‘Queer’ Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes On Creating an Ending for William S. Burroughs’ Unfinished Classic

But at the same time, Burroughs clearly made very intentional choices about what aspects of his life he wasn’t going to include in the William Lee that he constructed for Queer. And his wife is not a part of that vision. The real Burroughs—William S. Burroughs, the man—was in Mexico City with his wife and kids. And actually Lewis Marker, who Allerton is based on this man Lewis Marker, who Burroughs was in love with, was at the party where Burroughs shot his wife. He was a witness to it.

Crazy.

And so you learn all of that, and your mind starts racing about how you can include all of it. And then I sort of quickly realized, well, that’s not William Lee. That’s William Burroughs. So how do we acknowledge the sort of psychic wound and the haunting of this event that made Queer possible without all of a sudden turning the book into a story about William Burroughs?

I read that you’re working on a Mike Nichols-inspired project with Jude Law.

I can’t say much about it because it is not so much that it’s a Mike Nichols-inspired movie. It’s just that Mike Nichols is somebody that Jude and I really bonded over.

That’s good to put out there.

And when I sent Jude the script, he read it and said, “Oh, if only Mike Nichols were still around.” But we’re not making a Mike Nichols biopic. [Laughs] Mike Nichols has just meant a lot to me, and he also obviously meant a lot in Jude’s life.

And then the other thing, of course, that’s in the ether is that you and Luca might be doing a DC movie. Anything you can share about that?

I really can’t share much about that. It feels silly to not acknowledge that I wrote a script for DC… but I can’t really say much more beyond that. [Laughs].

That’s good. I feel like not being able to acknowledge something means there’s something to acknowledge. [Laughs] So yeah, we’ll take that. Now that the year’s winding down and awards season is ramping up, how are you feeling?

Good, yeah. A lot of this period of the year, I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s not me sitting at my desk writing, and that drives me a little crazy. But aside from that, it’s all good stuff. I was saying to somebody, you do all this stuff because you’re trying to make a case for the movies sticking around. And that’s actually what it’s about. A lot of movies get made, and people don’t see them, or they just disappear from people’s consciousness. And you use the energy of all of this stuff for this time of year to make a case for, ‘Don’t forget these movies.’ So I am reminding myself constantly of that.