Sean Slatter IF Magazine March 25, 2025

When Australian-Scottish screenwriter Zara Symes worked at London’s ITV News in the early 2010s, a story about the names of the city’s Crossrail tunnelling machines caught her eye.

While christening one of them Elizabeth was easy enough to understand, giving another the title of Phyllis seemed slightly more obscure.

After some initial research, Symes discovered the tunnel was named after Phyllis Pearsall, founder of Geographers’ A-Z Map Company.

“That’s kind of what put me down the rabbit hole of finding out everything about Phyllis, reading her memoir, [and] reading basically everything about her, and just becoming obsessed with the story,” Symes said.

Pearsall would become the subject of Symes’ debut feature screenplay, which is garnering renewed interest after being recognised at New York’s Athena Film Festival earlier this month.

Based primarily on Pearsall’s self-published autobiographies, A to Z offers a portrait of an outspoken and restless woman who defied the gender expectations of her time to walk every street of post-WWII London to create the first truly comprehensive and accessible city map. In crafting the story, Symes also drew from a website created by the painter and writer’s half brother Alex Gross, which refutes several of the books’ claims.

It was one of three winners in the Athena List script competition, the signature program of the female-facing festival’s Creative Development program, which spotlights scripts featuring women leaders at the heart of the story so they may be able to get made.

Symes said she submitted the script after receiving a notification from a festival tracker app that the Athena List was seeking scripts specifically about women in STEM, adding it was one of the few festivals she had come across where it was free to enter.

“There’s quite a big industry these days about entering scripts, ostensibly to cover the cost of script readers,” she said.

“People who are trying to break into the industry often get nominal fees to read scripts and give coverage and then progress the ones that they want to put forward into the competition.

“But Athena List is free, which I felt like was such a strong way of supporting women in the industry, because it gets really expensive, and writers don’t always get paid a lot of money.”

The inclusion of A to Z in the list comes more than a decade after Symes completed the script. She had decided to “let sit” for a while, following an initial round of unsuccessful meetings.

“It was essentially at the beginning of my writing career,” she said.

“I’d had a couple of TV shows optioned but nothing made, and then you are coming in with a script where the budget is potentially over $100 million because it’s a period piece shooting in Central London, and some of the set pieces are quite ambitious in covering London, including a big scene about the Blitz. Having a new writer come in with a script like that doesn’t give it a whole lot of momentum.”

Instead, Symes used A to Z as a sample for other opportunities to build her career.

Since then, she has served as a member of BAFTA Connect and worked as a script editor and development coordinator across new and returning series at NBCUniversal, including the studio’s 2019 Venice Berlinale-nominated multi-narrative VR/AR series ELEVEN ELEVEN.

Her other credits include being a writer/producer on On Air, starring Doctor Who’s Mandip Gill, and making her film directorial debut with Puff, which was awarded Best Microshort Film by the BFI 225 Film Club’s Female Excellence in Direction awards.

Symes has several television series in development and is working on a Scottish Highlands-set feature with UK producers titled Sin Eater. Set in the Scottish Highlands, the story is inspired by the historical ritual by which a poor person or outcast would consume a meal to take on the sins of a deceased person.

The Sydney-born creative is also preparing to start production on BFI-funded short film, He Died But Wouldn’t Leave, a “zombie genre heartfelt horror film” influenced by caring for her father as he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

More recently, she has been spending more time in Australia, taking meetings with production companies and pitching ideas within the Australia-UK co-production space.

For now, however, Symes remains in London to forge a path to the screen for Pearsall.

“I still, however many years later, firmly believe that this is a story that would be wonderful on the screen,” she said.

“She has lessons that we all need to learn that seem to be evergreen because they are as true as when I first wrote it 10 or 11 years ago as they are now.”

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