BAFTA-nominated screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz explains how she transformed The New York Times’ bombshell reporting on Harvey Weinstein into a brisk, sensitively rendered newsroom thriller.
As a playwright, Rebecca Lenkiewicz has always prided herself on exploring the lives of unseen women, be they strippers (Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers, 2000), suffragettes (Her Naked Skin, 2008) or convicts (That Almost Unnameable Lust, 2010). Now, with her no-frills adaptation of the Harvey Weinstein exposé She Said, the writer turns her attention to sexual-assault survivors – as well as Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the dedicated New York Times journalists who toppled the abusive Hollywood mogul in 2017. It took about four years for Lenkiewicz to bring their book to the screen. After signing onto the project, she spent time with the reporters, delving into ‘forensic’ detail on their working practices. ‘We were trying to make a very accurate portrait of journalism that honours the stringent codes of conduct,’ says Lenkiewicz. ‘I learned an awful lot about the logistics of building up this story and ensuring it was legally airtight. It’s so diametrically opposed to the way you write fiction, where you just throw words out there and hope that they make a good rhythm.’
Beyond her crash course in media ethics, Lenkiewicz was keen to gain insight into Kantor and Twohey’s home lives, which would allow her to humanise their characters in the script (such personal touches are mostly absent from the book). ‘My research was really about people,’ the writer explains. ‘It was more psychological than fact-based in some ways. I thought it was very important to include that they were incredible working mothers, because they’re pretty invisible and not portrayed on screen very much.’ Indeed, seeing Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan (as Kantor and Twohey respectively) pushing buggies, going to doctor’s appointments and, in the latter’s case, battling postpartum depression adds much needed texture to She Said. In addition to the reporters, Lenkiewicz met with the Weinstein survivors Zelda Perkins and Laura Madden, both of whom were Miramax employees in the Nineties. The writer navigated those conversations with the utmost sensitivity. ‘I wanted the survivors to have space,’ she says. ‘With Laura, I had read about her terrible experience so I didn’t ask what happened. We talked about her life and how she is and how the abuse has impacted her. Everyone I spoke to was unbelievably open and helpful and resilient.’
She Said (2022)
At this point, Kantor and Twohey had published their explosive Pulitzer-winning reporting in the Times, but not their book, giving Lenkiewicz six weeks to start ‘kicking around ideas’ and nailing down the film’s authoritative, unsentimental tone. (‘I wanted it to feel female and strong and muscular.’) The screenwriter, who cut her teeth on the stage, enjoyed the freedom of not having the source text initially. Soon enough, though, Kantor and Twohey were sending Lenkiewicz unpublished chapters from She Said. The three women were working in parallel: the reporters deepening their Times investigation, while the scriptwriter sought to ‘hone, hone, hone’ their prose for the screen. ‘The book was a wonderful life raft. If I was struggling at sea, it was a boat I could climb on!’ Lenkiewicz says. ‘The material coming in was so brilliant, it was really an editing task on my part.’
She Said (2022)
Another key task was making this journalism thriller – with its reliance on decidedly uncinematic phone calls – visually interesting. Lenkiewicz takes pains to inject a sense of momentum, locating conversations in parks, diners and beaches, as well as sharing crucial information through pacey, Aaron Sorkin-style walk-and-talks. Perhaps her most commendable narrative choice is refusing to show the sexual violence; instead, abuse is implied through well deployed flashbacks of clothes strewn across a hotel-room floor as survivors offer voiceover testimony of their attacks. ‘I’ve had enough of seeing women victimised,’ Lenkiewicz says, forcefully. ‘The last thing I wanted was gory detail. There’s been a century of the male gaze showing images of women being debased and I’m appalled by it.’ A similarly canny move is diminishing Weinstein in the film, where he is reduced to a looming threat rather than a physical presence (we only see brief snatches of him from behind). ‘I wanted to negate him, and give the time to those who were reporting on and telling their stories.’
She Said (2022)
She Said premiered in October, almost five years to the day since Kantor and Twohey broke the sexual-harassment story that turbocharged the Me Too movement. Its reverberations are still being felt. When I speak to Lenkiewicz, the jurors are being selected for Weinstein’s LA trial (the producer is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York for rape and sexual assault). Lenkiewicz is adamant that, although this particular predator is behind bars, the system that turned a blind eye to his criminality has yet to be dismantled. ‘I don’t think anything’s resolved. Violence isn’t going away, assault isn’t going away and our film isn’t a fairy tale.’ she says. ‘I hope that Hollywood just… learns!’
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