‘Woman of the Hour’ Writer Explains “Obligation” To Approach True Crime Genre With “Empathy”

deadline.com:

Although Woman of the Hour takes some creative liberties, the true crime film’s writer aimed to capture the “emotional reality” of Rodney Alcala‘s murders.

Following a Saturday screening of the Netflix film hosted by Writers Guild of America, screenwriter Ian McDonald told me in a Q&A that he felt “an obligation” to Alcala’s victims and survivors as the true crime genre becomes increasingly ripe with spectacle and sensationalism. “I mean, it’s tricky because on one hand, it should just be a basic tenet of writing any sort of thriller,” he explained. “If you wanna feel scared for someone, you kind of have to know who they are and you have to know where they’re from and where they’re going and what they care about, and the more you can get to know them as a person, the more you’re gonna feel their loss if something terrible happens to them or even if they just are in danger.

And yet at the same time, this isn’t a thriller, I mean, it’s not a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” McDonald continued, “These are real people with real lives, and if you spend years, like I did, reading about their deaths, article after article after article, at a certain point, you feel an obligation to — even though I’m changing their names and changing their biographies to kind of account for the fact that they didn’t opt to be part of the story, Rodney did by virtue of making his decisions — you do feel an obligation to try to be empathetic in the telling and bear in mind there are still families out there who are, even if they don’t watch the movie, they’re gonna know it exists. “And my hope is that if they did see it, they would feel as though the depiction was respectful and that these people weren’t just fodder to be killed off for fun,” he