I just had a personal goal as a, you know, one of a million young male writers who really

struggled to write female characters in my first several plays to write a story that had two

strong female leads who were not anyone's love interests who were not, you know, the younger

sister or the daughter, but who really had their own story in their own movie.

I'm Sean Fantasy, editor and chief of the ringer, and this is the big picture, a conversation

with some of the most fascinating filmmakers in the world. How does a young playwright make the

transition from stage to screen? For Corey Finley, it looks effortless. His first movie,

Thurobreds, is controlled tense and shockingly assured. It's about two teenage girls plotting

the murder of one of their stepfathers and it has dashes with the shining and heathers.

It's a perfectly time movie as bracing and dark as it is morbidly funny. I talked to Corey

about making his first film and the challenge of writing female characters. Here's Corey Finley.

Very excited to have Corey Finley, writer, director of Thurobreds here with me.

Corey, thanks for coming in. Thank you for having me. Corey, your playwright.

I am. And you're also a director and a writer. And those two things are similar and not quite the same.

And I think a lot of people will be wondering how a person who's writing plays in New York

ends up making a Hollywood film for focus features. Can you walk us through this process?

Still wondering myself sometimes. It's been an amazing process. I

write out of college, moved to New York and started writing plays. That's what I've been doing

pretty consistently for the last five, six years. And one of those plays was the time called

Thurobreds Singular, now Thurobreds plural. And it was a play that I fully intended to do as a play.

It was mostly about two young women on one set, mostly on one couch, just having conversations.

But there was always something about it that felt cinematic, that felt very

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