Interview: Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman (“Draft Day”) — Part 1
Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman wrote the script Draft Day which landed at the top of the 2012 Black List. Subsequently Lionsgate produced the movie starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner and Dennis Leary, and directed by Ivan Reitman.
In March, 2013, I interviewed Rajiv and Scott while they were in Cleveland during the film’s production, and I’m happy to share that wide-ranging conversation this week as Draft Day opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, April 11.
Today in Part 1, we learn about the duo’s background, how they met and the origins of the story for Draft Day:
Scott M: Let’s start off with the beginning. Where did each of you grow up, and how did you find your way into writing a movie?
Scott R: I grew up in Long Island, New York in a town called Smithtown, and always was a huge movie fan. I guess I first started screenwriting…right after college I moved out to San Francisco. I thought I wanted to be a copywriter in advertising. I quickly learned I really wasn’t very good at that, and that it was going to take a lot of hard work to get good at that. At the time I was also working at an advertising agency, and I saw how miserable all the other copywriters were. If I’ve made any smart decisions, this was one of them that I decided if I’m going to work hard to become a writer that if the end goal is copywriting, well, that didn’t look that great. I knew I was a long ways off from being able to write a good movie.
But I figured if I was going to work hard at anything, why not make the thing that I was striving for be the thing that I always wanted to do. I made this decision to leave advertising and took my first screenwriting class out in San Francisco.
Rajiv: As for me, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I went to a state school in Ohio called Miami University, and I was a Creative Writing major. I wanted to be a novelist growing up. When I got out of college seeking some world experience besides my suburban life, I joined the Peace Corps. I was in Senegal, Africa for about three and a half years. That period of my life really changed me as a person and really made into a writer. I was writing everything just in my journal, not really doing any form writing, just writing a lot just because of the extent of the experience.
When I came home, I moved to New York because I had some friends there. We were plodding along in the dotcom world for a while. After 9/11 when everyone got laid off from their jobs, I ended up deciding I wanted to be a screenwriter and went to NYU with Scott.
In my first year there, I switched from screenwriting to playwriting. Theater was something I knew nothing about. But it really appealed to me all of the sudden. I’m more of a playwright. This is the first real screenplay that I’ve written, and I’ve written it with Scott. But prior to this, all of my writing since grad school has been in the theater, and I’ve also done some work in TV. I wrote for “Nurse Jackie” on Showtime for the last two seasons.
Scott M: How did you two intersect?
Rajiv: We met in grad school at NYU. We’re exactly the same age. Unlike a lot of the younger people in our class, we were really desperate and feeling as if we were putting all of our chips on the table with this. Like knowing that when we got out of this we’d be turning 30, and we both decided to go all in. I think we got bonded over that.
Scott R: Unlike a lot of the kids we were in school with, we had both tried to make a go of things in the real world and quickly realized that we both didn’t have very marketable skills for the real world. If the writing thing didn’t really pan out, we were pretty much screwed. [laughter]
Scott M: That’s the key to being a screenwriter, having no marketable business skills.
Scott R: Yeah, that’s exactly it, and a real sense of desperation.
Scott M: Rajiv, this is the first screenplay you’ve written. You’ve been mostly doing plays. Scott, you took a class in San Francisco, but were on your way to NYU. Were you doing screenwriting there?
Scott R: I took this screenwriting class in San Francisco, and was temping, and just doing odd jobs. Surprisingly, the first screenplay I wrote did not turn into Pulp Fiction or Citizen Kane. I realized that it was going to be a long road ahead. I just buckled down and really did go all in. I wrote maybe three screenplays, then that third, actually the one that finally clicked, and worked, got me into NYU.
Scott M: Were you still at NYU when you hatched this idea for Draft Day, or did that come later?
Scott R: It came much later. Rajiv and I were really good friends at NYU and remained so after NYU. He had gone on to let’s just say “great success,” in the playwriting field. I’m sure he’ll get to it, but Rajiv had a play on Broadway and really had a lot of success doing playwriting, and I went strictly the screenwriting route. I was able to sell a few things here and there, and get started that way. I sold my first script right before the writers’ strike, which was fantastic timing. We were always friends, and we always knew that we wanted to do something together. Just the timing didn’t really work out, or we didn’t really have the right thing. When Draft Day came about, we had started outlining another project. When we had the idea for Draft Day, we just knew that was the thing to move forward on. That was 2010, that we had the initial idea.
Rajiv: Yeah, 2010. We had spent a year discussing it, and we started slowly outlining it. For us, we usually get together to watch football. Both of us love it, so the research and the discussions that went into writing this movie were, for us, a labor of love. It never felt like a job. It was totally on spec, we weren’t doing this for anybody. I think I might have mentioned it to one of my agents who was like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
Scott R: Same here, my agent said that…I think I said, “I’m doing this thing on the side,” they were like, “Great, let’s actually do something where you can make some money.”
Scott M: Rajiv, before we jump into talking more specifically about Draft Day, I know you’ve written a number of plays, including one that was a Pulitzer finalist. Could you fill us in on your background as a playwright?
Rajiv: After grad school, I just started plugging away. The one thing that appealed to me about playwriting, as opposed to screenwriting, was that, at least in New York, there’s a lot of opportunities to piece your way along, little fellowships here, a staged reading at this place. There seemed to be a lot of groups that were interested in developing playwrights. Whereas, I don’t think you see that with screenwriters. Either you hit a home run, or you go home, basically, with screenwriting. It seemed to me at least. You could bunt a little bit with playwriting, you could play small ball. I was just writing my little heart out, and also teaching at NYU.
I was teaching essay writing. I was able to patch together some luck and some hard work and get some plays produced. The one play got the Pulitzer Prize finalist, then that same play went on to Broadway and starred Robin Williams, which was amazing because he’s one of my heroes, and that led into my TV career.
Scott M: And “Nurse Jackie”?
Rajiv: Seasons three and four.
Scott M: It seems to be something of a trend. Historically there have been a lot of playwrights who’ve come to Hollywood. But it seems like in the last five to ten years with the emergence of cable TV, that there are a lot more playwrights making the transition into cable TV writing.
Rajiv: Absolutely, and I know I’m a little biased, but I think that’s easily connected to the fact that TV is really good these days, especially on cable. There’s a lot of character‑driven shows that have a real artistic bent. I think that a lot of producers and show runners find that they can find new voices, and interesting characters and stories, through playwrights. On the “Nurse Jackie” team that I wrote on, out of six writers, three of us were playwrights, and two of us had never done TV before.
Here is a trailer for Draft Day:
Tomorrow in Part 2, Rajiv and Scott talk about some of key narrative elements they focused on in writing Draft Day and why the location of the story shifted from Buffalo to Cleveland.
New York Daily News feature (April 6, 2014) on Rajiv Joseph here.
Rajiv is repped by Gersh and Kaplan / Perrone.
Scott is repped by CAA and Kaplan / Perrone.
Twitter: @scottmrothman, @RajivAJoseph, @DraftDayMovie.
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