Written Interview: Katie Wech (“Prom”)

Today’s written interview is with screenwriter Katie Wech whose movie Prom just came out a few weeks ago. Some excerpts from Part One:

Do you start with a list of the classic high school movie “types” and figure out ways to use them, avoid them, alter them, that kind of thing?

In some ways we constantly tried to steer away from that. We would try to pull back and really unpack that archetype so that I could pick what I thought was really true about the character and do away with what I thought was familiar or stereotypical as much as possible. An executive that I worked with at the studio said, you know, everybody has a Facebook page. Everybody has friends and everybody has the thing they’re into. We aren’t just one thing anymore. And we aren’t determined by one thing. So you have to be I think more rigid about that when you’re developing characters, especially in the high school genre.

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When you’re writing ten or so characters who have significant stories, do you start with one and then add on another and create the web? Or do you create a bunch of stories and then link them?

You know, it always starts the same way for me no matter what, if I’m writing a story about one character or an ensemble piece like this, which is that I have to have a very clear spine. And the spine I think that emerged in this development process was that every couple has a story. So from there it became about, I needed to be able to link every story somehow as like a vertebra on that spine. And if I felt like something was superfluous or not directly connected to how I was trying to build each story the way that I had collected those stories in terms of my research, it had to go. Or it had to be reframed. Because there were some universal things that I learned in my research. There’s the guy that got dumped right before prom, the couple that breaks up, the couple that’s been together forever, the guy that can’t get a date. There were these unifying elements that I kept coming across that I just tried to always be driving in the same direction at the same time.

For more of Part One, go here.

Here is Part Two of the interview.

And to read Wech’s piece in the WSJ “Why a Good Script is Like a Thong Bikini,” go here.

Thanks to several Greg Colburn and Tom Peterson who tipped me off about the WSJ article.