Over the course of a two-hour conversation, as he traces the arc of his career as a screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker ’86 Com unearths a number of visual aids from the shadowy reaches of his Los Angeles home office. There is the laminated replica of his Penn State diploma that he used to keep in his wallet; there are the sheafs of color-coded index cards replete with scraps of dialogue; there are the scribbled notes from a meeting with director David Fincher from over 15 years ago. And then there is one that catches me completely by surprise.

It comes when we start talking about the three books in this room that serve as his primary influences as a screenwriter. Two of them make perfect sense to me: Screenplay by Syd Field, which helped Walker learn the basics while a student at Penn State; and On Writing by the author Stephen King, whose macabre fingerprints can be found in nearly all of Walker’s work.

But then he tells me about the third: the classic self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. “I’m obsessed with Dale Carnegie,” Walker says. “I swear by his stuff.”

To understand how strange it is for Andrew Kevin Walker to be citing Dale Carnegie as an influence, you’ve first got to understand the misanthropic realms Walker conjures in his work. This is a writer who established his voice with 1995’s brooding Brad Pitt–Morgan Freeman thriller Seven, which culminated in one of the bleakest endings in film history. (If you don’t know what’s in the box by now, you probably don’t want to know.) After that movie threw a shock into the Hollywood system, Walker spent three decades—both through his multiple collaborations with Fincher and in his other work, including the Johnny Depp vehicle Sleepy Hollow, Nicolas Cage’s 8MM, and Benicio Del Toro’s The Wolfman—walking his audiences down dark and subversive roads.

Before I began emailing with Walker, I had a vision of him working in a musty dungeon, surrounded by an army of vampire bats. Judging solely by the tenor of his work, hearing Walker laud the wonders of a godfather of self-improvement is sort of like imagining King quoting Who Moved My Cheese?

And yet there’s an odd logic to it. Because it turns out Walker is not a dark and brooding individual at all; he’s a personable dude who only gets mildly agitated when some squirrels start making noise outside his window. His work might be edgy and subversive and cynical, but the reason he’s managed to persevere for decades in a cold and unforgiving business is because in real life, he adheres to Carnegie’s optimistic handbook for succeeding in the corporate world and in everyday life.

Take, for instance, Carnegie’s assertion that arguments aren’t worth pursuing because you can never win them. “I had a time when I was trying to keep Carnegie in my daily thoughts,” Walker says, “and my girlfriend would just be like, ‘What happened? You’re so nice now.’ And I’m like, ‘Carnegie, baby.’”

Of course, the life of a screenwriter—even a highly successful one—is a constant argument between art and commerce. But Walker never allowed himself to be pulled toward the business end of things; he just continually insisted on walking his own path. Over the course of his career, he tells me, he’s never once taken on a project he didn’t entirely believe in just because the money was too good to resist. Even if it means he may have missed out on some high-profile assignments over the years. Even if that means he’s endured long dry spells when he couldn’t seem to land his name on the credits of a finished film. Even if it means that some of his best scripts never actually made it into production, and even if that means that he had to bail on some other productions when his vision clashed with that of the film’s director.

“Since Seven came out, there have been times that were great, and times where you’re struggling to get anything made,” Walker says. “But as long as you’re staying true to you … it sounds so much like Carnegie, but to a certain extent it is. You’ve got to be writing something you believe in, or you’re just going to screw it up.”

This ethos, he says, isn’t driven by artistic snobbery—it’s driven largely by his own neuroses. His screenwriting motto is, Your disappointment destroys me. Meaning he never wants to get to the point on a writing assignment where the people in charge realize he’s devoid of passion and bereft of ideas, thereby disappointing the very people who are paying him. And so he stems off failure by carefully curating his projects, ensuring they fit with his voice. And then he crafts a meticulous outline until he feels he’s got enough to actually write the script. Through it all, he endeavors to stay true to his own voice instead of the outside voices demanding a hit.

“You can’t callously sit down and go, ‘I think I’m going to write something that’s going to sell,’” he says. “The example I always give is that you can write something that only one other person’s going to appreciate, but it’s that one other person’s favorite movie.”

In recent years, Walker’s confidence in his own singular outlook has begun to pay off. As the industry works its way through an existential crisis, Walker’s dark voice has thrived in the streaming era, when movies that escape the mainstream can find a home. He co-authored the well-received 2022 Hitchcockian thriller Windfall for Netflix; he wrote the bawdy animated comedy Nerdland, about a young aspiring screenwriter (based on Walker’s youthful self) who’s willing to do anything to succeed; and, for Fincher and Netflix, he conjured 2023’s The Killer, about a fastidious hit man (played by Michael Fassbender) who lives by a perversely Dale Carnegie- esque mantra that he begins to violate, piece by piece (culminating in a memorable confrontation between Fassbender and Tilda Swinton). The movie serves as a subtle—and not-so-subtle—critique of consumerist and corporate culture, from Amazon to McDonald’s, which, honestly, is about as anti-Carnegie as you can get.

