“Jackie’s Screenwriter Walks Us Through the Stories That Inspired the Movie’s Best Scenes”

Vulture checks in with Jackie screenwriter Noah Oppenheim.

Ever since during the Award Season of 2012–2013, Vulture has featured screenwriters talking about the screenplays they wrote for notable movies. Today we look at the 2016 movie Jackie, written by Noah Oppenheim.

Oppenheim based his writing on extensive research, archival material, and documents of how Jackie actually responded to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Vulture asked Oppenheim to walk us through five of the movie’s best scenes, explaining how he went about creating the version of Jackie that Portman then brought to life onscreen.

Jackie is talking to a journalist, played by Billy Crudup, for a story about how she handled herself in the wake of the assassination. The conversation is as much about them having the conversation as it is her experience of her husband’s death.

“One of the most extraordinary things about Jackie Kennedy is that she is the person who coined the Camelot mythology, a week after her husband’s assassination. That always struck me as an interesting cornerstone to build the story around: During that incredibly intense period where she’s grieving the loss of her husband, she’s dealing with the trauma of having been sitting right next to him when he was murdered, she’s shepherding two young kids through the loss of their father, she’s planning a funeral that the entire world is going to watch, she still had the presence of mind then to realize, I have to cement my husband’s legacy somehow. She comes up with this cultural reference in Camelot that ends up being more powerful than any list of policy accomplishments ever could be. I thought that was a stroke of genius, given the circumstances.

“In terms of what that interaction would look like throughout the film, it’s based on what we know of how she controlled her image and interacted with the press. We know that she was a smoker during her husband’s presidency, and yet she was never photographed with a cigarette — the public didn’t know that. We know that she actively edited her conversations with journalists, reporters, historians, that she would heavily redact things that she said and was very conscious of what ended up in the hands of the public. I tried to build a back and forth between her and this journalist based on that.”

For the rest of the article, go here.

For past Award season Vulture features on screenwriters:

12 Years a Slave — John Ridley

A Most Violent Year — J.C. Chandor

Argo — Chris Terrio

Beasts of the Southern Wild — Lucy Alibar

Best Marigold Hotel, The — Ol Paker

Birdman — Nicolas Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris

Boyhood—Richard Linklater

Chef — Jon Favreau

Concussion — Peter Landesman

The Danish Girl — Lucinda Coxon

Dear White People — Justin Simien

Enough Said — Nicole Holofcener

The Fault in Our Stars — Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber

Flight — John Gatins

Foxcatcher — E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman

Fruitvale Station — Ryan Coogler

Guardians of the Galaxy — James Gunn

Her — Spike Jonze

The Imitation Game — Graham Moore

Inside Llewyn Davis — Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Les Misérables — William Nicholson

Lee Daniels’ The Butler — Danny Strong

The LEGO Movie — Philip Lord and Chris Miller

Looper — Rian Johnson

Love is Strange — Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias

The Martian — Drew Goddard

Nebraska — Bob Nelson

Obvious Child — Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm

Perks of Being a Wallflower — Stephen Chbosky

Philomena — Steve Coogan

Room — Emma Donoghue

Saving Mr. Banks — Kelly Marcel

Sicario — Taylor Sheridan

Spotlight — Josh Singer

The Skeleton Twins — Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman

The Spectacular Now —Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber

Straight Outta Compton — Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff

The Theory of Everything — Anthony McCarten

Whiplash — Damien Chazelle

Wreck-It Ralph — Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston

I find features like this — where we get to read a script excerpt, then read about its execution from the screenwriter — to be invaluable. It affords us the opportunity to enter into the writer’s creative process and see how they attack solving story problems. After all, Hollywood screenwriters get paid a lot of money to be problem-solvers.

You may download the script for Jackie here.