Pain Bleeds a Heroine follows a suffrage strategist as she transforms imprisonment, political resistance, and personal sacrifice into a nationwide campaign to force the US government toward women’s voting rights. What inspired you to tell Alice Paul’s story in screenplay form?

There’s a statistic out there that says only 20% of Americans read books nowadays, and the statistic for people who read historical biographies is hard to even measure. It’s that small. Alice Paul deserves recognition that’s above 20%. That’s why I wrote this piece for movie theaters, where audience appeal for historical works is significantly higher.

How did you balance historical accuracy with the heightened, action-driven portrayal of Alice Paul?​

I understand most people haven’t studied screenwriting, so I’ll break it down for everybody. You could have one scene in a movie taken from multiple real-life occurrences—perhaps several—because the main thing every producer wants is brevity, brevity, brevity. A screenplay is only supposed to be 90 to 120 pages long. As you can imagine, it’s extremely complicated to squeeze a life story into 120 pages. Which is why a screenwriter has to be very creative when they shove several true stories into one scene over and over until they get to 120 pages. Obviously a great deal of the dialogue was my imagination at play (as is every other screenwriter’s of historical masterpieces) since we don’t know ANY of the behind-the-scenes whisperings from over 100 years ago, but I spent an absurd amount of time in my attempt to make everything as accurate as possible.

Which scene involving the imprisoned suffragists was the most difficult or meaningful for you to write?​

If I’m going to be brutally honest, I’ve been starved and beaten by prison guards, so I have an idea of what those suffragists went through when they were protesting conditions while incarcerated. Being hidden away from polite society allows correctional officers to behave in ways that can be shocking and unbelievable to the average individual. But it meant a lot to expose a fraction of the realities of confinement.

How did you approach developing figures such as Lucy Burns, Dora Lewis, and Inez Milholland alongside Alice?​

I thoroughly enjoyed writing Lucy Burns’s character. To me, she had the most personality. There’s a line I gave her that she said in real life while incarcerated: “I am fat and flourishing.” That one sentence is a beautiful portrait of a warrior that can have fun when they’re at their worst. It revealed more of her than anything else I wrote on this one suffragist in Pain Bleeds a Heroine. Each one of these “secondary” women demonstrated characteristics Alice Paul was lacking. Lucy Burns = fun, Dora Lewis = caring, Inez Milholland = charismatically likeable. Alice Paul had practically NO personality. *lol* She wasn’t known to laugh or joke. She was just a straight-up soldier, so focused, so goal-oriented. Obtaing the right to vote was her obsession. Writing that just now choked me up. I’ve never read about another historical figure I’ve admired more, other than Booker T. Washington. He’s right there with her in my eyes. It brought me an abundance of pleasure highlighting the attributes of these surrounding characters to FURTHER showcase the strength of Alice Paul.

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