Did they have to pick you up when Charlize won the Academy Award?

One of the most surreal experiences of my life, the weirdest experience of my life, because by the time we got there... Well, first of all, she won an Oscar and that's ridiculous, you know, for our tiny, tiny movie that no one wanted to distribute. But by the time we got there, she had so swept the awards that walking down the red carpet, everybody was like blithely asking, "So, she's going to win. How does that feel?" And I was like, Oh, my God, this is so bizarre. Not only are we at the Oscars, but now we're like jinxed not to win, because everybody's assuming she will win. So, it was like this weird churning. I don't remember any of it.

Did you expect the film to be as popular as it was? And have you been offered every serial killer movie under the sun?

I never, ever in my wildest dreams honestly imagined it. And it was almost a fantastic way to go into it, because I did expect it to be a film that I was proud of, and I did have much higher expectations for Charlize's performance, and for a lot of aspects of the film that I think people realized. You know, I always thought that this was a genre like "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver" and all these films that really could aim much higher than people - than the words - you know, female lesbian serial killer. I always thought there was a bigger thing there.

But everybody unanimously said, "This is a really unattractive woman that everybody in the country doesn't like and has no interest in." And I kind of went into it knowing that she wasn't somebody people even really wanted to know about. So, we were aiming for very, very moderate city based art house theaters success. So, the fact that it went to this place, I didn't even know what to do. So, it was like great to go into it, because we were like, "Yes, victory. It's going to get released in two theaters. All right," you know?

It's funny, I have a really good agent, so I think I get protected from a lot of things. But I definitely get a lot of strong, aggressive women taking things on. Which is because that's the one thing - I'm like, hey, guys, it's not that I'm a feminist or something, I'm just - I'm spent on that topic. I've got nothing to say there.

When you first pitched the movie to other studios, they asked you to make a lot of compromises. First of all is that true, and if you remember what those compromises were?

Yes, that's true, and it wasn't as simple as, you know, they said you have to do this or you have to do that. Across the board, people would say this - even if they would say - like a lot of them said, "Oh, we love it. We think it's a great film." Not all of them; some of them hated it. You know, but they would say, "You can't tell a story like this. This isn't even "Boys Don't Cry." In "Boys Don't Cry," the lead - our main character is sympathetic. You cannot tell an unsympathetic woman's story who's unattractive, as well. And so, the thought process was either - the theme and a lot of contention was the last murder.

It was the one thing that I had been so adamant about. And it's funny, because people have always come at you and say, "Maybe this is too sympathetic." And I'm saying, wow, I spent the entire film fighting for the reality that we could not be that sympathetic, that we wanted to be - fill in the details of this person's like that were sympathetic, but we could never back away from the fact that she killed people in cold blood. Who did not deserve it and ruined their lives. And that was the scene that was most obvious for people to say, "Well, you need to cut that so that she's more sympathetic," and we said, "Absolutely not."

The screenplay was so perfectly modulated. How did you incorporate so many childhood memories into the narrative?

Thank you so much for that. I appreciate the compliment. You know, it was funny, the opening section of the film, where she is remembering things, that was something that I deliberated for a long time about whether - and on pretty much every pass of the script it would come on and back off and back on and back off, and even when we were cutting the film I would take it away, put it back, take it away. The reason that I ended up putting that there was because when I would take it away, too many people would have questions.

People have a very hard time, I realized, capturing how a person who they can completely relate with, like a five-year-old child, can get to this place. And so, when I would take that information away, people would ask a lot of questions, like, "What is this woman, and why did she decide to be a hooker in the first place?" and these sorts of things. So, I found it important to understand the progression of how a human being doesn't necessarily decide to become a hooker, but this long series of events can lead you to being, you know, cut to 30 years later and here you are.

The other thing that I was always fascinated with about Aileen is the way that damaged people, unfortunately, don't come up to us and say, "Hi, I'm really damaged. I was raped as a young child, and now I'm a little unpredictable." Instead, it comes out sideways, and they bury - it's like burying the leaves. You know, they're telling you one thing, and only over a period of time do you get to start to collect this picture. What was very important to a lot of damaged people, particularly who live on the street, is protecting themselves by always putting forth, "I can handle it. There's nothing you can't do to me that I can't handle."

