25 Things You Didn’t Know About Se7en

25. The Idea For The Movie Came From Living In New York

Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker was working in a Tower Records in New York when he wrote the Se7en screenplay as a spec job. He’d moved from a very middle-class Pennsylvania suburb in the mid-eighties when crack cocaine became an epidemic and the Big Apple felt like it was crawling with maggots.

At the time, being able to elevator-pitch your movie in a glutted marketplace was essential, and Walker’s ‘seven deadly sins murders’ high concept was based on what it felt like for the sheltered Walker, living in crackhead central. What if someone else was even more sensitive to these deadly sinners - psychotically so?

That was the genesis of the Se7en screenplay.