“There is a kind of solace that one gets to experience when Andy’s on the case,” Fincher told Entertainment Weekly last fall. “When you say, in terms of the plotting, ‘Why do this and not this?’ a lot of people will say, ‘Let me get back to you.’ Andy’s going to take out his composition book … and flip to the page, and he’s going to go, ‘Yeah, I gamed that out.’ There aren’t many minds like that. It’s nice to turn over that aspect to somebody who takes it so seriously and engages with it so thoroughly.”

The Killer was the No. 1 streaming movie on Netflix upon its release, a testament to the partnership of two men—Fincher and Walker—that has persisted for decades in a business that tends to reward the kind of uniform content neither of them is interested in producing. For Walker, that’s meant adhering to Carnegie’s mantra about developing a strategy for success even as you endure the inevitable failures.

“To have a movie that gets made is winning the lottery,” he says. “To have a movie that gets made that you’re actually proud of is like winning the lottery twice in one day.”

Walker grew up in the small Pennsylvania town of Mechanicsburg, about as far removed from a dark and gritty existence as one could imagine. It was, he says, “true suburbia, in every sense … neighbors and rectangular yards and trees and flower beds.” And, both in Mechanicsburg and across the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, an eclectic variety of movie theaters and an increasing number of video stores.

Alongside classic fare such as Lawrence of Arabia, Walker gravitated toward the dark visions of the 1970s auteurs: Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (with a screenplay by legendary writer and director Paul Schrader), John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude. Walker refers to it as “cinema of discomfort”; there was, to him, something fascinating about the way a director could take you “behind these doors that you would never open and look through in real life.”

His parents, Kenneth Walker ’60 Eng and Mary Weeks Walker ’60 H&HD, met at Penn State, and many in his extended family are alumni, as well. When he graduated from high school in 1982, he chose Penn State, too, starting at the Altoona campus before transferring to University Park, where he took a class with a professor named Jeff Rush (now an emeritus professor at Temple). It was Rush who introduced Walker to Syd Field’s book on screenwriting—and more importantly, helped acquaint Walker with the three-act structure that forms the backbone of a screenplay. “Even in the two years I had him, I could see enormous growth,” Rush says of Walker. “Some students you learn to expect a lot of, and some of them never really develop. But we were so grateful that he kept going.”

While Walker wrote and produced his own short films, he also began writing a feature-length screenplay for Rush’s class. It was a comedy called American Beowulf, about a rock star who decides to leap out of a plane with his drummer and live in suburbia to escape the ravages of fame. Rush, upon being reminded of the script, calls it “ambitiously dark,” though Walker is a little bit harder on himself. “It was very stupid,” Walker says. “But it was about a guy trying to escape the bombast and hyperbole of fame in the most bombastic way, and then trying to hide out and realizing he had no connection to everyday life.”

Little by little, Walker began to piece together both the essentials of moviemaking—the importance of editing and music and rhythm—as he began to discover his unique voice. After graduating from Penn State in 1986, he wasn’t quite ready to move far away from his family to Los Angeles, so he got a place in New York City with a few friends from school. (Years later, he would base Nerdland on this period in his life.) It was a fascinating time to leap into the film industry, in part because tons of shoestring-budget movies were getting made so they could be rented by movie-hungry audiences at video stores. Walker and his friends lived in Queens; he worked in production on films starring Billy Dee Williams and Morgan Fairchild, but when he realized that lifestyle gave him no time to actually write, he took a gig at a Tower Records store near Lincoln Center.

At the same time, New York was struggling through the crack cocaine era, and the culture shock for Walker, coming from a lifetime spent in largely idyllic central Pennsylvania, was very real. Walker utilized that feeling, as well as the feel of movies such as Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver, as he began writing a screenplay about a cop who moves to an unnamed city where it always seems to be raining, just in time to investigate a series of grisly murders inspired by each of the seven deadly sins. The character he most related to, Walker said, was Tracy, the wife of Brad Pitt’s character (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), who finds herself alone in a brand-new city that she doesn’t understand.

“[New York City] was such a culture shock, and I really felt like a fish out of water,” he says. “I was struggling not to let the incessant noise of the city, literally and figuratively, make me too crazy.”

After finishing his first draft of Seven, Walker took a wild shot in the dark: He cold-called David Koepp, who was just embarking on a career that would make him one of the most successful screenwriters of recent decades, and asked him to read the script. Koepp loved Seven; he gave it to his agent, and Walker moved to Los Angeles in 1991. But even then, the path to production and to success was not exactly smooth. As Walker has learned over the years, it almost never is.

