Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves walked where the subjects of the new film, Unabomber, did. The pair attended Harvard University, which is the film’s primary setting. The film depicts Ted Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) during his time at the university, where he underwent intense psychological experiments administered by Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe).
When people talk about the infamous domestic terrorist, they don’t mention Murray’s name often. He’s integral to Kaczynski’s journey, perhaps even his worldview. It’s a psychologically frightening relationship that Chalsen and Greaves put at the forefront ofUnabomber.
Recently, the two screenwriters spoke with What’s on Netflix about exploring Professor Henry Murray’s psychological experiments and bringing him to the screen.
What immediately fascinated both of you, where you both felt like this is a really cinematic story, especially his relationship with Professor Murray?
Nelson Greaves:A lot of it really came from digging into Henry Murray and his background. Obviously, for us, it was very exciting to explore what it might’ve been like for Ted Kaczynski to have been at Harvard when he was 16.
Digging into this Murray guy, he is one of the most respected American psychologists who ever lived. But when you start reading his biography and the biography of Christiana Morgan, you start to see this guy was kind of a crazy guy. There were all of these other parts of his personality and his personal life that were not at all the sort of noble, respected guy that he was presented to the world.
And then understanding that, paired with him doing these experiments on these young kids at Harvard, suddenly we were able to see this story of, wow, this is a big, big story that happened between them. There was that level of drama that was happening between Henry and every student that he was conducting these experiments on. It showed us there was a movie here and let us dig in.
Even if you’re familiar with the Unabomber, I don’t think most people know Dr. Henry Murray. Were there any anecdotes or stories about him that, maybe they’re not featured in the movie, but shaped how you wrote him?
Sam Chalsen:Murray and [his wife] Christina [Morgan] had a very unusual sexual dynamic. It’s only fleetingly teased in the movie that they’re clearly having some kind of affair, but in real life it was much more of a true BDSM, long-term sadomasochistic relationship where they had alternate identities. There was maybe some level of cross-dressing and all kinds of role-play. It lasted for years.
And in the movie, these experiments are all about the dyad between someone submitting to one other person and the nature of this two-hander relationship. Their real-life partnership was one of these dyads where Murray considered himself to be the dominant force and she was a submissive. I think that true dynamic between them informed our larger theme, too, of these relationships, the dyad between Ted and Murray.
We have these two timelines that are speaking to each other. It’s the nature of it being about the individual submitting to power, also speaking to Ted’s own manifesto. I think that whole line of thinking definitely lives everywhere in the movie, even if we don’t have maybe some of the sex scenes that might’ve been in it if we were strictly adapting Murray’s memoir.
Did he write about it in his memoirs, that relationship?
Sam Chalsen:Morgan wrote about it, and then in Murray’s biography it’s covered.
Nelson Greaves:Her biography really goes into the intensity of it, though, and a lot of the details that are not as rosy. Another thing that’s crazy about Henry Murray is he spent some time with Carl Jung, which is alluded to in the movie. He actually built a replica of this tower that Carl Jung had built on the lake in Geneva. He built a replica of this at a house of his in Massachusetts, and this was also where he had his sort of sex dungeon. And so, yeah… very, very interesting guy.
Was there, in anything you read, any sense of regret or remorse in terms of how he handled experiments and the lengths he went to?
Nelson Greaves:Not really. One of the things that also really excited us about him as a character was the notion of ego. This man was so egotistical; it was all about the fame and the prestige. When you look at Ted and his story, it was very much the same. The thing that mattered the most to him was getting his manifesto published so people could basically fawn over it and adore how smart he was.
The parallel between a professor who is desperate to get the perfect study and publish it, to be fawned over, and this terrorist, desperate to have people praise him for his own philosophical treatise – there was an incredible symmetry there that does exist in real life.
Did Ted ever acknowledge, whether in interviews or in his own writings, how much of an influence Murray had on him?
Sam Chalsen:There isn’t anything specific about Murray, but we do know from David’s own memoir, I think, or at least some interviews with David Kaczynski, that the notion at the end of the movie… Ted says the equivalent of, “Oh, I kept coming back to these experiments,” because in real life, he did do this for four years of college.
Why did he not stop?
He kept coming back to show them he could do it. I’m pretty sure that is something that he told his brother about. I think it alludes to maybe whatever his relationship was like with Henry Murray.
Nelson Greaves:David at some point talks about how Ted went to Harvard and he did come back different from Harvard. I think Harvard… It’s a place that’s that competitive and you have that many people with big egos. You don’t have to be a troubled 16-year-old to come back changed from that place.
Unabomber. Russell Crowe as Henry Murray in Unabomber. Cr. Philippe Bosse/Netflix
Harvard has never released the documents of these tests. Did you ever reach out to the university to see if they’d be open to unsealing them for you?
Nelson Greaves:We did investigate finding them, and we very quickly found that none of this stuff had been released, and it feels very typical of a place like this, of Henry Murray, to cover up the bad stuff he did and not talk about it.
When you’re writing those tests, how much information did you have about how they went, how they were structured, and what dramatic license did you both feel comfortable taking in those scenes as well?
Sam Chalsen:A lot of the reporting on the tests is out there, and you can also read it. The actual report he wrote on the tests, whenever he did publish it, is publicly available. Most things are taken from real-lifeical of these tests that he was doing, and descriptions from other reporting of other students who were a part of them, and then from the actual study itself
I mean, it goes to show how crazy I think these tests were that we really didn’t take much dramatic license in terms of they would heat up the room. They would shine a big spotlight at them, and they would play back tapes and make them dissect their own performances. And the fact that, of course, these kids went in thinking that they were going to either be debating or sharing some ideas with a fellow college student, and instead it was a graduate student or a law student across from them basically there to interrogate them, that’s 100% true.
It’s actually even a little worse than what we see in the movie. In real life, in these diaries they would fill out, they were also encouraged to write down their secrets or sexual fantasies they were having or other kinds of shameful things. They thought that these journals were being read by some doctor, but they were actually being given to their opponent on the other side of these interrogations. So, we sort of dramatize that in our own way deeper into the movie, but pretty much everything from those scenes is based on some kind of fact.
As dramatists, you handle their relationship very well. You present it without outright saying, “Murray might’ve had a hand, small or not, in shaping Ted.”
Nelson Greaves:Well, a thing that is true is that Ted was a troubled kid. It’s well documented that even before he got there, he had behavioral issues. But he was a kid working under the study of one of the greatest psychological minds to ever exist. Instead of perhaps feeling that out and helping this kid, he was exploited, and that is very much true. To what extent that turned Ted into a terrorist, it’s almost incidental to the movie. The movie is about a very specific thing that really happened, and I think the story speaks for itself.
