‘Amsterdam‘: Read The Screenplay For David O. Russell’s Wild Comic Mystery

Fred Topel
·2 min read
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Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.

Amsterdam may be named after one place, but it spans the globe and multiple decades. David O. Russell wrote and directed the 20th Century Studios and New Regency comic historical mystery, which opened in October and is now streaming on HBO Max.

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Russell directed Bale to his Oscar for The Fighter and again in American Hustle. Bale this time plays Dr. Burt Berendson, a doctor who repairs faces damaged by war and other accidents. His partner is lawyer Harold Woodman, Esq. (John David Washington), with whom he served in World War I. In 1933 New York, the daughter of one of their former war generals asks them to perform an autopsy. They become embroiled in a murder mystery that involves their time in the war too.

The film flashes back to Burt and Harold’s service in France, where they meet nurse Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie) in the hospital. They become inseparable and travel to Amsterdam together, where Harold and Valerie fall in love. They’re reunited with Valerie in the ’30s, as well as Valerie’s brother Tom (Rami Malek) and his wife Libby Vote (Anya Taylor-Joy) while they evade two detectives (Alessandro Nivola and Mathias Schoenarts).

But that’s not all. This stacked cast also includes Ed Begley Jr. as the first murder victim, Taylor Swift as his daughter, Andrea Riseborough as Burt’s wife Beatrice, Mike Meyers and Michael Shannon as spies, Chris Rock as Harold’s legal assistant, Zoe Saldana as Burt’s true love, Timothy Olyphant as a nefarious shadow figure, and Robert De Niro as a general loosely inspired by the real General Smedley Baker.

Russell called Amsterdam a personal story about friendship. He first approached Bale about it five years ago, and Bale stuck with him as he went through drafts of adapting some strange but true historical stories. Once on set, co-stars vouched for Bale’s characteristic immersion into the role of Burt.

In Valerie, Russell created an amalgam of female artists; she turns the shrapnel she removes from soldiers into works of art. Danielle Osborne and Robbie herself made some of the works in the film. Burt and Harold’s unit, the 369th New York Regiment, is based on the Harlem Hell Fighters.

To tell this wild caper from WWI through 1930s New York, Amsterdam shot on the Queen Mary, Paramount’s New York backlot, several locations around California and some blue and green screen stages. Production designer Judy Becker and costume designer Albert Wolsey ensured everything in Amsterdam looked authentic to the eras in which is it set.

Read the script below.

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