The script for Seven made the rounds in Hollywood; it didn’t sell. It went around again and still didn’t sell. Finally, a director optioned it; Walker was asked to rewrite the ending, because the director believed it was simply too dark for audiences to accept. Walker, young and enthusiastic and thrilled for the script to be in development at all, did as he was told. But when that deal fell apart, a young director most known for directing high-profile music videos got interested.

David Fincher had recently directed the third installment of the Alien franchise and, by all accounts, had a miserable experience doing so. Walker’s reps accidentally sent Fincher the original version of the Seven script with the original ending, in which the detective’s character discovers the horrifying way the serial killer has set him up from the start. (Again, if you don’t know what’s in the box by now ….) Fincher, upon hearing he’d been sent an old version of the script, insisted that he’d do the movie only if the ending remained intact. Along the way, Walker says, “there were many, many people … who were trying to change the ending.” But Fincher, who is known for his extensive collaboration with writers such as Walker, refused to budge. The ending, to him, was what made the movie.

It turned out Fincher was right. Seven—which Walker always viewed as a kind of horror film—shocked audiences with its climax. It grossed over $300 million worldwide and helped turn Pitt into one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood. And the partnership and friendship between Fincher and Walker was born in that moment.

“Much of what it evolved into had so much to do with Fincher,” Walker says. “It’s all because of him that they went back to that first draft. It’s hard to be thankful enough to him without being obsequious, but I hope he understands how grateful I am.”

Seven turned Fincher into one of a handful of late ’90s auteurs; he followed Seven with The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, for which Walker did an uncredited rewrite, and then with Fight Club (for which Walker did some minor polishes to another script that would become a generational cult classic). Walker also began writing for other major directors, including the script for 8MM, a gritty crime thriller helmed by the late Joel Schumacher. That’s when he learned what would happen when he and a director had clashing visions.

“Joel and I just didn’t see eye to eye on it, and it became a very different thing—but that’s his job, to make it into his thing,” says Walker, who tells me he’s never actually watched the finished version of 8MM. “That’s why you have to be constantly refilling your reserve of naivete when you’re sitting down to write something. Because you have to believe that this time it’s going to be different, that this time I’m going to write the script and I’m going to have a director come on that I’m in sync with, and then it’s going to go to actors that appreciate it and don’t want to rewrite every word.”

That naïve hope for perfection explains why there are long gaps on Walker’s IMDB résumé. And it explains why some of Walker’s favorite scripts are projects that never got made, like a Batman vs. Superman script that’s made the rounds among fanatics on the internet. He also wrote a couple of unfinished projects for Fincher, including rewrites of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney, and of The Girl Who Played With Fire, a sequel to Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

But in recent years, Walker’s luck began to turn. Windfall, which Walker made with a few friends, landed on Netflix with an A-list cast, including Jesse Plemons, Jason Segel, and Lily Collins. Inspired by Cartoon Network’s edgy Adult Swim programming, he wrote Nerdland and spent several years pitching it before it got made in 2016, with the lead characters voiced by Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt. It’s arguably both his most personal film and his weirdest—at one point, the lead character decides to go on a killing spree to become famous, before failing miserably at it.

“It’s very stupid,” Walker says of Nerdland, “but I’m very proud of it. As long as you’re writing something that’s personally driving you to write it, then you end with the possibility that it ends up being a thing that propels you forward.”

Sometimes that forward motion takes years, as with The Killer, which Walker first met with Fincher about back in 2008. Over the years, there were stops and starts, and then Fincher’s contract with Netflix provided an opening. Walker wrote a sparse script that’s told largely in voiceover. From Page 1:

THE KILLER (V.O.)

It’s amazing how physically

exhausting it can be to do

nothing. If you’re unable to

endure boredom, this work is

not for you.

Whether intentional or not, it’s a sly reference to the screenwriting and development process—the process of working on a single piece of art that might take years to complete, if it’s ever finished at all. And yet there’s always the next project to bring him a new sense of hope: He’s currently working on developing a new vampire film with director Panos Cosmatos, with Kristen Stewart and Oscar Isaac as the leads. “I always like to say screenwriting is never fun because you’re always checking yourself and rewriting, but it really is fun to write for Panos,” Walker says. “Hopefully it gets made.”

That, above all else, is what Walker has learned over the years: Getting anything made is a long, languorous process that requires tremendous patience. And when it happens—when he wins the lottery twice in one day, so to speak—Walker has learned to savor the moment. He found himself watching cuts of The Killer over and over again before its release, as if he still couldn’t believe his luck in getting there, working again with one of Hollywood’s best directors on a film that again subverted the standard Hollywood fare, and in staying true to himself, even when the business tried to drag him in unnatural directions.

Sometimes, Walker has learned, you win friends and influence people not by arguing, but by turning the argument on its head.

“That’s the thing I try to say in meeting after meeting, when you’re often trying to defend something you’ve written,” Walker says. “One of the things that’s undervalued in Hollywood is earned surprise—that the audience sits down for the first scene and doesn’t know who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy, and who’s going to win in the end.”