What was going through Stephen King’s head when he came up with It? What was Lars von Trier thinking on the set of…any of his movies? The minds that create bold, polarizing, potentially disturbing stories are just as fascinating to audiences as the tales themselves. The way a storyteller takes inspiration from their life and spins it in a new way, sometimes taking the kernel of a story to an extreme end, is a mysterious, beautiful process. 

Wicked screenwriter Eric Weiss delved deep into the idea of family-centric horror, Hitchcockian suspense, and Jungian psychoanalysis to craft the script for this audacious thriller. The film follows Ellie, a troubled teen whose lustful obsession with her father spells doom for her mother. A native of Framingham, Massachusetts (40 miles from the witchy environs of Salem), Weiss attended Grinnell College for undergrad before receiving his M.F.A. from the internationally acclaimed American Film Institute. 

Primarily trading in dark comedy, Weiss penned the script for Bongwater, a substance-soaked odyssey starring Alicia Witt as a Portland woman who moves to New York with a heroin addict (Jamie Kennedy) after becoming frustrated with her weed-dealing boyfriend’s (Luke Wilson) lack of ambition. The film premiered at the 1998 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and features an endless list of “before they were famous” faces in the supporting cast, including Jack Black, Brittany Murphy, Andy Dick, and Scott Caan.

Weiss also co-wrote the adaptation of Robert O’Connor’s satire Buffalo Soldiers, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris and follows a group of American soldiers in West Germany on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The film premiered at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for five awards at the British Independent Film Awards, including Best Screenplay and Best British Independent Film. 

For Wicked, Weiss utilized his expertise in dark comedy but chose to focus on the dark when crafting the core of his story. In this recently digitized exclusive onset interview, Weiss discusses the inspiration for Wicked and the emotional toll of writing the disturbing script.

*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Click Here to Watch the Interview on YouTube

The Genesis of Wicked

I originally wanted to write a story set in a gated housing community, like a Winesburg, Ohio kind of thing. The story with Ellie was one of the stories I thought of and I started to focus on that and came up with the idea of doing family life as a horror film. 

I’m a fan of Polanski’s films like Repulsion and Knife in the Water. I’m fascinated by how he takes everyday things and shows them with the intensity you feel in real life. A lot of times in films, that intensity comes from the supernatural or goblins or something like that. But usually in real life, that intensity comes when you almost hit a car on the freeway and your heart starts pounding 120 times a minute.

Originally, the script was more Hitchcockian. It was more of a horror movie with some comedy. Then Michael Steinberg read the script and his contribution was to make it more of a murder mystery. In the original, you knew who did it. Michael looked at the script and said, “There’s all these other people that have motives, let’s make it into a murder mystery. Let’s take advantage of that. So when we rewrote it, we made Detective Boland more of a major character and we deepened the other characters as well.

The themes of infidelity and matricide came from exploring different sides of family life, which is very intense. The highs are very high. The lows are very low. This movie, I guess, is one of the lows. The script came out of the desire to show family life in a different way, as a horror film. It doesn’t mean this is what I think of family life, but it’s a different viewpoint.

How Audiences Will Respond to Wicked

I think it’s going to be one of those films you either really like or you really hate. I don’t think there are going to be riots in the streets but it’s gonna be one of those things where you either get it or you don’t. It’s not a Chevy Chase movie where when you’re at home at Christmas and everybody has to decide on a movie and you end up seeing the Chevy Chase movie.

The Experience of Writing Wicked

It took a lot out of me but when I was writing Wicked I knew it was good so it was affecting my real life in very positive ways. But when you’re writing something like this it’s very hard to do anything else. 

Watch Wicked on the following streaming platforms: Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, Plex, and Tubi.