![]() ![]() ’ There had been about nine months of, ‘The script is in a good place, we’re waiting for the schedules to align,’ then it became all hands on deck very fast.” “But something happened that put the whole thing on hold,” says Burch, “ to such a degree that Todd then said, ‘Let’s just pivot. The cast, says Mechanik, was “an embarrassment of riches”.Īll they had to do was wait for Haynes to get through another project, a biopic of singer Peggy Lee starring Michelle Williams. In May 2021, Haynes told her that his frequent collaborator Moore had agreed to play Gracie, the woman at the heart of the scandal. “We have been lifelong fans of Todd and all of his beautiful work, so that was like a lottery-ticket level of shock and awe,” says Burch, who refined the script based on notes from Haynes, Portman, Elbaum and Ferrell. The year ended with the news Portman had given the screenplay to Haynes and he was interested in directing. “That was a life-changing phone call, but I had not left the apartment in months, so it was like, ‘I guess I’m taking everyone’s word for it that this is all happening, because as far as I can tell we’re still in the apartment.’” Elbaum and Ferrell then sent it to Natalie Portman, who offered to come onboard as a producer, and play the television actress Elizabeth. In March, Booksmart producer Jessica Elbaum called her to say she wanted to produce the film alongside Will Ferrell, her partner at Gloria Sanchez Productions. The following January, Burch “got signed by some great managers” who sent out the screenplay to several production companies. “There was a bit of a wait because neither of us had any representation,” she says, “so nobody wanted to read the script or had any way of knowing it existed.” The pair roughed out their darkly funny and ultimately tender story in 2019, and Burch wrote the screenplay, mainly in the hope it might attract an agent. “You wouldn’t know it from the film,” adds Mechanik, “but we really love actors.” “You could do it with a reporter coming to get the scoop, but it made so much sense to us right from the beginning that this was an actress, and that it was not someone with any kind of ethical or moral code,” says Burch. ![]() Letourneau and her victim would go on to have two children together and be married for 14 years.īurch and Mechanik’s idea was to have a struggling television actress visit a fictionalised version of this unconventional family as she was preparing to play the abuser in a biopic. ![]() This prompted them to think about Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who was convicted in 1997 of sexually abusing a student when she was 34 and he was 12. In 2018, they noticed the tabloid scandals they remembered from their 1990s childhoods - the OJ Simpson murder case the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton affair - were being turned into true-crime dramas. “I had 10 to 12 years of writing spec after spec for no-one at all,” says Burch. “The two films orbited each other this whole time in a very strange way, even though they couldn’t have been more different.”īurch, who grew up in Los Angeles, and Mechanik, from Tampa, Florida, previously worked in casting and other film departments, and had collaborated on short films and spec screenplays ever since graduating from New York University, where Burch studied screenwriting and Mechanik film. “I got the news two hours before the actors strike ended, and we knew Natalie and everyone were going to be at the premiere of May December,” says Burch, sitting side-by-side with Mechanik on a Zoom call. But in November, Warner Bros Discovery announced that, for tax purposes, it would not be releasing the finished film. Acme, a live action-animation hybrid in the vein of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Burch had written the screenplay for Coyote Vs. May December, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, went on to pick up a host of critics’ awards, as well as an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.īut a wedding and an acclaimed debut film was not all that 2023 had in store for the couple. The pair got married, and in May, a film they had plotted together, and which Burch had scripted, premiered at Cannes Film Festival. Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik had a busy 2023. Todd Haynes with Charles Melton and Julianne Moore on the set of ‘May December’ Source: François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix ![]()
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