Krysty Wilson-Cairns

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Krysty Wilson-Cairns was fifteen years old when she first stepped onto a professional television set. The only reason she was there was her father's job. The Scottish detective drama Taggart had used his mechanic shop as a filming location. She spent school holidays watching the crew work. That access turned into a formal work experience placement on the show, then into work as a runner. She had no particular ambitions to write. Her plan was to study physics and become an engineer. What redirected her toward screenwriting, and how an unproduced script eventually opened the right doors, are the questions this story explores. The path leads from Shawlands to the Academy Awards.

• 2. Glasgow Roots

  ›

  Wilson-Cairns grew up in a single-parent household, with her grandparents partly funding her place at the private Craigholme School. The school gave her access that her family's circumstances might not otherwise have offered. As a teenager, she worked as a runner on the detective series Rebus and on the drama Lip Service. The work gave her sustained set experience across different genres and productions. Those years behind the scenes fostered her interest in film as a profession. She went on to enrol at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to study Digital Film and Television.

• 3. From Physics to Film

  ›

  Her first creative assignment produced a short story about killer guinea pigs. It was an unlikely starting point, but it suggested a taste for genre. The lecturer who most shaped her ambitions was screenwriter Richard Smith, who inspired her to pursue the craft professionally. She graduated in 2009. Afterward, she spent a year at the BBC Comedy Unit. Then she moved to London, where she earned an MA in Screenwriting from the National Film and Television School in 2013. During those studies, she worked shifts as a bartender at The Toucan, an Irish pub in Soho. She developed script ideas during the quiet hours between orders. The bar work gave her time to write, and the script she developed there would become her first breakthrough.

• 4. The Black List

  ›

  In 2014, Wilson-Cairns sold a science fiction thriller called Aether to FilmNation Entertainment. It broke through by landing in the top ten of the Black List. That annual survey highlights the most-liked unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Screenwriter John Logan read it and hired Wilson-Cairns as a staff writer on his television show Penny Dreadful in 2015. She contributed to both the show itself and its comic book series. Sam Mendes served as an executive producer on Penny Dreadful, and the two had already met through the production. In 2017, Forbes named Wilson-Cairns one of its 30 under 30 in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.

• 5. The Mendes Partnership

  ›

  Wilson-Cairns' first writing commission was a screenplay based on Charles Graeber's book The Good Nurse. The adaptation was to be directed by Tobias Lindholm. Mendes read her treatment for the project and was impressed. He suggested they work on a future film together. They developed two potential projects: a film adaptation of Gay Talese's The Voyeur's Motel and a piece tied to the podcast Invisibilia. Both fell through because of licensing issues. The screenplay she and Mendes developed together would become the 2019 war film 1917.

• 6. Into the Trenches

  ›

  To research the script for 1917, Wilson-Cairns travelled to the battlefields and cemeteries of World War I in northern France. Her mother came with her. She also read frontline diaries held at the Imperial War Museum. The film follows two young British soldiers racing to warn a fellow battalion of a German ambush. Mendes designed the production to appear as a single continuous take. Wilson-Cairns received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. She and Mendes shared the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film. Variety named her one of its ten Screenwriters to Watch in 2019.

• 7. Beyond the Trenches

  ›

  In October 2020, Wilson-Cairns co-founded a production company called Great Company with producer Jack Ivins. The following year, the company signed a two-year film deal with Universal Pictures. Around the same time, she co-wrote the screenplay for Edgar Wright's psychological horror Last Night in Soho, released in 2021. She also had a cameo in the film as a bartender. In 2022, she delivered the screenplay for The Good Nurse, an adaptation of Charles Graeber's book. That commission had first been announced eight years earlier. The film centres on serial killer nurse Charles Cullen and the intensive care nurse Amy Loughren who helped to convict him. To prepare, Wilson-Cairns spent a fortnight working in a burns unit at a hospital in Connecticut. Her work on the film brought a nomination for Best Writer Film/Television at the 2023 British Academy Scotland Awards. She is also writing a crime drama series for Amazon Studios. It is based on journalist Evan Ratliff's book The Mastermind, about programmer-turned-drug-cartel boss Paul Le Roux. The Cleopatra screenplay she is writing for Denis Villeneuve draws on Stacy Schiff's biography Cleopatra: A Life.