Screenwriter Ian McDonald packs years of sordid history into a 95-minute film. In Woman of the Hour, he crafts an elegant, non-linear narrative that captures the unsettling story of serial killer Rodney Alcala and his victims. Throughout, McDonald’s brevity never loses sight of humanity and respecting lives lost.
It’s an exceptional piece of storytelling that walks many fine lines. Filmmaker Anna Kendrick brings the script to life with an unshakeable vision, packing every frame with tension. Recently, McDonald spoke with Immersive Media eabout his experience writing Woman of the Hour and what he hoped to accomplish with the acclaimed film.
You have the complexities of a non-linear film with many years of story to tell, but it feels very elegant. Was that a challenge?
The goal was always that it be complex without being confusing. I think the non-linear structure lends the film a complexity that I like. I don’t think most audiences are going to be watching it going like, “Okay, that’s 1979. That’s 1972. Okay, how do you get from Wyoming to New York?” You just feel your way through the movie, and the narrative arc that Rodney undergoes, that’s where the movie is at its simplest and most clear, which was the intention.
The thing that remained the most consistent from the early drafts to the later ones was everything on the game show. With Cheryl, it was the flashbacks that tended to shift and change the most, because Rodney was a prolific serial killer. There’s unfortunately a lot of stories to draw from. We would try one opening and then swap that out for a different opening, and then things would move around, but what moved around to where and when? It was always done with the intention of, how we can make the story feel as digestible and emotionally interesting as possible?
When did you start writing the script? How many years was this of your life?
I wrote the first draft almost eight years ago. I’ll tell friends and family outside the industry, and they’re just like, “Oh my God, how do you live? That sounds like a nightmare.” And then I will talk to other screenwriters, and they’re just like, “Yeah, that’s about average.” No one’s surprised. Especially for a first studio feature, that’s particularly average. I talked to these other screenwriters who were just like, “What are you whining about? Our last movie took 20 years to get made.” I really don’t have much to complain about.
How did Cheryl (played by Anna Kendrick) become the eyes and ears for the audience?
Always the intention. I made some efforts to reach out to the real Cheryl, but I couldn’t really find her. As I did research, there had been Dateline episodes that interviewed a bunch of people who had known Rodney and met Rodney. It would make a lot of sense for her to have been in those and some of the articles that were about him, and she wasn’t in any of them. I would be shocked if other journalists hadn’t reached out. My guess is she probably said no, and she doesn’t want her life to be defined by a 30-minute encounter with a maniac, which is fair. I just left well enough alone.
There are little elements from the Dating Game episode that point in the direction of who she might’ve been. But that character, in particular, is largely a creation. I like to think of it as an alternative world Cheryl. Even her name is spelled differently, and her last name, I think, is totally different.
What I wanted for her — the thing that’s the most important about the real person — is that she went on the show before she saw the guy. She found him kind of funny and kind of charming, and liked him, and picked him as the guy she wanted to go on a date with. But then she met him backstage for some short period of time, got really bad vibes, called the producer of the show, and said, “Cancel the date. I’m not going anywhere with him.” And so, she trusted her gut in this deep and important way. Once you have that, then you can build around it. It was our foundation on which we could build.
One of the reasons why the movie really works is that it felt very respectful to the victims, in terms of what you and Anna chose to show and not show, where to linger and where not to. When you’re writing, how does your gut let you know what’s appropriate or not as a storyteller?
There are two answers to that. On one hand, I always knew that it’s a 92-minute movie or whatever. It’s not a 10-hour limited series. There’s only so much narrative real estate to go around. I always knew that I wanted the victims to be explored with roughly the same depth as Rodney. In the movie, we don’t learn a whole lot about Rodney. You just see his behavior play out in front of you.
I wanted to make sure that all of the young men and women who he encounters are… I just wanted to make sure that we got a flavor of their life, where they’re from, where they’re going, and what they’re struggling with. Because you can only be scared for someone if you know them and you care about them on some level. And so, you try to do a lot in a small amount of time. Hopefully, that works for people.
In terms of the actual violence, I’ve always thought that the more violent and upsetting a movie is, the greater its responsibility to say something meaningful. Especially when it involves real people, if you are going to depict that in viscerally upsetting ways, there needs to be a point to it.
