How a Rom-Com Writer Tracked Down Tonya Harding in Awards Season’s Most Surreal Screenwriting tale

Three years ago, Tonya Harding was driving screenwriter Steven Rogers back to his Oregon lodge when she offered him her pinky finger.

Rogers had flown up to Oregon from Los Angeles on his own dime to meet the disgraced figure skater, hoping she would let him purchase her life rights for a screenplay. Best known for romantic comedies like Hope Floats and Kate & Leopold, Rogers was looking to re-invent himself—and, as it happened, the project he was chasing could restore Harding’s reputation in the process.

Rogers became fascinated with Harding’s perspective of the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan attack—and the way the media fashioned her as the villain in its figure-skating fairy tale—after watching Nanette Burstein’s ESPN documentary, The Price of Gold. He soon called the contact number on Harding’s official Web site, only to reach a Motel 6 instead.

Eventually, Rogers tracked down Harding and flew up to meet her. As arranged, Harding picked Rogers up. But because the passenger-side handle of her truck was broken, she had to open the door for him. She took him to a nearby restaurant, where Rogers asked about her life—nudging her away from telling the same story she had been telling by rote for two decades. Though Harding told Rogers she had issues trusting people, she got along with the writer well enough to introduce him to her husband and son the same day.

But back to the pinky. On the car ride home, Harding asked Rogers if she would have any control over the script he planned to write. Rogers said no. But the possibility of finally getting her story (whichever way Rogers spun it) out into the world was worth the gamble.

“Are we gonna do this thing?” Harding asked.

“If I can get the life rights, I think so,” Rogers replied.

She offered him her pinky, as though it would cement the plan.

“I was looking at her like, ‘You’re a 43-year-old woman!’” Rogers tells Vanity Fair. “But I couldn’t leave her hanging. I had to do it.”

So they pinky-swore in the pickup truck. But Rogers, who had been burned by Hollywood himself—as anyone in the business more than 10 minutes has—couldn’t help adding, “You know this isn’t binding, right?”

—

Sitting outside the Novel Cafe in Santa Monica, where Rogers wrote I, Tonya, the writer explains the leap he took by reaching out to Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, who pleaded guilty to racketeering in the figure-skating saga aftermath and was sentenced to two years in prison.

“I had never interviewed anyone, though I did not tell Tonya that. No one was paying me. Sometimes I think my mind has a mind of its own. I look back, and it’s surreal that I actually did this—tracked down Tonya and tracked down Jeff and somehow wormed my way in and got them to agree to let me interview them.”

“Their stories were just so contradictory,” remembers Rogers.

While hearing polar-opposite perspectives on the same event might have confused other writers, the differences actually crystallized I, Tonya for him. “I thought, ‘That’s my in! I’ll put all of the perspectives in there and let the audience decide what was what.’”

The result is a gripping, at-times hilarious, literal he-said, she-said which sheds light on Harding’s abusive upbringing and first marriage, and recasts the 1994 figure-skating scandal in a new light—showing how Kerrigan, with her impeccable costumes and Disney-princess looks, became the noble victim in the media’s fairy tale, while Tonya, who dropped out of school to figure skate and wore costumes handmade by her mother, was pegged as a villain even before the incident.

“I didn’t want to write a conventional biopic,” explains Rogers. “I felt like the story was funny and crazy and tragic and all those things, and I wanted the screenplay to be that too. I felt like the characters in real life were reduced to one thing [in the 1994 news cycle]. And I wanted I, Tonya to be more nuanced than that. I felt like the characters were all very rebellious and wrong-headed, which I found to be an interesting combination, so I wanted the screenplay to mirror that. I included all that stuff that they tell you you can’t do in a screenplay, like split screen and voiceovers, and at one point Allison Janney’s character [Harding’s mother] criticizes the screenplay.”

Rogers wrote the script on spec so that he could maintain some control over the project and produce it himself outside the studio system.

“Like the characters in I, Tonya, I was known as just one thing,” Rogers says of his career. “Which I never thought was fair. I’ve been lucky to have movies made, but a lot of times they’re very watered-down versions of what I wrote. I was known as the guy who writes romantic comedy. But that’s not all I am, obviously.”

