‘King Richard’ screenwriter Zach Baylin on crafting a story about parenthood [Complete Interview Transcript]
Zach Baylin is now an Oscar nominee for his very first screenplay, for the sports family drama “King Richard.” The film tells the story of Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and his journey of making them into tennis superstars.
Baylin recently spoke with Gold Derby editor Christopher Rosen about developing the story from Richard’s point of view, the involvement of the real-life Williams family and how the film is about parenthood. Watch the exclusive interview above and read the complete transcript below.
Gold Derby: Zach, the movie is so great. I’ve seen it twice now. I loved it, and I’m sure there are probably a lot of different ways you could have come into a story about the Williams family and their sisters. How come you decided to go in through Richard and their early years? What was the impetus for you to start there?
Zach Baylin: Yeah, I think you’re right. There are a lot of different ways you can probably go into any story. When the producers, Tim and Trevor White, approached me about it, I think that Tim had really circled Richard as this pretty incredible character for a number of years and had been looking into making a movie about him and their experiences. So when it was brought to me, it was always through the lens of Richard. But I felt like that was really an interesting way to tell this story because I think we all know what Venus and Serena have gone on to achieve in their lives, but it felt to me more dramatic to focus the story on the time in their family’s life when all the chips were on the table, and that there was a real, precarious situation of whether or not this huge gamble that they had made as a family was going to work, and that window seemed to me the most dramatic and it really distilled their journey down into something that was a movie.
And then in terms of Richard being the one to guide us through the story, when I started watching video of Richard and read about this really preposterous idea that he had that he was going to raise two tennis champions that had not been conceived yet, and he had no experience with the sport, that just felt like such a central journey for a character. So I really wanted to allow that to be the guiding principle of the story and then also just that Venus and Serena and really, all of the women in that family, achieved so much and that we, as filmmakers, I think, really looked at it ultimately as a story of a father who can be overshadowing at times, who is looking for something personal in this experience, but ultimately, throughout the course of the story, is relinquishing that responsibility and giving that agency to Venus in particular. So that felt like a rewarding arc.
GD: Yeah, it really is. I love what you said there and I think that the way you show fatherhood, that’s what makes the movie so good because it’s not just a sports movie, though, I think obviously it is a great sports movie, but the parenting aspect is so different. Not to jump way ahead, but for me, the key emotional scene is obviously towards the end when Richard and Venus have their conversation about going into juniors and you mentioned the parenting. One of the things that struck me was when Venus is trying to make her case, it’s not that she’s mad at Richard for not allowing her to compete. It’s that she’s upset and almost heartbroken that she doesn’t understand. Does he not believe in her? And I thought that scene was really great and powerful. Can you talk a little about crafting that relationship? The nuances of parenthood, I think, are really strong in this film. I know you’re obviously a parent also, so can you talk about that and how you kind of came at it from that approach? I think it’s really wonderful.
ZB: Yeah, I’m glad you said that because I’m a big tennis fan, but one of the things that really attracted me to writing the story was that I have a daughter, I have a son, and it’s such a transformative experience in your life and I hadn’t written anything about parenthood or being a parent, so I really wanted to sort of try and investigate that. And then, I think that scene in particular, we looked at it in a lot of different ways. If you were to totally subtract the sports film element from it, it’s still a story about a parent who has to let go of their child and allow them to go out into the world and you’re questioning, have I done enough? Are they going to be safe out there? Are they going to achieve the things that they want to? I think that we looked at that as just a kind of universal experience. It could be the same as you’re sending your kid off to college. It could be the same as any time you let them out in the world. But obviously, the stakes within this family were so high.
Will [Smith] and Rei [Reinaldo Marcus Green] deserve huge credit for that scene because there was a time where that scene took place in a different location and Rei said, “No, their relationship is seen through this almost adversarial at that point, on a tennis court, the net is between them, and we want to see them come together in that moment.” So Rei really crafted that beautifully. Richard had gone through such tremendous trauma in his life and there were so many incidents that we could have chose for him to tell his experiences to Venus at that moment and Will found that story. That’s a true story and Will brought it to me and Rei and said, “I think this is the one I want Richard to say here, because it really links that idea of him not being afraid of not being present.” And so, at the end of the match, when he comes back and sits in the stands, Venus knows that he’s there for her. Will found that story of Richard, and I wrote it up with him and I think it’s a beautiful scene.