You need to bear that in mind, not just in a macro way, but in a scene-by-scene way. And so, that was something that I agonized over. Because if you push the violence too far, it feels exploitative and oppressive and mean-spirited and ugly. And yet, if you don’t go far enough, there’s a problem with that too, which is you risk whitewashing the crimes and giving a false impression of just how bad the guy was. You don’t want to do either of those.
You’re always adjusting and trying to find that right spot. You just have to find your way through and figure out what feels right and what feels like too much. And again, that’s a point where collaborators become really important. You share a draft with Anna, and she’s just like, “Ah, can we pull back on this just a little bit?” And trusting that you’re all coming from the same place ethically, that I think is important.
It’s tasteful about something so distasteful.
It’s an incredibly hard needle to thread. I know different people are going to obviously have different reactions like, “Ah, why did you show that? Why didn’t you show this?” And that’s obviously their right; it’s subjective, and everyone’s going to come to a different conclusion. But it was something we thought hard about. I hope at least the effort we put into it reads, but you never know.
When did you first learn about Rodney’s story? What was the film you originally saw in it, the exact story you wanted to tell?
I read about him on some webpage, “a strange true crime stories you’ve never heard of.” But the whole serial killer on the Dating Game thing, that really wasn’t what captured my attention. It was when I started researching him, and in particular, reading interviews with his coworkers at the LA Times. They were just like, “Oh, yeah, he used to bring in these photo albums that had pictures, nude photos of underage girls and boys in it.”
What was so interesting to me about that was other stuff I had read about him tended to compare him to Ted Bundy. But there’s a real key difference between them, which is that Ted Bundy was a chameleon. He was good at making people think that he was a Boy Scout. When he was arrested, there were a lot of people who were like, “Oh my God, not Ted. You clearly have the wrong guy.”
No one really felt that way about Rodney. He flaunts his behavior — not the killing per se, but a lot of really ugly stuff up until then. People were like, “Oh, yeah, that checks out.” As soon as you learn that, you realize, well, the story in some ways is not really about him. It’s about everyone around him, societally, that is looking the other way. And how that looking the other way enables bad behavior. Looking away enables small bad behavior, which enables medium bad behavior, which enables on and on and on.
To me, I wanted to explore that. I didn’t want it to just be a movie about a serial killer. I wanted it to be a movie about this cultural avoidance that happens to have a serial killer in it.
That cultural avoidance, did you and Anna talk about its relevance to today or just wanted the story to speak for itself?
Honestly, we didn’t have a lot of conversations about that in particular. That was pretty baked into the script by the time it got to her. The conversations that we tended to have were more about the dangers that come with intimacy, whether it’s going on a date with someone or something as simple as asking a guy, “Hey, can you help me move these boxes into my apartment?”
We had a lot of conversations about intimacy and the risk associated with intimacy. Those were a lot of thematic conversations that we had. As I kept working on it over the years, the themes evolved and broadened. It kind of started as one thing, and eventually, it came to encompass other ideas as well.
The unknowing around Rodney, the extent of his crimes and what is or isn’t going on underneath, is especially terrifying. What did you want to leave unexplained?
This is another thing that’s really tricky. I mean, because what he does is so ugly and awful. I mean, it’s really tempting to be like, “Oh, he’s this dark, mysterious, unknowable void.” In a weird way, that romanticizes him too much. I think there’s a really basic way in which if you want to know what motivates him, well, he’s a guy that gets off on hurting people, and that it kind of is just as simple as that.
I think there’s kind of an addiction narrative woven into it, which is something that I detected in my research — that the more he did it, the more he wanted to do it, and the less he was able to control it. And there’s a scene at the end of the movie where he’s just attacked someone, and afterwards, he’s laying in the dirt crying into his hands. It’s kind of tempting to be like, “Oh, maybe he feels bad about what he did.” No, he doesn’t feel bad for her. He feels bad for himself. He’s clearly acting self-destructively, and he knows he is doing something that’s going to get him caught.
It’s tricky because I don’t think these people run very deep, but because of what they do is so grim, there’s the temptation to assume depth where it doesn’t really exist. And so, we also tried to find little moments where we could make him look foolish and insecure and reveal his ego to be as paper-thin as it really was.
Woman of the Hour is now available to stream on Netflix.