So, oftentimes in Aileen's personal letters that I read, she would write, you know, "Oh, it's so funny." You know, if someone wrote like, "I have sore legs," she'd be like, "Oh, man, I remember once I was walking like a duck. I'd had my whole, you know, pelvis was broken by these guys that raped me a beat me up. And I'm like walking like a duck for" - and it would always - that kind of information would come out sideways, and you'd be saying, "Wait, back up. That's horrific, what she just said," but it was important to her to always couch that sort of thing in - oh, it's no big deal. I can handle it. There's nothing that you can do that I - oh, it's old hand.

And so, after putting in those initial scenes in the beginning, it was important to me, first of all, that the tone of her voiceover not nod to what we were seeing, because you have to find a way to live with it and not remember the bad things. And then, throughout the movie that little pieces of information would kind of drop just accidentally. And so, that was why - yes, I decided to do that.

Aileen certainly generated a lot of press over the years, and I really felt there was almost two stories. There's the story of her leading up to when she's incarcerated and then the exploitation of her afterward. How did you decide where to end your film and why did you choose that point in her life to end it?

Well, that was an interesting process. You know, I've talked a lot about Nick's films and our film, and the thing that I always come back to is that I actually think Nick made films about the period of her life which is best made by a documentary. She was alive, she was present, she was available to be filmed and the real people were all available. The part of story that I was still always left with questions about - because it wasn't what Nick's films were about, and it wasn't what all of the other things I'd seen more about - was what happened in this period of time, between these two people, that culminated in this?

Once I really started to look at that, it was so framed so honestly by this relationship, this last attempt to make something work, where she actually tried the hardest ever to clean up her life and ended up murdering seven people by the end of this year-and-a-half-long process. And once I started to look at that period of time, which is best told by a feature film, because all of these people are people who cannot communicate what happened during that time, so the only way to do it is to get into it yourself.

This was the story of this person's last chance at hope, and that hope ended. And her life, as far as this part of her life and this part of her soul, died the day her girlfriend turned on her, to me. And so, there had been talk about - you know, particularly because there was no plan to execute her at the time that I wrote the script and was writing to her. So, when that happened, there was period of time of saying what do we do, how do we change this, and I thought, you know, it's just those 12 years on death row have been not only well documented, but really that person was - her life was over. She spent the next 12 years writing about her - asking about her girlfriend and how she was, and she sort of lost all hope and faith in a future, at that point. And so, I decided to end it with that testimony.

Nick Broomfield had already documented both the story of Aileen Wournos prior to her execution as well as her eventual exploitation. Did you have any contact with him, or did he show you any footage of the interviews with Aileen before her death?

He was very gracious with us about that. When we had started making the film, and we were I think about six months in and about ready to shoot, when he was called down to Florida to testify at her - I think it was right before she was executed, and then decided to make the second documentary. And so, he and Charlize had met each other before. He was very gracious. I never got to talk to him really, but he sent us footage in advance of the second films for us to research.

I had followed Aileen's story from 1990, when it broke, and had always watched it on the news and kind of read the things that were available. And when his documentary came out, you know, it was definitely a lot of really interesting information. And then, his second documentary, we poured over both of those and all of the Court TV information, all of specials that had been done about her all over the world and any footage we could get our hands on.

How difficult was it to shoot the really violent scenes?

Horrible. Just horrible. I think that the hardest scenes to shoot were the first murder, the last murder and the bus station scene. They were particularly difficult because there was a constant intersection between reality and making a film going on all the time. And in those cases, in particular, obviously we don't know verbatim what was said in those cases, but we pretty much ascertained that they had gone down something like that.

And being in Florida, in places very close to where these things actually happened and reenacting something that had happened to people, was really very overwhelming and somber and a devastating experience. I think the thing that Charlize can never get enough credit for is that acting is a much more emotion art form than people necessarily credit it.

You have to live that life, and you have to get yourself to a place where you can justifying making the same choices as the person you are playing. And that's really scary, scary place to go to - very, very horrifying to actually force yourself to walk down that same decision-making process. And so, it was very hard: hard for me, as a director, to watch somebody go through that and hard for me, as a writer, to go through it myself.