Writing the True Crime Thriller with ‘The Order’ Screenwriter Zach Baylin

Based on a true story, an alarming surge in violent bombings and bank robberies in the Pacific Northwest leads a weathered FBI agent into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a charismatic domestic terrorist plotting to overthrow the US government.

Adapting a true crime story is not for the faint of heart. Especially when the story being told is incredibly relevant. Screenwriter Zach Baylin, is no stranger to adapting true stories. And when it came to adapting this very specific time in history, as depicted in his latest film The Order, he left no stone unturned in terms of years of research and getting it right. While there are lessons to be learned about society and America at large – there are also screenwriting lessons to take note of in Zach’s approach to breaking the story, and developing the two opposing characters that carry the film.

Zach Baylin returns to speak with Script, this time about his film The Order. In this discussion, he touches on how he eventually landed on the book and resources that inspired the film, creating emotional depth for the main characters, structuring the narrative around key events, and important factors to consider when adapting a book and/or true story.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What initially attracted you as a screenwriter to tackle this adaptation and story?

Zach Baylin: It was actually kind of interesting, or at least an unusual adaptation process for me and how the book ended up being a huge part of it. I was working with a producer named Bryan Haas…this was like 2017, and we had started to do a lot of research about the private militia movement in America and domestic terrorism. And, I mean, there had been this huge rise in awareness of those groups at that time – the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally had just happened - it was very much in the zeitgeist. And we were sort of looking for a story that could speak to something. And so, we circled a lot of different. I had read a lot about Ruby Ridge, and at some point we started doing a lot of research about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. And in researching that, we came across this story of Bob Mathews and the order in The Turner Diaries.

And one way that that happened was I went to Oklahoma City and went to the bombing Memorial. One of the first displays in the museum is a copy of The Turner Diaries - essentially, the plans to bomb a federal building using a U-Haul truck are in that book. And McVeigh had found that book because he admired Bob Mathews and the order.

So, through all that, I started reading about Bob and all their crimes, and that felt like there was a real movie there to tell. Obviously, I was becoming more aware of and sort of frightened of in the country, and that would speak to the origins of it, but also it had a lot of the elements of a great old crime thriller. There were a lot of heists and there were great investigators who tracked that group down.

And so, once Bryan and I had really locked in on, ‘This is a story we want to tell,’ we went out to try and find what's the best book or article, or where can we find the huge tome of research about this group? And that's how we found the book, Silent Brotherhood, and that that book had been written by two Denver Post reporters who had, who had reported on Alan Berg's murder. And Alan Berg was a radio host who was murdered by Bob and his group in in Denver in the early 80s. And so, they had covered that, and then they had gone on to write this really incredibly well-researched book about Bob Mathews and the order and the investigators who tracked them down. We kind of came to the book because we were interested in the story.

Sadie: That's such an interesting way to get to that specific source material. The beauty of the rabbit hole of research, you just never know.

Zach: You never know. I've done a couple of true stories now, and I think that there is a different entry point every time. And sometimes your entry point is a great book or documentary or something. And other times it's just like there's a subject matter that you're fascinated with, and you start rooting around and finding something that you can lock into.

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Sadie: I'm curious about the process of developing those characters, especially someone like Bob Mathews and Terry Husk.

Zach: For Bob, it's not the most fun part of the research. His ideology and the things that he did were incredibly horrendous. And I think for me there, luckily, there was a lot of archival tapes, actually, of him speaking that I could listen to, and the book Silent Brotherhood had really meticulously interviewed a lot of people that had known him. And so, I felt like I had a really good fundamental grasp of who he was and what he had done, and what his ideology and his drives were. There were big parts of the script that in early drafts that we cut that followed his trajectory becoming radicalized. So, there was probably a 30-page prologue where the movie starts originally that followed his discovery of these ideologies and his own sense of kind of marginalization.

And so it felt to me, really important that anything that we portrayed Bob doing, and the things that he said was really accurate, and didn't want to, humanize is certainly the wrong word, but to try and at least show him honestly, to have, hopefully, some kind of understanding of how someone like that forms and forms their ideologies and how dangerous they can be when that's packaged in a young, charismatic guy.

