80 EMMY
HEN CAITLYN CLEAR HEARD HER PROFESSOR ANNOUNCE
THAT HE WANTED EVERYONE IN HIS GRADUATE CLASS,
ONE-HOUR TELEVISION DRAMA, TO PEN A SPEC SCRIPT
FOR THE DARKLY COMIC SPY THRILLER KILLING EVE, SHE
WAS ELATED. “I SAID, ‘YEAH, I GET TO WATCH IT AGAIN!’”
SAYS CLEAR, A GRAD STUDENT AT CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY IN
ORANGE, CALIFORNIA, WHERE SHE IS WORKING ON AN M.F.A. IN
TELEVISIONWRITINGANDPRODUCING.
She ended up watching the first season three times, mostly to home
in on the dialogue. “I knew that was the part I needed to get right,” she
says, referring to the zingy, unpredictable exchanges between the lead
characters. Eve, wryly played by Sandra Oh, is a clever if emotionally messy
British intelligence officer who engages in a coquettish cat-and-mouse
game with the psychopathic assassin Villanelle, endearingly portrayed by
Jodie Comer.
A scene from Clear’s bang-up script, “My Blood on Your Hands,” appears
on the following pages, along with a novel take by her classmate, Ryan Good,
who titled his episode “That Can’t Be Healthy.” Both students showed a clear
grasp of the series’ tone, intent and characters. It’s easy, in fact, to imagine
their inventive ideas folded right into the middle of season two had the real
scriptwriters not taken the series in a different direction.
Their professor, Victor Bumbalo, still recalls the lessons he learned from
renowned writer-producer David Milch about how to vault into someone
else’s show without knocking it off-kilter. In 1995, Milch hired him to write for
NYPD Blue. “He said, ‘Don’t try to write like me. But enter the world and bring
something of yourself to it.’”
Among other lessons that Bumbalo imparted upon his nine students
was how to give and take criticism. “In a writers’ room, that’s going to occur all
the time,” he explains. He also asked them to dig below the surface and find
the subtext. “I would always ask, ‘What’s your episode really about? What’s
underneath it? What do you reveal about the characters?’”
Good says that Bumbalo impressed upon him the importance of keeping
Eve paramount. Eve, unlike Villanelle, is no psychopath, and therefore has the
capacity to change. That makes her key, Bumbalo told him, even if Villanelle
is more fun to write for.
So Good conjured up the idea of bringing Eve back to America to attend
her mother’s funeral. Shedding light on Eve’s conventional upbringing and her
discord with her mom, he figured, would help explain why she’s become such
a risk-taker. “Suddenly you could see why this other world was so attractive
to her,” Good says.
Before they began writing their hour-long episodes, which wouldostensibly slot somewhere into season two (Bumbalo suggested they avoid
watching the new season), he had the students analyze other successful
scripts, including Mad Men and Breaking Bad. They researched the mind of
the psychopath and how to compose intriguing non-verbal scenes. He also
required them to come up with three Killing Eve concepts and pitch them to
the class before choosing one.
“He said, ‘Come up with a story you want to see. A story that you think
can last you fifty-two pages. And have fun,’” recalls Clear, who discovered
that she could better improvise dialogue by jumping on her skateboard and
extemporizing in motion. “The dialogue kind of led my script, ” she says.
To invent the corresponding action, which, in the following scene, takes
place in a hotel room, Clear found it helpful to close her eyes and envision
step-by-step what each character would do. Because her mom reminds
her of Eve in some ways, she substituted her at times. “I thought, if my mom
came in and saw a man hanging, what would she do? Just go for the legs!”
Good, meanwhile, arrived at an ingenious plot twist. He imagined
Villanelle crashing the funeral in the guise of a former lover of Eve’s mother,
shocking everyone with recitations of their supposed private moments. It
was an idea that just “popped into my head,” Good says, but neatly syncs with
the kinky outlandishness of the real series. Written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
(season one) and Emerald Fennel (season two), it airs on AMC.
“A scene like that is very, very much a Killing Eve scene,” Bumbalo says.
After Good turned in his script, he and his wife sat down to finally watch
season two. They chuckled to see that there were more than a few places
where Good’s ideas dovetailed with the action. He says, “So it was a fun little
game of ‘Oh, I got that one right!’ in the eyes of the Killing Eve writing team.”
—Ann FarmerOn the following pages, sample a scene from Clear’s and Good’s scripts.
They are also available online, at TelevisionAcademy.com/Chapman-scenes,
along with scenes by Chapman students Emily Coleman, Kalley Hoshaw,
Blake Jelinski, Dorothy Lolagne, Veronica Marin, Puja Nigam and Caitlin
Vukorpa. For more about the students, see page 89.