Read The Dead Girl (The Complete Screenplay .pdf)

Fear is her guide. It compels her to walk over to the dark side. She gazes into places we'd rather not see, places we spend fortunes to avoid. There's no escapist impulse in Karen Moncrieff. Here's how murder really is, she says, and no amount of sentiment and romance and melodrama can change these facts. Here's silence but no lambs. Take it or leave. Just don't forget.

From the very first moments in The Dead Girl when Arden, played by Toni Collette, finds the mutilated corpse of a young girl, you realize this film is going to take you places you haven't been to before, just like writer-director Moncrieff's Sundance Festival hit of 2002, Blue Car, became anything but a typical coming-of-age story.

“As a viewer I like to be put through the wringer, I know a lot of people don't, but I do,” Moncrieff says. “I like to be challenged, pushed off my center, shaken up, made to think, and more than anything made to feel.”

Watching The Dead Girl, which premiered at AFI Fest in Los Angeles this past November and will be released by First Look Pictures in New York and Los Angeles on December 29, you'll experience all of Moncrieff's emotional points. Her second feature's uncompromising, sophisticated realism depicts five seemingly unrelated women's lives intersecting over the murder of a young woman.  While each character has her own narrative, the film explores the powerful ripple effect of a single act of violence. Its complex structure is reminiscent of classics such as Rashomon and L'Avventura.

“I wanted to create portraits of women, who each were in some way dead in their own lives and in need of resuscitation,” says Moncrieff. “But I wanted to do it in a way that doesn't glorify violence or serial killers. Because I do character-driven dramas, it's more compelling to allow the character to unfold over the course of the film. To do that, I force the audience to do the work, and each of the portraits act like pieces of the puzzle coming together. In the end a bigger, more surprising portrait emerges about who these women are and who the victim was.” 

Although The Dead Girl is much more ambitious in scope, it examines the same kind of themes as Blue Car, which was Moncrieff's coming-of-age as a writer-director. In that film, she creates a harrowing and unsentimental look at a young woman's journey through the pain of adolescence. As Meg, Agnes Bruckner (Murder by Numbers) resonates as she enters a relationship with Auster, her writing teacher and mentor (played by David Strathairn). The mentorship gradually drifts from a safe-harbor support system into a predatory, sexualized intimacy. Her script for Blue Car earned Moncrieff a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting in 1998, and she went on to direct the film in May/June of 2001.

“Because of the sexuality in Blue Car,” she recalls, “I was really hell bent on directing it myself. Meg's experience could be exploited for something lurid, voyeuristic, and creepy, and I knew it needed to be acted and directed delicately.”

Blue Car premiered at Sundance in 2002 and was released by Miramax in 2003. Moncrieff was nominated for Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Screenplay and Bruckner for Best Actress. Moncrieff  was also chosen as one of Variety's 10 Screenwriters to Watch. With The Dead Girl, she's definitely lived up to her promise. A strong, uncompromising  point-of-view anchors and marks both her films. In Blue Car, there's an awkward, perverse sex scene between the teacher and his student, which she fought for initially with producers and even now it's the source of friction as a cable network wants to cut it before the film airs. Despite her uncompromising artistry, however, Moncrieff heard the audience groans and gasps during the middle portion of the seduction; she decided to cut part of the scene on her own. (This deleted sequence remains for viewing on the DVD's extras.) 

“People are uncomfortable with that scene because we're used to sex scenes functioning as gloss in a movie, usually some erotic male fantasy where there's lots of ogling the bodies,” Moncrieff says, “but here the scene furthers the narrative and Meg begins her transformation. You are left to endure the act with her, and it's harrowing, and it's meant to be so, and you do feel betrayed. But this is her story, not Auster's, and I always like the audience to be closely aligned with the protagonist at all times.”

Still, her artistry won't deny sympathy for even those who betray confidences and have shameful lusts: “In the end, what I hope I came up with was a portrait of two lost characters longing for connection, which is really a theme throughout all of my work.”

In real life, Moncrieff is married to her college sweetheart, Eric Karten, and they have a 13-month-old daughter, Ruby, and a mixed pitbull named Luther (who would become the model for their independent film company, Pitbull Pictures). Karten's also producing partner on both films, her collaborator and sounding board, and occasional actor (although his brief, sordid role in Blue Car was cut, it can be viewed as an extra on the DVD). The two met at Northwestern University in Chicago, where she studied theater. In 1987, a year after graduating with a B.S. in Performance Studies, she headed to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress. She spent 10 years doing episodic television and soap operas, eventually landing a contract role on Santa Barbara.

At a crossroads, she signed up for several extension screenwriting courses at AFI and UCLA. Suddenly, “writing felt so comfortable in a way that acting never really did. With writing, I was using all parts of myself, all of my skills. Soon, I cared too much about what I had written and wanted to cast the absolute best people that I could get.”

