Interview: Allan Durand (2012 Nicholl Winner) — Part 3

Allan Durand’s original screenplay “Willie Francis Must Die Again” is an amazing real-life story and a script that won Allan a 2012 Nicholl fellowship. However the story behind the story is also quite remarkable, one I’m happy to share with you through this interview.

I will be posting the whole interview over the course of this week, and for those of you who think the only people who break into Hollywood as screenwriters are young USC or NYU grads, Allan’s saga will dispel that myth quite nicely.

Today in Part 3, Allan talks about the challenges of adapting a real-life story into a screenplay.

Scott: The choice to do the cross‑cuts between Bertrand DeBlanc and the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., where you’re going back and forth between them, did you know originally, “I’m going back and forth between those two locations”?

Allan: Well, yes I did. I worried about whether I’d made the right choice until I got the call telling me I had won the Nicholl Fellowship, because I always felt that was intensely interesting to me, but I knew it was interesting to me in large part because I was a lawyer. At least I thought it was in large part because of my legal background. I worried incessantly that it just wouldn’t seem that interesting to anybody else. But I don’t think anybody…I don’t think 99.9 percent of the population, when they think of the U.S. Supreme Court, they think of these scholarly arguments in the back room over cases and precedent and constitutional amendments. They really don’t see two guys sitting right there drinking coffee, saying, “If you can vote for me on this, I think I’ll be able to vote for you on the other.”

You don’t think of the Supreme Court as your eighth‑grade classroom, where you agree to vote for me for president if I agree vote for you for vice president. But that’s at least in that one instance, that’s how it worked. I thought that was just fascinating.

Another thing, of course, being a lawyer, clients never understand how emotionally involved lawyers get in cases. I thought it would be interesting to show at the Supreme Court level, the dissenting justices, how strongly they felt about it. They were willing to go to bat and slash and burn, lie and cheat and do whatever they had to do. It was like it really was a member of their family.

I thought that was really interesting. I didn’t know whether it was too much for an audience of non‑lawyers, which is every movie audience in the country.

Obviously, where I got lucky is that the people who judged the Nicholl competition are very, very sophisticated folks in terms of story and that kind of thing. I didn’t know it until the night of the Nicholl awards when Gale Anne Hurd, the chairman of the committee, was introducing everybody and everything.

She said when you cut it down to the semi‑finalists, that last 100 to 110, the group of people who cut it down to the 10 finalists include 35 screenwriters, all of whom have either won or been nominated for the Oscar for best screenplay.

You talk about not your average movie audience. I was lucky in the level of education and sophistication and experience and all of those things and intelligence of the people who were judging that competition were probably higher than your average cross‑section of the population.

Scott: Your choice to do cross‑cuts between Louisiana and the Supreme Court and then the eventual intersection of Bertrand with the Supreme Court was smart because it allowed you to track two parallel story lines, bouncing back and forth between them, which makes it more interesting than just following one.

Also that narrative technique underscores that point you made: it’s not just the law, it’s about these people, these characters, the Supreme Court justices becoming emotionally involved in this case.

Allan: Absolutely, because they didn’t almost embrace him, they embraced him. In fact, that’s literally what happened. It shows when you read their papers and how much time they devoted to it. That’s a fact. I guess the moral of that story is, you can bounce back between two different stories as long as they’re both really interesting stories. The trick is to either find two interesting stories or figure out how to make them interesting.

Scott: I have done a couple of adaptations myself, and I certainly have talked to a bunch of writers and read, to know that doing real‑life stories or adapting books is perhaps the single‑most challenging form of screenwriting there is. Because people’s lives don’t normally lay out in beginning, middle, and end plus there’s just so much content. Oftentimes, the more difficult issue is not what you include but choosing what to omit. Did you find that to be a challenge for you, like there was a lot of content that you just said, “I just can’t figure a way to put this in,” or making those choices about which subplots or characters or scenes to put in?

Allan: The way I did it is every five to 10 pages, I wanted a big fist to come out of the screenplay and punch the reader right in the gut. I wanted them to take a bite at the whole apple. I just wanted something to come out of it. I picked all of those what I thought were the elements of the story that really shook you, rocked you, and got you dizzy, and made sure all of those were in there, and just figured out how to link them. There are probably some things that were interesting to me or that I might be able to put in, but at some point, you’ve got to stick to the spine. So far so good, it worked out.

Scott: As far as Bertrand is concerned as a protagonist character, what about him? I know you knew this person as a real person, but as a protagonist, as a narrative figure, what about that character did you find yourself connecting to?

Allan: The human side. The fact that when you start a football game, the band’s playing and everybody’s on their feet cheering, and then you get in the middle of the third quarter and you’ve been getting your butt kicked around for two‑and‑a‑half quarters. Everybody’s going to the concession stand or the bathroom and nobody’s cheering anymore. You’re so tired you can hardly stand up. Just the fatigue of fighting a long fight, especially this kind of thing. He was in a battle where he knew he was right, and it would be almost impossible to win.

He was taking care of that case instead of taking care of his family. No matter how noble or well‑intentioned you are, at some point, that’s going to start wearing your ass down. That’s something that I tried…I don’t know if I portrayed it, but just the humanness of it, the fact that people get worn out, and doing the right thing can be tiring. It’s not always a joyful, uplifting thing that keeps you smiling and whistling 24 hours a day. Sometimes, it just wears your ass out.

The enormity of the sacrifice you’re making is real. Big sacrifices are real. They’re noble, but boy, they are tough. I don’t see that a lot in films, and I just thought that it’s a fact, and it’s real. When in doubt, go with what’s real. That’s my two rules‑when in doubt, go with what’s real, and my second one is, don’t ever let the facts stand in the way of a good story. [laughs]

Scott: Yeah, well, that second one, absolutely. That’s one of the golden rules in Hollywood, right?

Allan: Absolutely.

Scott: I have to ask, because it’s one of my top five movies, were you inspired as a boy or as a young man by “To Kill A Mockingbird,” the book and the movie?

Allan: Oh, yeah. Every time I see it since I’ve been out of law school, it reminds me that is the ideal that you should strive for. Just because you’re right don’t always mean a lot. But that’s something that it’s like the St. Christopher statue on the dashboard of your car to remind you to be careful. It’s just a beacon out there. For any lawyer, it ought to be a beacon out there. If you’re doing like that, you’ve done it right.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Allan shares some of his experiences visiting Los Angeles for the Nicholl festivities and going out to meetings in Hollywood.

Please stop by comments to thank Allan for taking the time for the interview and post any follow-up questions you may have.

Allan is repped by WME and Madhouse Entertainment.

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