense of empathy to the faceless military battalion the protagonists Blake and Schofield are trying to save. “One very difficult thing is that you cannot show the 1,600 men that [Blake and Schofield] are racing to save. That's why Blake ha...
Dec 23, 2019 · When director Sam Mendes called Wilson-Cairns with the idea for 1917 —a First World War film that he already knew would be filmed to appear as a single, uninterrupted shot—her next stop was...
Oct 29, 2021 · Krysty Wilson-Cairns On Her ‘Sinister’ Horror Film, ‘Last Night In Soho’. Mike Ryan Senior Entertainment Writer Twitter. October 29, 2021. In 2019, Krysty Wilson-Cairns co-wrote 1917...