She also wanted to protect what she'd written and believed the best protection was to direct her scripts. To learn this craft, she returned to college, earning a certificate in film studies from Los Angeles City College, and made several short films. “Doing both writing and directing challenged me like nothing else I'd ever done,” she says.

The Blues

But Moncrieff still hadn't found the story she really felt passionate about. “I went to Eric and he asked me, 'Why are you writing all these stories about men? Why don't you write about something you know? Or that you would want to see?'”

She realized her husband knew his wife well. Growing up in Rochester, Michigan, her parents sent Karen and her sister to California to stay with an aunt for the summer. When they returned home, “suddenly all of our stuff had been moved to an apartment and our dog had been given away to our grandparents. It was a really frightening and devastating time for my family, and our father was being cast as the bad man by many relatives. It took me a long time to have a relationship with my father.”

And so she accepted her husband's challenge. “I tried to write a story that was really personal, while not autobiographical, but true to my own experience,” she recalls. “I had written a poem in a poetry workshop here in Los Angeles about a time during my parents' divorce when I was eight years old. When I finished it, I remember thinking there was something very cinematic in there, perhaps a kernel for something I could explore. In some ways, Blue Car was a reaction to films I had seen, like Stealing Beauty, a very idealized view of a girl's coming of age. I wanted to get inside the woman's experience and tell the story from her own perspective.”

For anyone who has experienced the loneliness of divorce as a young child, the image of Meg's father's blue car driving off after he's dropped her and her sister at their mother's apartment is acutely painful. Meg stays on the porch until the blue car becomes a tangible symbol of what divorce has cost their family. But writing the script of Blue Car became a wrenching, emotional experience for Moncrieff, who often, drained after composing a scene, would curl her head in her husband's lap and cry.

“I let my emotions and feelings be my guide,” she says. “I find the things that trouble me the most, the things I wish I could change, are what I need to explore. And it's always good to start with something that scares me.” 

This discovery has become her creative center. While serving as a juror on a murder trial of a prostitute, the seed for The Dead Girl was planted. “Even though the murderer had been convicted, I just couldn't let go of this huge weight of sadness,” she says. “I wanted to redeem her in some way. She was a series of contradictions: a passionate mother, an unmedicated bipolar, a drug addict, and a liar. But she was also a troubled human being who didn't deserve to die.”

 During the trial, Moncrieff encountered the people associated with the girl-customers, lovers, former convicts, pimps, dealers, family-and realized all formed a community. “We didn't know each other, many of the witnesses had never met each other,” she sensed, “and yet we were all affected by this act of violence, obviously some to a greater extent than others.”

This shock of recognition linked to other events in Moncrieff's life. A close friend had been raped by a serial killer but by chance survived the horrible encounter. That random act of violence was very disturbing and definitely informed her creative process. A litany of voices began haunting her imagination. While reading an article about the wife of a serial killer, she began developing Mary Beth Hurt's character and similarly did the same for the dead girl's “Sister” character. Grim discovery after grim discovery opened her to a world far from the romanticized serial killers of fiction and film. After reading a eulogy on the Internet given by the father of a girl who had been missing for five years but whose remains finally had been found, Moncrieff conceived another character. “In the eulogy it was implied that the family's entire life had become about this search, and I started wondering what that would do to the other children in the home. How do they cope? And from there I created the character of Leah,” she says of the character whose life can't go on until her missing sister's corpse is identified.

After completing a 30-page outline on the subject, Moncrieff wrote the first draft of The Dead Girl in two weeks and then quickly wrote three more drafts. When her screenplay was completed in March 2005, she worried that she'd written an uncommercial, ensemble drama with all female leads-all red marks against her in Hollywood. But her husband Karten's reaction to the script was quite the opposite.

“When I finished reading the first draft, I had two simultaneous responses,” says Karten. “As a partner and collaborator, I thought, Wow this is a major step forward for Karen in scope and ambition. And it emerged fully formed with a daring construction, cohesive narratives, vivid characterization, clear voices, and smart dialogue.”

Equally significant was his reaction as a producer. Karten decided that “this is Pitbull Pictures' first production. Actors are going to clamor to play these parts, and we can do it on the cheap.”

Reality Bites

Her agent and manager, however, were not enthusiastic. But in a life-imitating-art moment, her English teacher Auster's words to poetry student Meg rang through Moncrieff's mind: How important it is to feel good about your own work, as there will always be people judging you. “I took that lesson to heart,” she says, “but God bless Eric, he was like, 'This is the best thing she's done, we're going to make it, and if you don't see it, get out of the way!'”

A quote kept over her desk from Italian filmmaker Vittoria De Sica became her guide: “Art has to be severe. It cannot be commercial. It cannot be for the producer or even for the public.  It has to be for oneself.”

