Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Wilson-Cairns was born on 26 May 1987[1][2] in Glasgow, Scotland.[3] She grew up in the Shawlands area of the city in a single-parent household. Wilson-Cairns was privately educated at the Craigholme School. Her grandparents partly funded her place at the school.[3] At the age of 15, she had a work experience placement on the Scottish detective show Taggart.[4] The series had used the mechanic shop that her father worked in as a set and she reports that she used to watch the filming of it during her summer holidays.[3][5] She became a runner on the show as well as on other television series including Rebus and Lip Service.[6][7]

Wilson-Cairns had initially aspired to study physics and become an engineer but her on set experiences as a runner fostered her interest in working in the film industry.[5] She studied Digital Film and Television at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), and graduated in 2009.[8] Her first creative work at the RCS was a short story about killer guinea pigs.[3][9] She credits her ambition to become a screenwriter on being inspired by one of her lecturers at the RCS, screenwriter Richard Smith.[10] She then spent a year working at the BBC Comedy Unit, before moving to London where she gained an MA in Screenwriting from the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in 2013.[8][11] While studying at the NFTS, she worked as a bartender in The Toucan, an Irish pub in Soho. During her downtime, she developed script ideas.[12][13]

Wilson-Cairns sold her first film script to FilmNation Entertainment in 2014.[14] It was for the science fiction thriller project Aether, which provided her breakthrough after it made the top ten of the Black List.[15][16][17] The script was read by screenwriter John Logan who hired her to work as a staff writer on his television show Penny Dreadful in 2015.[8] She also contributed to its comic book series.[18] After this, her first writing commission was for a potential film adaptation, to be directed by Tobias Lindholm, of Charles Graeber's non-fiction book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.[19][20] Filmmaker Sam Mendes was impressed by her treatment, and suggested collaborating on a future film project.[21] They had previously met while working on Penny Dreadful, for which he was an executive producer. They worked on two potential projects together.[22] This included a film adaptation of Gay Talese's book The Voyeur′s Motel. However, both projects fell through due to licensing issues.[23][24] In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes′ 30 under 30 in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.[25]

Wilson-Cairns co-wrote the screenplay for Mendes' World War I film 1917 (2019) as her feature film debut.[22] The film follows two young British soldiers on a mission to warn a fellow battalion of a German ambush, and is shot to appear as if it is one continuous take.[26] To help develop the script, she travelled to the battlefields and cemeteries of World War I in northern France with her mother and read frontline diaries at the Imperial War Museum.[3][27] For her work on the film, Wilson-Cairns received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.[28][29] She shared the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film.[30] She was named as one of the 10 Screenwriters to Watch by the trade magazine Variety in their 2019 list.[31]

Her upcoming project is Edgar Wright's psychological horror Last Night in Soho (2021). She co-wrote the screenplay with Wright, and will have a cameo as a bartender.[24] Wilson-Cairns has also been hired to adapt journalist Evan Ratliff's book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. about programmer-turned-drug cartel boss Paul Le Roux, for an Amazon Studios crime drama series.[32][33] In May 2020, it was announced Wilson-Cairns would be co-writing a new Star Wars film with Taika Waititi, who is set to direct it.[34]

• Krysty Wilson-Cairns at IMDb