And then, Terry Husk, who we really looked at as more of the I would say, the protagonist of the movie, and he's a character that I created. There were a lot of FBI agents who worked the case. There was a guy who came out to Coeur d'Alene at the end of his career, and sort of found the footprints of this investigation in the same way that that Terry does in the film.

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When I started working with Jude [Law] really closely and Justin Kurzel, the director, we felt like Terry was very interesting in how like weary he was, and how much he wore the weight of both the career that he's been in, as well as the worlds that he's had to sort of survive in. I was very interested in creating a character who is a bit of an archetype, but to be able to show him in a way that he’s still capable of actually doing this job and why would he want to, given the things that he's experienced?

And so I think that we tried to create him in counterpoint to Bob, who was obviously very youthful and in his own really insidious way, kind of optimistic about the future that he might be building for his family. Whereas Terry is someone who is pretty beaten down about the possibility of what kind of future he is leaving behind, but is still trying to do something for his family. And I think that that idea of family was something that was very pervasive throughout the script and tried to sort of apply that to all the characters.

Sadie: Later on in the movie, Bob says a little quip, “Putting words into action.” That’s essentially what’s fueling him, but also, I feel like it's such great writing fuel as well, in terms of just putting these words into action, and how you're going to map that out. Once you started mapping this out and laying down that foundation, how do you know when and where to lay those crucial big event moments that also line up with character motivation and goals?

Zach: Honestly, a lot of trial and error. There were a handful of huge events that we knew were going to be sort of signposts along the way of the structure of the movie. There's the huge heist towards the end, that's an accurate event, and the murder of Alan Berg, and the first robbery that the group commits. All those felt like they were both big turning points within their story and as well as within the investigation. But also, they were character turning points for Bob and the men as they decided to go further into putting words into action and how. A lot of the people who joined Bob had no criminal record before, and Bob convinced them to rob banks and ultimately, murder multiple people and to try and wage a civil war against the United States.

And so, trying to track the escalation of that, as well as when characters believed and bought into, ‘OK, I'm willing to take that next step with you.’ And I think for Bob, it was always tracking for us too, when is his recruitment and his pull on these really disenfranchised young men feel earnest and compassionate in a way. And when does it begin to reveal itself to be just a lot of narcissism? And so, trying to understand both for the audience as well as those guys, when those turns happen.

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I really like a very good procedural, and I think that there's a real foundation to that kind of structure. So, from the investigative side, I think that it was nice to know what events they were going to be bumping up against. There was a draft of the script that was, like 180 pages. I think the final draft of the script that we shot was 100 pages. And credit to Justin, who figured out how to manipulate things in a way where we could still make what I think feels like a really big movie, but in the time we had.

Sadie: Any advice for writers on adapting a book that's also based on true events?

Zach: I've learned a lot on this project, particularly because it's been six or seven years in development. What's been helpful for me is in adapting these kind of things is one, just really finding the big scenes. It was very apparent to me very early on what scenes needed to be in the movie, and where they needed to be was a different question. I've heard Justin say this, but these kind of like islands that you knew were out there that you as long as we can get to this next one, there's a movie there. So, reading these books and just sort of very clearly be able to lock in and say, ‘This is the scene. This is the scene. This is the scene.’ When I can do that, I feel like, ‘OK, I can see a movie here.’

But then I think also, just being very clear about what is the story that you are trying to tell in this adaptation, because the book is fantastic. It is not what this movie is necessarily. It’s a very, very, very detailed account of everything that happened with the group. And so, it was very helpful for me to go into that process knowing from the beginning that I wanted to make a crime thriller that was going to be in some ways a two-hander between the investigator and the criminal mastermind, and that it was going to bounce back and forth between both perspectives, and it was going to ratchet up to this ending. Which was a very natural ending, because it was like the standoff between the two guys. But anything that sort of didn't fit that, that mode of filmmaking I jettisoned really quickly. And so, I think knowing what that movie that you want to write at least allows you to begin to funnel things into a direction. 

The Order is exclusively in Theaters on December 6, 2024.