Interview (Written): Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan

A conversation with the screenwriters of the movie Chappaquiddick.

A Film School Rejects interview with Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan who wrote the screenplay for the upcoming movie Chappaquiddick along with the film’s director John Curran. The script made the 2015 Black List.

Can you all talk a little bit about what it was like to write and direct a story that is true, and about such an iconic family that at least most everyone is a little familiar with?

Allen: That was one of the great joys of writing the movie; [it] was getting to put on the Woodward and Bernstein hat and have my day being a journalist and looking into court records. There’s actually an inquest into whether or not a crime was committed that weekend. And that inquest brought back everybody six months later to testify under oath; the boiler room girls took the stand, the US attorney played by Jim Gaffigan went under oath, and even Ted Kennedy himself. And it was reading those transcripts that really formed the basis of the movie. I think that was one of the most exciting parts of the process; [it] was poring through, and finding the inconsistencies and different perspectives on the events of that weekend.

Logan: Yeah, that was our, you know, we really wanted the truth to be our North Star, and having those court transcripts were invaluable as we dug and did the research. Because it was very important to us that we not make a conspiracy movie; that it was something where we were investigating what had actually happened, and trying to accurately portray that.

Curran: You know, there’s the responsibility, I think, with any historical film: you feel there is a sense of responsibility to get it right in some way. But the great thing about this story was that a lot of it is built around myths and conjecture. So, what I think these guys did really well was actually going to what are on-the-record facts about this story. And a lot of them come from Ted himself — his evolving story — and the film kind of follows the evolving story to the point where, [by] the end of it, you’re really no closer to the truth; the actual truth. For all we know, the events of that night are completely different than what we have in the film. But I think what was freeing about the way these guys approached it was [that] it is kind of the point. A lot of it was deflection and cover-up.

Allen: And one of the things that John says is interesting is that maybe they were completely different, but [that] ultimately, the sourcing is drawn from these many different perspectives that people brought to it. So while the film isn’t trying to be the definitive source or the definitive truth, it is an amalgamation of many people’s different viewpoints, and so it’s got an effect in that way that you come away wondering, and hopefully capturing more of an essence of truth from these perspectives.

Going off of that, what was maybe the most difficult part of putting together this story; of directing this story?

Curran: Well, for me, it was getting the character of the setting right. My instinct was that it’s so typical in modern-day filmmaking [to] just chase state incentives, that it literally doesn’t matter where the story is set: someone is trying to sell you on New Mexico because they have a great incentive or something, even if it’s a tropical story. But for me, this sense of the physical setting, and the specificity of the bridge, and its relationship to the road and the island…I just felt like we’ve got to go shoot there. It’s a very distinct and specific thing. And, also, the character of the people. That accident is very well known, and people doing bad Boston accents is very distracting. So I wanted to have a wealth of locals that I could pull into the film. But that made it difficult because of the cost, you know, shooting there probably cost us some money; we could have saved it in other places, but it was just figuring out how to protect the script — not cut the script down to fit this strict budget — but at the same time shooting in a place that I felt was very important to the film.

Logan: As writers, one of the most difficult things I found was getting our script down to a manageable, producible length. When we finished our first draft, it was 196 pages long, which is a little on the long side. But because we were so research-driven, a lot of that research found its way into the script, and so it was a process between Taylor and me to figure out how to parse everything down into 120 pages.

Allen: There was a great scene where Ted bought his newspaper in the morning from the hotel desk clerk, and we thought it was interesting from the perspective of: what was not actually a normal day at all seemed to be [a] normal day to everyone that encountered him, and that was just one of the many people he encountered. So we have all those details about what was on that paper and what he talked about with the clerk, and all of it was on the record, so that was really exciting, but you end up condensing, so now we just have a scene where he’s at brunch with the other people at the race, and that speaks to those larger themes.

Here is a trailer for the movie:

The movie debuts in theaters across North American on April 6, 2018.

Twitter: @Taylor_M_Allen, @Andrew__Logan.

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