Interview (Part 5): Sam Baron (2014 Nicholl Winner)

Sam Baron wrote the original screenplay “The Science of Love and Laughter” which won a 2014 Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting. Sam and I had a great conversation which I will be sharing with you this week in 6 parts.

Today in Part 5, Sam reflects on some key aspects of the screenwriting craft:

Scott: Let’s talk about the experience of accepting the Nicholl, going to LA and that whole thing. What was that like?

Sam: That was an experience. It was definitely the most intense week of my life so far. The Nicholl people lay on an incredible week of events and seminars, all kinds of fun and interesting stuff. Plus my UK agent had put together lots of meetings with people in LA, so it was just five days of meetings all day, every day. You go from one to another to another to another. They call it “the water bottle tour”, because each place gives you a water bottle. It was exhausting and exhilarating and scary and exciting and fun and everything in between. Very educational.

Scott: When you win a Nicholl, you’ve got an obligation to write a project. Are you working on that?

Sam: Yeah.

Scott: Congratulations again. Let’s jump into some craft questions, if we could. This one stumps writers sometimes, but I think it’s interesting. How do you come up with story ideas?

Sam: I don’t know. They just come along at the most unexpected moments. Hopefully you have some way to write them down. For me, it’s usually an interesting contradiction, or some kind of emotional bind or moral question. Something where I think, “Oh, that’s interesting,” or “That would be a difficult predicament,” or “That would be awkward.” I guess there’s always got to be tension somewhere, and there’s always got to be ways into the characters. I have ideas constantly, but most of them just float in and float out. It’s the ones that make you think, “Oh, there’s something in there,” that you come back to.

Scott: Do you actually have a list or something where you keep these ideas?

Sam: I send myself emails. Every time I have an idea for a script, I pop it into a Gmail thread. When a script’s thread has around 100 messages in it, that’s when I start thinking about it properly. So things tend to percolate for a couple of months before I actually take them seriously.

Scott: Let’s talk about what we could call “prep writing,” which is where you’re developing the story before you actually type, “Fade in.” Brainstorming, character development, research, outlining. What of those aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time and focus to?

Sam: I always used to jump straight in. But after doing 26 drafts of my feature, I have now decided to try and spend a bit more time preparing. But every project is different. I’m writing one period thing, so there’s huge amounts of research that go into that. That’s been really interesting, because you just can’t start the freewheeling creative process until you’ve done so much baseline research. For a normal contemporary project, I don’t know. Each one has its own natural way in, but I guess it’s a mixture of brainstorming and then trying to… There’s the creative side and the administrative side. There’s getting all brainstorming ideas down, and then trying to turn those random ideas into some kind of sequential document where they actually lay out in some kind of story form. You think, “Maybe that belongs in the first third, and that probably belongs in the last third.” Then, you read through it a couple of times and build it up. I’m a big believer in the iterative process, where you go over something again and again and again, adding little blocks each time, until you feel, “God, now I’ve just got to write the thing”, or the dialogue is bursting out of you, and you think, “This document is going to get unwieldy if I start writing every line in it.” Then I tend to move over to Final Draft.

Scott: How about characters? You mentioned earlier you wanted to write a character‑driven script for the Nicholl script. I’m imagining you have an affection and affinity for characters. Any specific things you do to get to know them?

Sam: That’s a good question. I think it’s all about point of view or perspective. One of the most important things I read in one of those screenwriting books was that every character is the protagonist of their own life. There’s no such thing as a two‑dimensional person in real-life. So you can’t really write a character unless you know them as a person. There are great articles about this, which will say this much better than I can. But there’s no such thing as just “the receptionist” or “the security guard”. Those people all have families. They all woke up this morning. They all heard something on the way to work. I think it’s just about taking their perspective and thinking, “Who is this person as a human being? What else is going on in their day?” If they’re a security guard, they don’t just care about stopping a person coming into the building. They’re also thinking about how they just got caught speeding and they have to post that form off to the place, otherwise they’re going to get points on their license. Or they’ve just forgotten their mother’s birthday. They’ve just been dumped. Whatever it might be. It’s all about the human way in.

Scott: That reminds me of that line ‑‑ I can’t remember who said it ‑‑ but, “Even bad guys have mothers.”

Sam: Exactly.

Scott: All the characters have. They live in that story universe 24‑7–365. As far as they’re concerned, they are the protagonists of their own stories.

Sam: Exactly.

Scott: Dialogue. I’m imagining it’s probably a pretty intuitive thing for you in terms of how you find their voices?

Sam: Mixture. Sometimes it is. Sometimes, you have to work at it. When I was younger, I used to just write dialogue because it would be funny, or whatever. But now, you have to see the virtue of each line, not only in terms of revealing character but also in terms of, “Why is this line in the script?” Dialog really needs to pull its weight from a broad story or theme or emotional perspective as well as just a character perspective and as well as just being funny or whatever. Someone very smart once said “dialogue is verbal action” — i.e. you’re using words to do something to someone, or to achieve a goal.

Scott: Right. Dialogue is conversation with purpose.

Sam: Exactly.

Scott: You just mentioned theme. That seems to be one of those concepts that writers have a lot of different ideas about what exactly that means. I’m curious. Do you have any specific thoughts about what theme is and how important it is to you? Do you start with themes, or do they arise in the context of developing and writing the story?

Sam: Anytime I’m thinking of a new project, as I said, I throw ideas into a Gmail thread to myself. Often I’ll be sitting on the train or whatever, and will come up with an idea that doesn’t have any script attached to it, but I think, “That’s an interesting observation,” or “That’s an interesting character trait,” or “That’s an interesting quirk of the world”. I write it down, and then I have to think, “Which Gmail thread do I put this idea into?” The answer to that is how I define theme. For me, scripts start off as this jumbled up thread of ideas and characters and story beats, endings or beginnings or twists — and the theme is what unites them. It’s why they’re in one Gmail thread as opposed to another.

This script was about honesty in relationships. It’s about taking chances and those kinds of things. But I was also writing a couple of other things alongside of it, and there’s a reason why things ended up in this script as opposed to another script. It’s the theme.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Sam gives some advice to aspiring screenwriters.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Sam is repped in the U.K. by the Curtis Brown Agency and in the United States by 3 Arts and UTA.

Twitter: @baronifish.