Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Krysty Wilson-Cairns is a Scottish screenwriter. Born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, she studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the National Film and Television School. During her teenage years, she was a runner on television series including the detective show Taggart. Her script for the unproduced science fiction thriller Aether made the 2014 Black List and led to a staff writer role on the television show Penny Dreadful. Her feature film debut was the screenplay for the Sam Mendes-directed 2019 war film 1917. She co-wrote it with Mendes and received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Early life
Wilson-Cairns was born on 26 May 1987 in Glasgow, Scotland. 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. At the age of 15, she had a work experience placement on the Scottish detective show Taggart. 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. She became a runner on the show as well as on other television series including Rebus and Lip Service.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. She studied Digital Film and Television at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and graduated in 2009. Her first creative work at the RCS was a short story about killer guinea pigs. She credits her ambition to become a screenwriter on being inspired by one of her lecturers at the RCS, screenwriter Richard Smith. 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 in 2013. 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.
Career
Wilson-Cairns sold her first film script to FilmNation Entertainment in 2014. It was for the science fiction thriller project Aether, which provided her breakthrough after it made the top ten of the Black List. 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. She also contributed to its comic book series. 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. Filmmaker Sam Mendes was impressed by her treatment, and suggested collaborating on a future film project. They had previously met while working on Penny Dreadful, for which he was an executive producer. They worked on two potential projects together. This included a film adaptation of Gay Talese's book The Voyeur′s Motel. However, both projects fell through due to licensing issues. In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes 30 under 30 in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.Wilson-Cairns co-wrote the screenplay for Mendes' World War I film 1917 as her feature film debut. 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. 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. 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. She shared the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film. She was named as one of the 10 Screenwriters to Watch by the trade magazine Variety in their 2019 list.
Her upcoming project is Edgar Wright's psychological horror Last Night in Soho. She co-wrote the screenplay with Wright, and will have a cameo as a bartender. 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. In May 2020, it was announced Wilson-Cairns would be co-writing a new Star Wars film with Taika Waititi.
Filmography
Feature films
| Year | Title | Notes | |
| 2019 | 1917 | BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film Nominated – Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay Nominated – Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay | |
| 2021 | Last Night in Soho | Post-production |