Fran Walsh The Frighteners (1996)
Fran Walsh was thirty-six years old when The Frighteners opened, two years past her Academy Award nomination for the Heavenly Creatures screenplay (with Peter Jackson), and seven years into a co-writing partnership with Jackson that has produced every film he has directed since Meet the Feebles (1989). She has co-written, produced, and co-composed songs for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. She rarely gives interviews. She is, by most accounts, the most consequential New Zealand screenwriter of her generation.
A working-class Wellington start
Walsh was born in 1959 in Wellington, New Zealand, and met Jackson in the mid-1980s while she was working at TVNZ as a freelance writer. Her early credits were on the television series Worzel Gummidge Down Under (1987–1989). She joined Jackson on Meet the Feebles (1989) as co-writer; her writing credit on Braindead (1992) is her first solo Jackson collaboration. She and Jackson became partners romantically as well as professionally; they married in 1987 and have two children.
"Fran is the better writer. Peter is the better director. The partnership is a forty-year argument about which scenes need to exist. She wins more often than he does." — Philippa Boyens, co-writer of Lord of the Rings, The Hollywood Reporter (2014)
Heavenly Creatures as the breakthrough
Heavenly Creatures (1994), the adaptation of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, was the first Walsh-Jackson screenplay to attract international attention. The film built two teenage girls as fully realized characters whose imaginative inner life — rendered in the Borovnia digital-clay sequences — was as rich as their criminal one. The screenplay earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
"Heavenly Creatures was Fran's project as much as mine. She had grown up reading the Pauline Parker diaries. She knew that case the way a historian knows a moment. The screenplay is hers; I made sure the camera kept up." — Peter Jackson, Vanity Fair (2017)
The Frighteners as register experiment
The Frighteners screenplay was Walsh and Jackson's attempt to combine the splatstick comic register of Braindead with the psychological character drama of Heavenly Creatures. The Frank Bannister character — a widowed con-man who is also the only one who can see the dead — is built to support both registers simultaneously. The con scenes are Braindead; the freezer scene is Heavenly Creatures.
The screenplay's structural decision to put Patricia Bradley's true identity behind a sustained misdirection — the timid daughter who turns out to be the scorekeeper — is Walsh's specialty. Heavenly Creatures had used a similar architecture: the audience sympathizes with the protagonists fully before the audience understands what the protagonists are about to do. The Frighteners runs the same trick on Patricia.b21 b30
"Walsh writes women who are not who they appear to be, and the reveal is always engineered to feel like a moral fact rather than a plot twist. Patricia Bradley in The Frighteners is the same architecture as Juliet Hulme in Heavenly Creatures. The audience has loved someone who has been doing something terrible the entire time." — Anne Billson, The Guardian (2017)
After The Frighteners
Walsh co-wrote The Lord of the Rings trilogy with Jackson and Philippa Boyens (2001–2003), winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Return of the King (2003) — sharing the trophy with Jackson and Boyens. She co-wrote King Kong (2005), The Lovely Bones (2009), The Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), and Mortal Engines (2018). She also co-composed the lyrics for "Into the West" (with Annie Lennox and Howard Shore), winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song for The Return of the King.
She rarely speaks to the press. When she does, the topic is generally the work of others, not her own.
"Fran Walsh is the most consequential New Zealand writer of her generation, working largely invisibly inside what the public reads as Peter Jackson's career. The films are hers as much as his. The public credit is asymmetric." — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker (2013)