GD: It’s so beautiful. Like I was saying earlier, there’s a lot of different ways you could have gone with this story and how this movie could have played out and I think there is a version of it that’s not as genuinely emotional. The movie is so good at… the emotions are real. It doesn’t feel very manipulative, I think, and I think that’s a credit to you and Rei also and the whole thing. And that scene in particular, I feel like it does pay off so well, like you said, when he comes back to the match. I really appreciate that about the movie.
ZB: Oh, thanks. My hope for it, I think that there are a lot of ways that the story could have been depicted, and I think there is a much more straight down the line sports movie version that feels like a Nike commercial, and I think that could have been really interesting and dynamic but Rei, I think, really tapped into the idea that this was going to be a family drama and that everything that happened needed to feel intimate and fully realized in that way and not manipulative. The story is so improbable, Richard, this idea that he came up with and the fact that his whole family, when the girls were five and six, decided that they were going to reorient their entire life, their entire work schedules, so that 15 years from there, they could all be world champions. And the fact that that came true, if there were false notes in the filmmaking, I think it would dilute the idea of how remarkable that was.
GD: Yeah, you have that scene earlier in the film where he’s talking to, Kevin Dunn is the actor, and he’s like, “How improbable it is,” and that guy, honestly, it is so improbable. It’s not what we want to hear, but it is truly improbable that this is how it happened. It kind of is remarkable. It’s a wild story. Obviously, you mentioned the family aspect there. I know the family was involved in the production and stuff, but I don’t believe they were involved, obviously, when you started writing. How does that work when you’re writing something that obviously, another thing, I think that I’m not the first person to say, the movie does not shy away from some of Richard’s complexities and certainly the relationships and stuff that he had with his family. So it’s not like you’re doing like a hagiography, but obviously, they’re involved. So when do they come in and how do you approach that?
ZB: Yeah, this is my first movie, so I don’t know how other things have been developed exactly, but I think the process with this was fairly unique. So I met Tim White, who’s one of the producers, in 2017 and we were meeting about another movie and when I was leaving that meeting, I happened to be going to the U.S. Open in New York, and I told him that, and he was like, “Oh, well, if you like tennis, sit down for like five more minutes. I want to tell you about one other idea.” And he told me about this, and I immediately just threw everything else out that I had and just said, “I have to do this movie. You have to let me do it.” And I came back to him and Trevor with this take essentially like, “This is what I think the movie is, and here’s Richard’s arc,” and what we thought it could be. And then collectively, we all sort of decided that, we knew didn’t have the rights, we knew we didn’t have contact with the family yet, but we knew we would need it, not just for commercial purposes, but also because I was going to need to sit down and talk to Ocacene and Venus and Serena.
Richard is so front-facing that there was tons of documentation for me to read about that. But then we also sort of assumed that, me and Tim and Trevor, me not having any credits, going to Venus and Serena saying, “Oh, we want to write a movie about your life,” that, one, they’ve been approached so many times and that was just not going to be successful. So we decided that I would write the script and then we would use that and probably hopefully attach a piece of talent that we could then advocate for it being real. So I researched the script independently. That script ended up on the 2018 Black List, and that’s the one that Will read, but Will also said this is great, we’d love to do it, but not unless the family has given their thumbs up. So at that point, Tim and I and Trevor went on a long campaign of trying to get the script in front of Venus and Serena and Isha [Price], who is their sister, ultimately read the script and agreed to sit down with us and said, “If you’re willing to dig in and interview us in and really hear some of the intimate details, then we’d love to be a part of it.”
So that began a really interesting process for me, where I got to sit down with Oracene [Price] and Isha and Venus, and to their credit, it was never them saying, “We don’t want this in the script.” Oracene read the scene where what became the scene in the kitchen, where Oracene and Aunjanue [Ellis], who is just incredible, really lays into Richard about a lot of the mistakes that he’s made in his life and his other children showing up. Oracene read that scene and said, “Oh, this is going to be in the script.” And we said, “We feel like it has to be to really be true to what your experiences were.” And she said, “Well, if it’s going to be in there, let me tell you exactly how it happened. And a lot of the dialogue that is in there is verbatim from what she said. So, for me, that was huge. We never wanted to make a film about a family that went through this experience. We wanted to make sure it was a film about this family and these specific interactions. So for me, it was huge to have their involvement at that point.
