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The most important scene in Netflix's 'Extremely Wicked' never actually happened
8 May 2019, 13:34
Only 95% of the movie is accurate, according to 'Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile' director Joe Berlinger.
So by now you've probably been gripped by Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, which is the latest real-life movie to hit Netflix. But just how accurate is it?
The movie centres on serial killer Ted Bundy (Zac Efron) and his crimes through the eyes of this longterm girlfriend Liz Kendall (Lily Collins). We also get to see how their relationship developed, how he managed to charm the people around him and his marriage to Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario).
On the whole, sadly all the grisly details are true, but the final scene was given a creative spin.
In the final scene, we see Bundy's ex-girlfriend Liz visit him in prison right before he was due to be executed and make a confession to police.
In the hope of finally discovering the truth about what he had done, Liz asked what he did with the decapitated head of a victim, showing him a photo given to her by detectives.
"You need to release me, Ted," she pleaded. "Tell me what happened to her head." Bundy, who had maintained that he was innocent until his confession, then leant in and wrote "HACKSAW" on the glass between them with his finger.
Berlinger has now revealed that the dramatic final scene didn't exactly go down like that in an interview with Digital Spy.
In real life, Bundy is thought to have decapitated at least 12 of his victims but the instrument he used to do so is still unconfirmed Meanwhile, his final "meeting" with Liz was actually over the phone.
"You know, I just felt that, particularly with the #MeToo era of accountability that we live in, you know, which I wholeheartedly support in the most fundamental way, I felt it was very important for this character to really hold him accountable; to make him, eye to eye, admit to her what he's done," Berlinger explained.
"And so 95% of the film is extremely accurate. But that final scene is, you know, embellished for dramatic purposes. But it is based on a real conversation that had happened.
"But that was a telephone conversation – and in a movie that's full of telephone conversations, it would have been very anticlimactic to have yet another phone conversation."
Berlinger added that they couldn't fit all the crucial details in, so they had to move the timing of Carole's pregnancy around to compress the story within the film.
In the movie, Carole told Ted she was expecting just before he was due to be sentenced. However, it actually happened later in the timeline.
He continued: "The pregnancy of Carole Ann actually happened after he was on Death Row. They continued to have conjugal visits – you know, bribed conjugal visits – but they also had conjugal visits while the trial was happening.
"So the timing of the pregnancy was cheated a little bit. You know, at a certain point, you have to condense things. So that was a slight change of chronology."