Over the three-year process of bringing this story to the screen, Rogers says the trickiest aspect was securing Harding and Gillooly’s life rights.

“Jeff didn’t want to take any money,” says Rogers, explaining that Harding’s ex-husband still feels guilty for orchestrating the string of events that resulted in the U.S. Figure Skating Association banning Harding for life. “He said that she never would have thought of calling a death threat [on Kerrigan], and she was a great skater and she got kicked out, and he doesn’t want to profit from it.”

“It took [Harding] a while because she doesn’t have a lot of money, and she wanted someone to [negotiate] pro bono,” says Rogers. Once he finally secured the life rights, the screenwriter flew back to Oregon and interviewed Harding and Gillooly more intensely—recording more memories from both that were staggeringly, comically opposed to one another.

“To me, that’s what the movie’s really about—the things we tell ourselves in order to be able to live with ourselves. And how we change the narrative, and then want that to be the narrative. Which is why I made the film documentary-style. Because all of them are trying to change the narrative, you know?”

The Harding-Kerrigan event coincided with the inception of the 24-hour news cycle, and the media fed the public its own narrative—with Harding as the villain and Kerrigan the princess—that even Rogers bought into at the time.

“In that sense, it’s a cautionary tale,” Rogers explains. “I just wanted all those haters in the comments section, who hate so randomly, to realize that these are people. They’re not just anecdotes . . . I don’t say that Tonya’s the hero or anyone’s the villain. All I really wanted to say was they’re human. And there’s more to the story than you think.”

“It’s a funny story, a tragic story, a very crazy story. It’s true-ish, depending on whose point of view,” says Rogers, explaining that there was only one subject on which Harding and Gillooly agreed: Harding’s mother, LaVona, who is portrayed in I, Tonya as being verbally and emotionally abusive to Tonya.

“I did not interview the real LaVona, because Tonya didn’t know whether she was dead or alive,” says Rogers, who wrote the role for his longtime friend Allison Janney. “As soon as there was heat on the script, I said, ‘Allison Janney is playing the part that I wrote for her, and I want it in writing or it’s a deal-breaker. And I sort of said that before Allison had agreed to do the part.”

When he finally did pitch Janney on the role, he told her, “I wrote this part for you. You’ll have a bold haircut, you’ll have these big glasses, you’ll have a half-fur coat, and a bird on your shoulder.” Janney’s response: “Great.”

Rogers also sent Harding the script to read. She had only one note: “There were too many swears.”

Margot Robbie was immediately interested in the script, and met with Rogers about playing Harding and producing the film through her LuckyChap production company. The screenwriter notes that when he told Robbie about his interviews with Harding, “her eyes had this intense focus all of a sudden”—the same intense focus that Harding had in her eyes when she was talking about the triple axel. (To this day, Harding is one of only eight women who have successfully landed the triple axel in international competition. Because producers could not find a body double who could physically land the move on camera, the triple axel in I, Tonya was re-created with special effects.) “I just thought, ‘Wow. That’s another sign.’”

Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) signed on to direct I, Tonya—which Rogers says had a budget of $11 million—and its 260-something scenes in 31 days. “Because we didn’t have a lot of money, it made us scrappy. And that scrappy quality, I think, mirrors the characters,” says Rogers.

When Harding first saw the film, the former figure skater both laughed and cried. “There were things that she did not like,” points out Rogers. “Mainly, stuff that was told from Jeff’s point of view. But she e-mailed me twice, thanking me.”

The most important frame of the film for Harding, however, comes at the very end—once her skating career is over and she’s been banned from U.S. figure skating. In fact, it has nothing to do with skating whatsoever. It is a final title card, after the fates of all the key characters have been revealed, that simply says, “Tonya wants you to know she’s a good mother.”

Speaking about how that card came about, Rogers says that he asked Harding during their interviews, “How do you want people to remember you?”

“She said, ‘I want people to know I’m a good mother,’” he says. “She broke the cycle of violence and became the mom that she never had, which is really moving to me. Here’s a girl who was always looking for love in her life. And a family. And I think she got it, finally.”

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fair’s website.