Interview (Written): Jimmy Warden

A conversation with the screenwriter of the hit horror-comedy Cocaine Bear.

Cocaine Bear is a phenomenon. As of today, the high concept horror-comedy has grossed $77M in worldwide box office revenues on a reported budget of $30–35M. It’s safe to say that after its theatrical run and ancillary income, the film will make a hefty profit.

The movie is based on a screenplay by Jimmy Warden. In a Vulture interview, Warden discusses how he stumbled across the real-life story via social media, then wrote the script on spec never expecting it to get made.

Here are some excerpts from that interview.

I hear you found the Cocaine Bear story on Twitter.
I was a couple decades late to the party, but I found it on Twitter, and then I went down a rabbit hole where I couldn’t stop clicking links. I found this story on Andrew Carter Thornton, who was a drug runner, and he was dropping duffle bags of cocaine into the Chattahoochee National Forest for his partners in crime to pick up, and a black bear got into it. I thought, Wow, that is an insane premise for a movie. So I wrote it.

In real life, the bear ingested the cocaine and died not long after, right?
Yeah. It’s kind of a bummer. I don’t know that much, but I do know as a screenwriter that a bear dying three minutes into the movie would make for a very short movie. And also a bummer. I thought we could tell the truth of the inciting incident, which is interesting in itself. The actual true story I figured I would leave up to true-crime documentaries and podcasts. The story that intrigued me was how this bear ended up doing all this cocaine, and I left the rest up to my imagination.

The first decision I made was: I want the bear to live. Liz [Banks] always talks about the redemptive aspects of this story. At a certain point, you’re rooting for the bear, and we gave it the story that I’m not sure the other people in the movie deserved, but it’s maybe what the bear deserved.

What was the hardest sell: Getting someone to green-light a film with this premise, or getting a studio to actually let you call it Cocaine Bear?
Surprisingly, neither were that tough of a sell.

Oh, really?
Yeah, I wrote the script thinking it was never going to be something that got made, so that freed me up creatively to do whatever the hell I wanted. But with a title like that and a concept like this, I was definitely surprised at how people just accepted it with open arms. I wrote the script. I passed it to a friend of mine who’s a producer on the movie — Brian Duffield. He gave it to the good people at Lord Miller, the production company, and it felt like they walked it into the studio and then it was sold within a couple weeks.

Did that surprise you?
It still surprises me.

Here’s a scene from the movie:

For the rest of the Vulture interview, go here.

For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.