The film follows nurse Amy Loughren (portrayed by Jessica Chastain) and the part she played in helping police capture her friend and colleague Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), who she learned had been killing patients from 1988 to 2003. The actual Cullen is currently serving 18 consecutive life sentences.
Although the film explores the real-life events that lead up to Cullen’s incarceration, it was important for Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns to make specific alterations to the project.
What ‘The Good Nurse’ Director and Writer Felt They Had to Change From True Story
Speaking to Newsweek at the BFI London Film Festival earlier this month, director Lindholm said that he “didn’t want to portray a real person’s death” in the film because he felt that it would be a step too far in the true crime drama.
“I felt that the relatives had been through enough,” Lindholm explained. “We wanted to tell their story. We wanted to address the critique of the system for them So, therefore, the only names that we have that are true are Amy and her girls, Charlie, and the police officers. The rest we decided to make anonymous by giving them fictional names.
“We have also changed the names of the victims. There is nothing in those portrayals [of the deaths] that are 100 percent as it played out, basically to protect relatives now.”
He continued: “But there is nothing in this systemic way that the system protected itself that isn’t taken exactly from the truth. So everything we tell is true, but we did it with a responsibility towards the relatives on both sides.
“Charlie Cullen has an ex-wife and daughters out there and we weren’t there to point fingers at them. I went out there to point fingers at the people working in the administration of the hospitals. We were there to show how and why the system failed to stop him.”
Wilson-Cairns concurred with Lindholm, explaining that it didn’t feel right to have scenes in the film that recreated the real-life deaths caused by Cullen.
“I just think it was really important. We weren’t in the room. Also, it was very difficult to research any of the victims. It was difficult to find any family members and remember the victims have actually been killed, so we have no access to their frame of mind,” the Oscar-nominated screenwriter explained.
“And so you’re inventing life stories, in some cases their last moments. And it felt icky, to be honest with you, to be doing that with real people who had experienced the horror of Charles Cullen.
“So I think quite early on we decided that we would keep the methodology that Charles used, how he would kill the victims, this sort of lack of selecting of the victims. We would invent the people and that they would be drawn on a lot of the sources that we had from Charles Graeber, but they wouldn’t be identifiable because I think it’s just not fair to do that to them or their families.”
Wilson-Cairns added that she felt “to each their own” with true crime since other shows and films often opt to include real-life victims rather than anonymize them because “they have their own processes.” But she said: “For me, it just wouldn’t have sat right.”
On How They Approached the True Story
The drama is based on Charles Graeber’s book about Cullen, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder. However, it doesn’t focus on the parts of the book that detail Cullen’s early life and his time before meeting Loughren. This, Wilson-Cairns explained, was because it wasn’t something that “resonated” with her, as she wanted to approach the story from Loughren’s perspective.
“I remember a lot of TV dramas when I was growing up were like murdered sexy women. There was always an element of it where they were murdered but did they deserve it?” Wilson-Cairns said.
“And there was always that. To me, it’s so off-putting and it invalidates the victims. And, in this, to go through Amy’s experience, to understand her, you don’t need to know why Charles Cullen did what he did.
“In fact, none of us ever can assume because he’s never said it. Also, I don’t think he even knows. So either you invent that—you put words in people’s mouths, ideals. [But] you’ve got to remember there might be 400 victims out there, so it doesn’t feel quite right to do anything like that.
“Or you go through Amy, and you experience her true reaction of this man who she thought was a good man who turns out to be a monster—and who, in the end, she defeats or I suppose brings around with humanity.”
In the film, there are a number of tense scenes between Loughren and Cullen once the latter’s crimes are revealed. One episode sees Loughren returning home one night to find Cullen alone with her daughters, and she tries to remain calm so as not to tip off the killer that she knows what he’s done.
Reflecting on approaching the story with scenes like this, Lindholm said he was keen “not to overdramatize” the events and added: “There’s always a fine balance between fascination and identification. What do you go with? And I felt that the only way to be truthful about those scenes was to go with the identification and understand her fear without necessarily exploring it.
“I think that us looking at Amy being afraid when she comes home and realizes Charlie’s in her house is much more scary because the audience can imagine how scary it is for her—instead of us making it into a slasher where there’s actually something to fear.
“I think that when Charlie became a stranger to her, because she realized what he was doing, and she forgot his humanity and his goodness—that’s when things got really scary. But when she could lean into his humanity later on, it kind of makes sense.
“We did this thing where we would rehearse all the scenes again and again in the four weeks before we started to shoot, so we knew them so well and we had found the truth in them.
“So when we finally were there, I could kind of allow [Chastain and Redmayne] to just go for it, which made it very playful, but also gave them an opportunity to be totally honest, because they knew the material so well.”
Wilson-Cairns also said that she hoped The Good Nurse would make the public see Loughren as a hero, rather than make them become obsessed with Cullen.
“My dream is that Amy Loughren becomes a household name and not necessarily Charles Cullen,” she said. “Although I think people do need to know about Charles Cullen because it seems that I didn’t know about it, and I’m the kind of person that knows about serial killers. I’m a weird writer who spends a lot of time in their bedroom googling sad and creepy things. I should have known it and I’d never heard of it.”
Getting the story from script to screen took Wilson-Cairns about 10 years to do. She explained that the hard work felt worth it following the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
“When we watched it in Toronto, Amy was at the screening and she came out on stage and had a standing ovation afterwards. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s 10 years well spent’—to see her finally be recognized by a crowd,” Wilson-Cairns said. “So [she’s] finally lauded for what she did. I felt we were all a bit choked up a bit actually. I felt really, really happy with my choice to do this for 10 years.”
The Good Nurse is out on Netflix now.
