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This article was originally published on May 1, 2024.
Weve republished it to coincide with theUnder the Bridgefinale.
Despite the raw subject matter, there was a levity to their work, Shephard says.
It was really a crazy time.
We would do these long picnics with farmers-market food and sit outside talking for hours.
She read a lot of drafts of the pilot.
She showed me all this research and her old family photos.
She gave me all her diaries.
Obviously she had a very traumatic loss.
Thats a big part of the show.
I didnt ask her about that in our first interview.
I wanted to give her at least one conversation before I went right for the hardest stuff.
I think who she was as a kid was so influential in how she wrote the story.
The ending sceneof the pilotis based on the first moment she met the kids in real life.
She had gone to the juvie center for research for her first novel.
One of the girls was crying as she looked through the window.
The guard was like, Yeah, we just arrested all these girls for murder.
Rebecca was so struck by how young they were.
She felt they were almost calling her, like they wanted her to tell their story.
In an interview I read before I met her, she talked about her trauma from childhood.
She was really open to it.
I think there was an element of knowing she was at the end of her life.
She never seemed to feel a real pressure to want the character to be hyper-lovable or sanitized.
She felt that so much of his way of moving through the world would be shaped forever by guilt.
Cam was written as a completely new character.
Cams backstory, her adoption, being an Indigenous woman those were elements added for the show.
But it never was.
There arent any references to a bindi.
It was something that almost went overlooked.
In the late 90s, there was a lack of understanding of the nuance.
That was all stuff we wanted to see play out in the show.
To ignore racial motivation in the attack would be to ignore a massive part of the story.
With every single other character, you could trace a level of humanity to them.
With her, you cant find it.
Shes very famous in Canada for a reason.
In episode three, we learn there are romantic feelings between Cam and Rebecca.
Theyre often really at odds.
A lot of those conversations had both.
Her husband texted me.
That would make me spin out.
But it was also really sweet sometimes.
When were fictionalizing, is it responsible?
Is it something that could be upsetting?
Is this honoring who this person really was?
I dont know when it goes away.
At some point I made peace with the fact that it might never go away.
There was so much beauty and there was a lot of grief, and I venture to hold both.
Probably itll have some echo in a script I write one day.
