The plot is high concept: A female assassin has 24 hours to find the person who poisoned her and seek vengeance. But while the lone warrior fighting against an onslaught of thugs and powerful people isn’t necessarily a new concept, Kate — a Netflix original action-thriller — showed how to make a story like this unique.
Behind the story is Umair Aleem, a screenwriter who grew up on John Carpenter movies and didn’t take a traditional route into the film industry (albeit there really is no one way to make it).
Like most filmmakers though, Aleem was super into movies for as long as he can remember. As a child, his dad let him stay up on school nights to watch movies. Yet when it came to college, he only took one class on the subject.
“People were pretentious,” he recalls. “When everyone was asked about their favorite film, everyone said Godard and Fellini. I said I liked John Carpenter and everyone scoffed.”
That was just the beginning of Aleem’s unconventional route to Hollywood. He started in Washington, D.C., and moved to Los Angeles years ago, writing organically along the way; letting it flow, believing that the tone should inform the story — so that’s where he started and let the voice carry the script.
Once Kate was written, Aleem procured an agent and asked them to do something that is a little uncommon by today’s standards.
“I grew up reading about the glory days of Hollywood,” Aleem shares. “I wanted the script to hit the market and cause a fervor. Scripts get stifled a lot of the time and don’t go out cold. I wanted to get eyes on the page.”
His agent’s response: Friday you sign, Monday we go out.
Aleem believes when a story idea forms, it’s an electric moment — like a lightning strike. He remembers hearing an interview with Oscar®-nominated writer Tony Gilroy, who said that when you get an idea, you have a secret no one else knows.
“And that’s how I feel,” Aleem says. “When you get an idea, you’re in this delirious stupor. When you’re out of it, it’s time to get sober and write it. That’s the best way I describe my thing.”
Aleem thought up the concept that stemmed from how he perceived life during the Trump era. To him, it felt like everything was on fire.
“I hung out with a friend and was like, ‘I feel like I’m dying’. That was the lightning bolt moment,” he says, turning that feeling of dying into a story in which someone knew how much time they had left and was determined to seek vengeance.
Another lightning bolt moment for Aleem was having one of the characters early on comparing Kate to Godzilla. The protagonist goes through the city and destroys everything in her path.
“She’s essentially Godzilla, a monster, itself a metaphor for nuclear calamity – wrecking everything in its path,” Aleem explains.
When it comes to writing, Aleem, who lives in L.A., always sees writers seemingly hunched over the keyboard in coffee shops. Instead, he takes long walks and hikes and that’s where most of the writing happens.
Before he even puts words to the page, he must know where it ends and then reverse engineer it.
“When we're starting out, we want to start writing, but I hold it off as long as I can until I have most of the answers and I’m dying to hit the keys,” he states. “I see the benefits of outlining but I do it in a way that’s not too boring or clinical. When I have all the answers, I start writing. I don’t want to problem-solve when writing.”
Regarding the process from script to television screen, Aleem understands every project has a natural way of developing. He says, “Once it sold, the project evolved every step of the way as new elements were coming on board, and so things had to shift and change.”
The producers kept Aleem in the loop most of the time, as well. “Even when I wasn’t needed, whether it was post or other things, I would hear about it,” Aleem says of his relationship with the producers. He recognized that this isn't the case most of the time.
Just like his other writing style, Aleem feels that his action has to happen organically.
“Kate was very Walter Hill-like (whose credits include 48 Hrs., The Getaway and Aliens). It was very action-heavy,” Aleem explains. “She doesn’t chit chat so I wanted to figure out a way to write it so the action wasn’t boring. It should convey emotion without over-writing.”
This thought process worked out well because it was how director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan saw it. From there, all the departments could line up behind it because he was able to convey the emotional crux of the scene and capture it.
“I enjoy writing action,” Aleem says. “It’s different for each project. This was a very melancholy script and it’s reflected in the way I tackle the syntax.”
“Watch a lot of movies,” Aleem suggests for those writers eager to enter the action genre. “If you watch a lot of stuff you’ll undoubtedly be going ‘I wanna do this my own way!' And that right there, doing your version of it, is a good jumping off point."
Mostly though, he believes the writer’s voice makes it fresh.
“Your perspective hopefully makes it interesting and that’s usually where I start. For example, since I love John Carpenter, I figured out a way to have my own version of an Escape from New York-esque sequence in Kate.”
Kate is available to stream on Netflix and writers can find five screenwriting takeaways from the film here.