Interview: Alisha Brophy & Scott Miles (2014 Nicholl Winners)

Recently I interviewed Alisha Brophy and Scott Miles wrote the original screenplay “The United States of Fuckin’ Awesome” which won the duo a 2014 Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting.

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “I needed the gunpowder to build the bomb to blow up the car. We had the fire department there. It was all a very controlled thing, but I still had to purchase the supplies. It was just me, this 18 year old kid, showing up at a gun supply store asking for enough gun powder to blow up a car. But it’s East Texas, so no one bats an eye.”

Part 2: “Having readers you trust, you can show them the worst things you can put on the page and they still think that you’re amazing, because they see what the project will eventually be, and they give you notes and help you figure out the things that you’re not figuring out on your own.”

Part 3: “ It was definitely trial and error. We would take a couple of Washington‑heavy scenes and maybe try it a few different ways. Then we said, “This is a big, broad, ballsy comedy. Let’s just push it as far as we can go,” and we tried a few lines in the style we have now. We just laughed so hard at that and thought, “This is crazy, but let’s try it on another scene,” and it worked there too.”

Part 4: “Each time we write together, we get more and more outline‑heavy. There were many drafts of the outline before we ever hit pages. It’s a little hard to answer just because our outlines get really, really detailed. They’re almost like a script without dialogue.”

Part 5: “Recently, we spent months working on a feature that took us, I’d say, a paragraph to explain to people, because we’d go into the reason why we wanted to write it, and what we were exploring with it, and the gist of it. We wasted months spinning our wheels, and then one day realized that this side character who’s only in two scenes was more interesting than anything else we were doing with this project.”

Part 6: “I would just advise people that it doesn’t matter how strange or bizarre your idea is, if you can find a way in and really put your voice and your passion into it, it’s going to find a home eventually.”

Here are Alisha and Scott with their Nicholl Fellowship acceptance speech:

The duo is repped by Paradigm and Circle of Confusion.

Twitter: @alishabrophy, @scottmiles.