“The quote itself is severe, of course,” she acknowledges, “but it's a great counterbalance to the chattering voices in my head that would urge me toward writing for the approval of others-always, in my experience, a disastrous move.”

Not for nothing was their indie production company's title inspired by their dog. Pitbull Pictures represents “the qualities we admire in our beloved Luther: loyalty, tenacity, sweetness, and dogged-determination.” Oh, and “people think of a pitbull as having the capacity to go for the jugular.”

They submitted the script to Henry Winterstern, a CEO and co-chairman of First Look Studios. (Winterstern is credited as producer, as is Tom Rosenberg, founder and chairman of Lakeshore Entertainment; Karten; Richard Wright; Kevin Turen; and Gary Lucchesi.) Meanwhile, Moncrieff became pregnant, making the physical effort of directing even more difficult. Nevertheless, work began on the project about the human consequences of a serial killer's victim. The team moved forward with casting, but then Moncrieff experienced some pregnancy complications and was required by her doctor to rest for the remainder of her pregnancy. This, of course, became very disappointing on both the personal and professional fronts, but after birth and once baby Ruby was 5 _ months old, Moncrieff found that the financiers were still committed. (They resumed prepping in February, and on April 17 began a five-week shoot, edited and mixed the film by October 2006-from prep to finished film, the birth took nine months and less than a year total to the film's AFI premiere.)

And her script had made the rounds, attracting a remarkable ensemble. “I read the script and absolutely loved it,” says Mary Beth Hurt. “So many times you read scripts that are written for a star and they bring their qualities, what they look and sound like to a particular part, but this was so real, so subtle and intricate-all of these details that told me so much about the character.”

But Moncrieff had to fight for Hurt, who some of the producers felt would be too strong. “I knew she would be a revelation in the part, and she was,” Moncrieff says. Hurt revels in the role of a serial killer's wife, making believable the character's final, horrifying decision to remain with her monstrous husband. “You wonder about those people, what is it that separates me from the wife of a serial killer,” Hurt says, “and what it takes to allow this woman to make a decision in the film. Although that decision wasn't popular early on with the producers, well, that's just terrific.” Plus, the character was based on a real story that haunted Moncrieff.

Along with Hurt, Moncrieff's eclectic cast includes actresses  Collette as “The Stranger,” Rose Byrne as “The Sister,” Marcia Gay Harden as “The Mother,” and Brittany Murphy as “The Dead Girl.” Kerry Washington, Mary Steenburgen, and Piper Laurie round out the strong female cast. Moncrieff, working with casting directors Deborah Aquila and Tricia Wood, found that her original script scored with male actors too, including Josh Brolin, Bruce Davison, James Franco, Giovanni Ribisi, and Nick Searcy. Not bad for a film budgeted at $4 million.

For many directors, it could have been quite an intimidating experience, but being a former actress certainly helped her directing. “I felt confident in my ability to work and direct actors.” She had learned a lot from directing Blue Car: “I was a huge fan of David Strathairn's work. He brings such a beautiful humanity to everything he does, and I had written the part of Auster with him in mind. But even when you're such a fan of the actors, you still have to direct them. They still rely on guidance to get to those moments that are required to tell the story.”

Although the five key women didn't work together while performing in The Dead Girl, each had four or five days per segment. Moncrieff was amazed at all the performances, especially looking back on the shoot and her lack of sleep. Her newborn had been like all babies, ravenous and insomniac. She had to direct through a haze of exhaustion: “I was flying on instinct. I relied so much on my original version of things, where I'd spent so much time in the writing and imagining and creating these characters.”

Her daughter is still not sleeping through the night, so now Moncrieff has changed her writing habits from working all night to a morning schedule. But probably right now her biggest frustration is learning the art of the compromise in filmmaking.

“You envision the film as a writer but then as a director you have to please the financiers, and that still remains the supreme challenge. I know there's a lot of money involved and producers, in most cases, retain the final cut, but it feels wrong to me. As the writer, I've given birth to these characters, and sweated on the set with the actors, and studied the film in the editing room, so it's frustrating that [less involved] people have power over you.”

But as Hollywood's annual awards season kicks off, The Dead Girl found itself nominated for several of Film Independent's Spirit Awards, including Best Feature. Hurt's performance earned a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and Moncrieff was nominated for Best Director. (The winners will be announced at the February 24 annual awards luncheon.)

Now, she's been contracted to adapt some scripts and other works for hire. Indeed, her morning hours remain reserved for solitary struggles with her writing, even during awards season. She's currently adapting a novel titled Relative Distances, a drama by Victoria Jenkins about a woman who returns to her family's ranch in Wyoming to find herself, then begins an affair with the son of the man she used to love. She's also polishing her original spec script, The Sword Man, about a 13-year-old girl who escapes her abusive home life and takes up with a carnival sword swallower who may be wanted for murder. No wonder she's creating that story-fear, murder, a woman's point of view… What's not to like?