GD: Yeah, that scene you’re talking about is incredible. The specificity of their relationships, I think, is what makes the movie work so well as a family drama, for sure. I personally didn’t know much about Oracene at all. I think her whole character is really interesting and how involved she was with the sisters as well as their coach and stuff and all of those different things. I think, again, a different version of this movie, maybe sidelines her, and the fact that you bring her in and have her on equal footing with Richard is part of the reason it’s so special.
ZB: Oh, thank you. That was huge for us to get that right and I think that because Richard was going to be such a dominating force in the movie that we tried to utilize that to the advantage of the storytelling, I think. For Serena, Serena really was in the shadow for many of those years because Venus was so talented and she was such a prodigy and that audiences might be coming in and saying, “Well, I know Serena more. When is she going to take center stage in this movie?” And we felt like that actually could work for our advantage dramatically because people were going to question why she might have a smaller role. And then, she has a great moment to come out and actually say, “This is why that happened.” And then I think for Oracene as well, I just became so impressed with the real woman that she did so much for the family, not just being the breadwinner and raising all five of those girls but she taught herself to play tennis and she was a coach. She is a very private, interior person, so we tried to craft the character in a way where she begins in that way, but throughout the course of the film is really exerting her agency and her voice when she feels that the goal is being compromised, and Aunjanue was a huge part of building that. Aunjanue is a great writer as well and we had really good creative chemistry and arguments and really fruitful conversations that made those scenes a lot better.
GD: You mentioned earlier how this is obviously a Black List script and Will read it and in fact, it’s hard watching the film, there’s not a lot of people who could be Richard Williams, right? I would imagine it’s a very short list of actors who are that charismatic and have that big of a presence. So when you were writing it, was Will Smith even on your mind because you’re writing basically a movie star part? You know what I mean? And it’s like, you need a movie star to play that part. You can’t get a better one than Will.
ZB: Yeah, I mean, we’re so lucky that he read it and then said yes. I knew or at least I was hoping it was a really big role. But I think for me, because Richard was a real character, I didn’t have to try to imagine who might play the role. I just tried to stay in thinking it was Richard, but Will was so perfect for it because, I mean, obviously, he brought so much of his own personal story into it. But I think Richard can be really funny too, and Will is so charming and I think he brings a real humor to it. But then my scenes that are the favorite with him are when he’s in the backyard with Tony Goldwyn and that just feels like a side of him that we don’t get to see very much where he can be really determined and he can be really complicated in that way, and I always like the way Robert Elswit shot that and Rei staged it. That, to me, feels like Tony Soprano like sitting by the pool and he’s just owning that space in a way that I was really excited to see Will do.
GD: Yeah, it’s a great scene, and you’re right. It is very much a Tony Soprano vibe to him there and he’s so stubborn and obstinate, almost, and his willpower is really cool. I know we have to wrap up here. I mean, no spoilers because it’s real life, but I love that you end the movie on a loss, with her losing. There’s probably a lot of different exit points that you could have come to for this story. Why did you pick that match with Arantxa Sánchez Vicario? How did you come up with that?
ZB: Well, I read about that. There was a lot of contemporaneous “New York Times” articles that were following them at that time and I think really in that initial weekend after I had talked to Tim about the movie, I read about that match, and really just kind of latched onto that immediately and said, “This is where it has to end.” Because, again, we all know what their careers went on to become, but I felt like if we could frame this story in a way where the stakes of what we want them to achieve as people was going to arrive at this moment, and it was not just about the financial success, but about whether all the choices that had made in their life to not play juniors, to sacrifice so many different things in their upbringing, were going to culminate it into not necessarily this victory, but whether or not Venus, I think, felt like an adult, felt like she could go out in the world and hold her head high. So I really hoped that we could develop a sense of dramatic tension that could culminate in that moment and that otherwise, knowing where their careers go, we might not have in the movie.
GD: Yeah, another thing I love in that scene and it kind of goes back to what you were saying before about the parents letting their children go, when she’s coming out of the locker room, she takes her bag, but then she hands it back to her dad. I just thought that was really sweet. I don’t know if that was something you guys intentionally thought of, but at least to me, it was like, “Oh, she is going forth on her own but she still does want the support of her family, too.” And I just thought that was a great, nuanced part.
ZB: That’s a touching moment, I think, really great. I was very lucky, I got to be on set every day and I came on set and I think Isha actually said she should take the bag and then Saniyya [Sidney] gave it back to him. It’s really sweet. Honestly, that’s how the whole film was. I mean, it was really collaborative because Isha Price was there every day and all the actors and Ray, it was just a really collaborative process that was super fun.
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