Superficially, the story of Todd Haynes’s Netflix film May December resembles that of Mary Kay Letourneau—appropriate for a movie all about deceptive surfaces and what lurks underneath. Letourneau, who died in 2020, was a teacher convicted as a sex offender for beginning a sexual relationship with her student, the Samoan American Vili Fualaau, when he was 12 years old. Despite her stint in prison, they stayed together for more than 20 years, and were married for over a decade; they raised two children and had their lives constantly scrutinized in the public eye. The seed of May December, written by Samy Burch, came from a passing thought along those lines: Letourneau and Fualaau’s children were approaching adulthood themselves, meaning the couple was facing life in an empty nest. (They separated in 2019, around the time Burch started writing the script.)  

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Yet the key detail there is Burch’s imagination of what these lives could be like. She created wholly original characters out of that initial setup, removing the teacher-student dynamic and particular identity markers—Julianne Moore’s Gracie is a baker and former pet shop employee, and Charles Melton’s Joe is Korean American—while also framing the drama around the arrival of a famous actor named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) set to play Gracie in a movie. In brilliantly examining this triangle of relationships, at a moment of reckoning for the central couple, Burch says she didn’t actually do any research at all. She wanted to work off of her personal feeling of living in a tabloid-dominated culture, particularly as someone who came of age at its height in the ’90s. She knew what she needed to know, and didn’t know what she wanted to explore—without constraints.

“I grew up in West LA—like, O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, that’s the same neighborhood,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I would see them around. I saw, literally as a child, O.J. after he was acquitted, at San Vicente Foods in the cereal aisle, thinking he was going to kill a random child.” 

This is Burch’s first produced screenplay. While she majored in screenwriting in college, she’d been working as a frustrated casting associate in the industry before, after a terrible job fell through—“It was no time, very little money, and I was so desperate…and then they called me and said, ‘Oh, we found someone to do it cheaper!’”—she dedicated herself to writing May December. She intended to stay away from true crime because she’d previously done a fact-based script on spec, and disliked the experience. “I felt such a responsibility when it was these real people, even these little side characters, some of whom did horrible things,” she says. “I really wanted to get it right—and I didn’t want that again…. I wanted to not feel clouded by the facts.” Memories and the real world flowed into May December, but its boldly comic tone and deft character psychologies can be attributed to Burch’s sense of freedom, with responsibility only to emotional truths, and not to historical facts.

Credit also goes to her rigor. Burch, who won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best screenplay, wrote extensive character biographies for Gracie, Joe, and Elizabeth, most details of which aren’t plainly evident in the final script. “There’s a certain voice that appears when I’m doing that, even though it’s written like a biography,” she says. “With Gracie, there was a certain denial in the voice of her history. Then with Joe, there was something bubbling up.” (The film builds toward Joe finally confronting Gracie about the repressed nature of their lives.) Burch was not intimidated by the psychological minefield involved: “I’ve known people like Gracie—not convicted sex offenders, obviously, but the unexamined if very certain way in which she goes through the world that’s, in some ways, quite amazing.” 

As for that unproduced true-crime script that Burch wrote, someone else ended up telling that story to great success in Hollywood. When she was writing May December, she started seeing dramatizations like it everywhere she looked. Not only did her prior experience inform the fictionalization of May December, but it came to define the world in which it’s set. “There are [crimes] that happened three years ago that have already been television shows, and there’s this unquenchable appetite for human misery that is interesting to me,” she says. “We all live in this tabloid world, whether we want to or not. We’re in this new phase of it, where there’s this reckoning—like, Oh, let’s pick it up and look at it again. I think that can be really valuable; you go, Oh, that’s actually not how I was thinking of it. But sometimes I go, What have we really learned here? Is this not just another round of exploitation?”

Burch asked these big questions of herself while, mostly, working in a closet. She wrote May December in her new home, in cramped quarters that she retrofitted as an office. It had a little window you couldn’t open, but that provided some light. The rod for hanging clothes was removed. A friend designed a pretty wallpaper pattern. An Amazon desk was installed, and a rolling chair that didn’t have space to actually roll around was placed inside. The door had slats. Burch could stick her hand out to signal if she needed something. “That was it,” she says with a laugh. “There was nowhere to move. It was just you go in, you sit, and type.”

As a longtime aspiring screenwriter, Burch brought a range of touchstones to this material, particularly genre-bending favorites like Heavenly Creatures, Dog Day Afternoon, and Badlands. The arch tone of May December, wending its way from cutting comedy to heartbreaking drama, reflects her goals as a writer, but she’s learning to extend beyond her comfort zone too. May December was bought by Jessica Elbaum and Will Ferrell’s Gloria Sanchez Productions before Natalie Portman got involved (she also produces) and brought in Todd Haynes; it was picked up by Netflix at Cannes. Off her work on that project, Burch was hired to take on the script for Coyote vs. Acme—the embattled Looney Tunes live-action-animation hybrid, currently seeking new distribution after Warner Bros. dropped the title to great outcry. “Up until getting that job, I thought, I’m not going to get this job,” Burch says with a laugh. But when she got Coyote, she did it her way. “I still always come from a place of character,” she says. “I mean, I wrote a character biography for the Roadrunner.”