‘Cocaine Bear’ Screenwriter on Sequels, Extreme Gore and 12-Year-Olds Trying Cocaine: ‘I Never Thought Anybody Was Going to Make This Movie’

variety.com:

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer When Jimmy Warden was a kid growing up in Chicago, he wound up watching “a lot” of horror movies when he was, he says, “far too young.” “I became used to seeing people get their guts eaten or torn out of their bodies, stuff like that,” he says over Zoom with a wry chuckle. “So that’s where a lot of my taste is right now.” Warden’s sensibility is on robust display in his screenplay for “Cocaine Bear,” the R-rated action-comedy, directed by Elizabeth Banks, that is loosely based on the true story of a black bear who died after ingesting a mountain of cocaine in 1985 from a botched drug smuggling operation.

Warden stumbled on the account in the mid-2010s while scrolling through Twitter, “not doing work that I should have been doing,” and instantly realized that “there was something there.” But Warden wasn’t interested in writing about the drug trafficker who scattered dozens of bags of cocaine across the Appalachian Mountains, and then died when his parachute didn’t open, nor was he keen on writing about a bear who dies from a cocaine overdose.

Instead, he says, he wrote “my twisted fantasy of what I wish actually happened after the bear did all that cocaine.” Warden first sent his script to Lord Miller, the production company founded by filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — Warden’s first job in Hollywood was as a PA on Lord and Miller’s live-action directorial debut, 2012’s “21 Jump Street.” Still, despite their reputation for making movies — from “The LEGO Movie” to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” — that delightfully defy conventions, Warden had zero expectation that his script would ever make it to theaters.