Drip on? Confirm that you’ve already watched Spiderhead on Netflix and are ready for spoilers ahead. 

When screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese first came across George Saunders’ chilling short story “Escape from Spiderhead,” about a dystopian prison laboratory experiment, they immediately thought it should be a movie. The process, though, required much more than just a dose of Verbaluce™. Spiderhead expands Saunders’ eerie universe beyond the page, adding new narrative arcs, characters and motivations — all while maintaining the essence of the brief original story. Still, Wernick and Reese, whose longtime professional collaboration has led to films like Deadpool and Zombieland, were determined to rise to the challenge. 

Directed by Joseph Kosinski, Spiderhead focuses on Jeff (Miles Teller), an inmate at a special prison facility run by Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth). In exchange for special privileges and reduced sentence time, the “subjects” — as Jeff and his love interest, fellow inmate Lizzie (Jurnee Smollett) are known — voluntarily participate in experiments to test the effects of emotion-altering drugs. But when Abnesti’s demands become increasingly onerous, the audience is left to wonder if these drugs can overpower basic human instincts. And more importantly, should they?

Ahead, Wernick and Reese break down the ways in which their script differs from Saunders’ short story. 

When you first read “Escape from Spiderhead,” what struck you most about it? Rhett Reese: We fell in love with its tone, its humor, its message, its darkness, its originality... just everything about it. We knew that [it] was going to require some heavy lifting because the short story is, by definition, a short story. We used almost every scene, [but] then we had to invent a little. We had to expand our character’s lead story and give him a bit more of an arc, a love interest, and find a theme that was able to expand out to feature-length. We wanted to do right by George and honor his tone and his message. We just wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a moment in the movie where you felt like you’re being passed off from one writer to another.

Lizzy, played by Jurnee Smollett, doesn’t appear in the short story. Can you describe how you kind of came up with her character and the process of integrating her into the script? Paul Wernick: Ultimately, the thing that we landed on after kicking it around for several months was this idea that “love conquers all” — that there could be this drug in your system that makes you obedient, but you [still] can’t hurt the ones you love. With that theme in mind, we needed to give Jeff a love interest. Abnesti was trying to create [this] with the love drug, but what he least expected was that anyone would find love within those four very tight walls [without it]. That sprung the idea of Lizzie. [Lizzie and Jeff] bond over mistakes that they’ve made in their lives and where they are and how they’re trying to redeem themselves. That was the start of our love story.

Meet the Cast of ‘Spiderhead’

Jeff’s crime is also different in the film. He kills his friend and wife while driving drunk instead of attacking someone with a brick. What prompted you to make that change? Reese: At one point, we did have a version where he got into a fight with a friend and hit him over the head. [He also] knocked over a lantern and started a fire. But what was most important to us was that we could see ourselves in Jeff. We wanted to make it a bad decision, as opposed to saying that Jeff had something broken in him or that [he] was a violent person or a ticking time bomb waiting to commit a crime. “What would it be like to kill someone behind the wheel of a car and kill your girlfriend or your wife and your best friend?" We wanted to make it feel like anyone could be Jeff.

Wernick: And that there was a possibility to redeem him. It felt like an accident versus [an] intentional [crime]. It just gave us an opportunity to have Jeff have that redemptive drive through the movie.

Reading the short story, was there a specific scene that you were especially excited to bring to the screen? Reese: The sex [in the book] made us laugh. At its heart, it’s really a cruel experiment. Very immoral. But there was something about this idea that, “Eh, we’re making hurt people sleep with other people” — it was just shocking and bracing... 

Wernick: When Heather [Tess Haubrich] kills herself, that was the scene that just ratchets [the story] up another level. This idea that technology is a two-edged sword and, on one hand, it makes our lives better and can improve the world. But on the other hand, sometimes it comes at great cost, and it can be very destructive, damaging and even fatal. That was the scene that made me go, “Wow. This might be a movie.”

Throughout the film, you strike this balance between different tones. One minute it’ll be light and funny, the next things get very serious — the scene with Heather is a perfect example. You’ve done this in your past work as well. How do you manage to walk the tightrope between quips and darkness? Wernick: It’s a delicate dance. Our goal in anything that we sit down to write is we want to make you laugh. We want to make you cry. We want to make you feel. A lot of that has to do with the attempt to ground our material [in real life]. Life carries over in every tone that exists. You’re laughing one moment, you’re crying the next.

Reese: Humor is a true bedfellow of tension, thrills and even darkness. Oftentimes, characters and audiences will find themselves cracking jokes in scary situations. It’s a defense against the darkness. 

Wernick: When you’re in the hands of such wonderful actors like Chris and Miles and Jurnee, it is not only a difficult balancing act for us as writers. They just did a wonderful job with it. 

How much input did Chris and Miles and Jurnee have on their characters? Wernick: They all cared a lot about backstory and motivation. We did some pretty deep digging with all three. [Chris,] for instance, got into his relationship with [Abnesti’s] father and how this might be redemptive for him in certain ways to maybe create a world where [someone like] his father couldn’t hurt people anymore. With Jurnee, we explored [Lizzy’s] backstory with her lost child. Then also, they had some fun ad-libs too. Chris has a really fun ad-lib in the movie about “benefiting from being handsome,” which draws a big laugh when anyone ever sees the movie. He just did that off the cuff. We probably would’ve been too afraid to write that into the script.

What about the yacht rock that Abnesti is constantly listening to? In the story, classical music is used to test one of the drugs, but it seems to have a different purpose in the movie.  Wernick: We always had music in the script, [but] we hadn’t picked the type of music. I think it came about after a conversation about how it might be fun to have Abnesti pumping this yacht rock music through the halls of this penitentiary unironically. He has this odd cheeriness to him. [Abnesti] wanted to create this environment in what is essentially this hall of horrors.

Reese: But it’s all diegetic in the sense that the characters are hearing it too. That was important to us that it wasn’t just a soundtrack. It was Abnesti playing this over the speakers of his own place, so you got the sense that it was coming from [his] character, from his own wacky sensibilities. It also ultimately proved beneficial for us in that it gave Chris Hemsworth the chance to dance on-screen, which is my favorite scene in the movie. He’s just so fun. That’s going to be a meme. Mark it down: In a month or so, Abnesti dancing around the room is going to be a meme.

How did you land on the movie’s explosive ending? Reese: It was the toughest thing in the movie. We tried a bunch of different endings. We had retributive justice endings where the inmates tore apart Abnesti with their bare hands. We had endings where Abnesti overdosed on his own drugs, and killed himself as the cops were coming in, as a means of escape. We ultimately decided that the most ironic justice for Abnesti would be to be flooded with the same drugs that he has been giving his inmates and that he’s secretly been giving to himself. That his own impairment would bring his own doom. That felt like the best match. In the short story, Jeff kills himself. I think collectively, we felt like that might be a downer, especially once we introduced a love interest, so we weren’t sure we could do that. 

There are always things that end up on the cutting room floor. Is there anything you wish had made it into the final movie that you weren’t able to place? Reese: I did have a horrifying affection for the scene where the inmates tore Abnesti apart. They all started descending on the Spiderhead, and Jeff backed away while the rest of them – all 75 – just converged on him and literally tore him to pieces. There was something brutal about that that I miss.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.