Interview (Part 2): Amy Tofte (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Amy Tofte wrote the original screenplay “Addis Abeka” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Amy about her background as a writer and her award-winning screenplay.

Today in Part 2, Amy talks about what inspired her to write “Addis Abeka”:

Scott: Let’s jump into your Nicholl winning script, “Addis Abeka.” Here’s a plot summary. “A young Ethiopian boy loses his family and must navigate the world on his own for 10 years, until he can be reunited with his brother.”

As I understand it, your story arises from your experiences where you traveled to Africa, I think it was in 2013. Could you talk a bit about those circumstances, and why Ethiopia?

Amy: My father died in 2013. He had ALS and dementia, and it was a very slow decline and hard to lose him in that way. I know a lot of people have experienced that. It was a rough time that my family had been going through for a few years. My dad was simply the kindest human being I’d ever known and he worked hard his whole life. It felt so unfair to lose him in that way.

At his funeral, I saw my cousin who does humanitarian work. She’s a surgeon, and one of the places she goes back to quite often is a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I had traveled a lot back and forth from LA to see my family while my dad was sick, I had just finished my MFA. I wanted to do something to honor my dad, but also get out of LA and take a hiatus from my own life and re-ground myself. My cousin encouraged me to join her in Addis, because they need lay people who volunteer and do non-medical things.

I had no expectations. I’d never been anywhere in Africa. I certainly did not go intending to write a script. That was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to be somewhere else for a while. I think my dad and my grief was on my mind and it made me vulnerable to this foreign world. I felt like I had permission to be curious. Almost like a kid again.

Some of the days were long, but working in the hospital was interesting and not anything I could have anticipated. I’ve done some freelance journalism work and I went around and interviewed some of the doctors. I interviewed people I met at the hotel, cab drivers. I would interview complete strangers on the street if they’d talk to me.

We took some day trips into the countryside and I got a different perspective outside of the main city. We spent another afternoon at an orphanage. Somewhere in there the story was born. I sat down in the hotel lobby and started writing the outline. It was the day before I left. That outline is pretty much the script.

Scott: The protagonist is named Abeka, and when we meet him, he’s 10 years old. Is that where you started? With his character?

Amy: I did, yeah.

Scott: How did his character evolve? There were some key aspects to his back‑story, a personality that you knew upfront, or things emerged along the way?

Amy: I was meeting a lot of natives of Ethiopia who had never left the country, and I thought about writing a story about a person from there who simply has hopes and dreams. That’s all. There’s nothing different about this kid than a kid growing up in South Dakota who wants be a screenwriter, as far as I’m concerned.

We would see boys along the roads herding goats or cows. So many of the grown men and older boys would hold hands while they walked. And it’s not a sexual thing. It’s a deep friendship and brotherhood. That’s where Abeka came from as a character. He’s like the best in all of us. He just happens to also be Ethiopian. He’s very real to me.

Scott: He has a brother, Hetu, who’s five years older, and the handholding, same description. There are moments when they do that. They’re a very tight relationship. They have no father and a very sickly mother, so these two boys pretty much have to fend for themselves.

They’ve got some street smarts. I guess that’s reflective of what you were experiencing when you were witnessing these kids herding goats and whatnot down in the streets in Ethiopia?

Amy: There’s a scene in the script where tourists are in a van and the guide gets out on the side of the road. That scene is basically us. We were the American tourists. He brought the teff plant to us from the field, and he’s yelling at the kids, trying to smack them away from the van, and we’re trying to give them money and talk to them.

When we did those drives I sat in the back of the van and would watch everything. At one point there was this pale yellow horse in the middle of the road, starving, standing there, and nobody claiming it. There are people around. There are lean-tos along the side where people live, and there’s this horse. He’s not bothering anybody, but also nobody’s bothering to take care of him. You could see his ribs. It was so distressing to me.

That’s one image that started to spark the story. A lot of the story is about is the luxury of compassion. When you’re in an environment where there is so much struggle for a lot of different reasons, it’s harder to preserve that, and that’s what some of the struggle for Abeka is about. Survival comes first.

A scene from “Addis Abeka” as read by Jimmy Smits, Freida Pinto, Kathy Baker, and O’Shea Jackson Jr.

Scott: That’s interesting because I pick up on it now, because after a point his mother passes away, his brother gets arrested, and so he’s on his own. He intersects with a couple of people, one is Murali, who’s a medical student, who has the luxury of compassion because of his background, and then Sweto?

Amy: Yeah, Sweto.

Scott: Sweto, who essentially takes him in. Again, luxury of compassion. That idea of fate, was that there pretty early on when you were developing the story?

Amy: I don’t know how it is for you, but there’s a part of the writing process where I just know in my gut what needs to happen and I simply make it happen or drive toward that outcome. The ending is sometimes so clear. I knew this was a story about someone good losing all the people he loved and then finally reconnecting with his brother.

That’s part of why I think the outline came very quickly, I knew what some of these key moments were and the defining moments of his journey. I had experienced the locations. The work of the script was refining and connecting actions to show his growth.

It comes from actions. It’s like you can’t sit down to write a play about alcoholism or you’re probably going to write a really bad play. It becomes…

Scott: Pedantic?

Amy: Yeah, it becomes propaganda of one form or another. Instead you start with a character or a compelling circumstance, and then you go from there. When I got home and started really digging into the story details and actions, that’s when this theme about luxury of compassion came to the front for me.

As an outsider I had this luxury of compassion and I was able to see that other people couldn’t always have it. Because of their circumstances. And the ones who had it, who were born and raised there, such good people working so hard in what could be a tough system. The politics and roadblocks they faced.

What happens with Abeka, too, is when he takes action, it’s a very specific moment. There are a lot of things happening to him where he is actually quite passive. But then there are key moments when he does make an action, especially towards the end when he finally makes the biggest action.

That’s where the power of the story comes from, at least for me, and that was definitely an intentional thing that came to me in the writing process as I was letting the character do his thing. I realized that was something to exploit.

Scott: Interesting you mention that, because I was thinking we’ve read all these screenwriting guru books. The first thing is “Make your protagonist proactive,” right?

Amy: [laughs] Yes.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Amy and I delve more deeply into her Nicholl Award-winning script.

To read Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Twitter: @AmyTofte.