Go Into The Story Interview: Frank DeJohn and David Hedges

Frank DeJohn and David Hedges’ original screenplay “Legion” won the writing duo one of five 2013 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.

Frank, a businessman, and David, a K-9 policeman, have had an unusual path to Hollywood success, so I was pleased to be able to interview them at length about their respective backgrounds, their script “Legion,” and their approach to the craft of screenwriting.

Scott: As I understand it, Frank, you’re a businessman, who at this point writes full time. David, you’re a K-9 policeman with a degree in English Literature. It almost sounds like the making of a high concept buddy comedy.

[laughter]

David: Sometimes it is!

Frank: David has been writing a lot longer than I have. I sold a business I had in Santa Barbara in 2004 to write full time.

A common friend of ours named John Corre, also a police officer, kept saying to each of us individually, “You guys have got to meet, you both write historical pieces. “

At first we were both lukewarm to the idea, but eventually we did connect. We started kicking around story ideas and it just clicked.

Scott: What year was that?

David: I think 2006.

Scott: Let jump back a bit. David, how did you get into police work?

David: I was going to major in art, but I had no talent, so I majored in English Literature, and started writing in college. I had an instructor that really pushed me. He said, “I’m going to teach you how to write screenplays.”

I finished school, went out into the world, and realized an English degree meant nothing to anybody. I tried working in an office for a year. I was miserable, so I moved to Santa Barbara and spent my savings running on the beach for a few months, trying to cleanse the cubicle out of my system.

I was running out of money. Then I saw an ad in the paper: the police department was hiring. I thought, “That might be kind of fun.” On a whim, I went and applied. A month later I was marching in the police academy.

Scott: What college did you go to?

David: I went to Azusa Pacific University, a school in the LA area where my father taught for many years.

Scott: How about you, Frank? What business were you in?

Frank: I went to Cal Poly where I got a degree in business administration. I eventually teamed up with a friend, opened one of the first athletic footwear stores in Santa Barbara. We were at the right place at the right time, and had a great run. Writing always was there in the background for me. I’d write, throw some things in the drawer, thinking one day I’ll get to it.

Scott: Did you all grow up loving films?

David: Movies were a huge part of my life. I remember waiting to see a movie for an hour and a half in a line that wrapped around the movie theater. It’s unthinkable now to go two hours early and stand in line. In those days, it was normal.

I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark twice, back to back. I actually stayed in the theater and watched it again. I was just a kid so I had to call my mother and tell her not to come pick me up yet.

Scott: How about you, Frank.

Frank: Movie night was a big deal at our house as a kid. The whole family would gather around in those days and watched some classic feature.

Scott: Let’s talk about the script “Legion”, which won you both the 2013 Nicholl Fellows Award. A plot summary: “Just days before he’s to a leave a life of wafare behind him, a Roman Centurion must assume command of a group of misfit soldiers trapped deep within hostile country.” What was the inspiration for this story?

Frank: When we first got together I was doing research for a Roman period piece. We were looking for something that would be a contained story, not some sprawling epic that would cost a fortune to make. We came across a reference to a Roman fort that in 9 AD that held out for three days against the German uprising. We coupled that fact with a real character, Marcus Caelius, a centurion who died in that battle, and fashioned a story about his last days commanding the fort.

Scott: Speaking of movies from our youth, it reminded me of “Remember the Alamo” when I was a kid.

Frank: You could say it’s a Roman Alamo, for sure.

Scott: The script has got a real sense of authenticity. I always felt like you, as the writers, were in control of the facts. How much research did you do, and what was your focus in trying to achieve that sense of authenticity?

David: Frank had already done a lot of research on that period, wanting to write a very similar story, set on Hadrian’s Wall. We moved it to Germany.

There was a lot of research that went into Legion. The great thing about that is during the process you come across nuggets of information that lead to an interesting character, or plot point. The research wasn’t really drudgery.

Scott: How long do you think you spent in the research phase?

Frank: First we just got together and talked about what we wanted the story to be about. We started creating an outline. It was several months before we would actually get down to writing the script.

David: We had the luxury of a spec, which means nobody was waiting for it.

Frank: That’s for sure. [laughs]

David: If we didn’t talk to each other for a month, by the time we got together again we both had done a lot of fact-gathering. I think if we knew it was going to come to this we probably would have worked a little faster, but we were just sort of working as fast we could work well. I know it was months before we even had an outline.

Scott: Let’s talk about some of the key characters. The central figure is a soldier named Marcus Caelius. How would you describe his character to someone?

Frank: Our Caelius is a seasoned centurion about ready to retire when he shows up at a remote fort just as the Germans rise in rebellion. The fort’s commander dies and now Caelius is the most senior officer. If he stays, he’ll likely die. If he leaves the soldiers at the fort without a commander, they’re doomed. He makes the tough choice and stays.

Scott: Yeah, there’s that line on page 45 where Caelius says, “We’re not trapped. We choose to stay. We choose to fight.” That’s a line which is called back later. That obviously appealed to you, putting a protagonist at a crossroads like that and making a decision that, in some ways, would go against his best self-interest.

Frank: Absolutely. It’s really isn’t a debate about just whether or not they live, it’s a debate about what is the right thing to do in this particular moment.

Scott: This really is an archetypal hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell talks about the point of those stories is transformation. You’ve got that dynamic going on in “Legion”. Marcus Caelius enters into this fort where it’s really a pretty dissipated situation.

The people are grumbling and dissatisfied. He is squarely at the center of lifting the spirit of these people and getting them organized. Could you describe your thinking about why you made that narrative choice and how you went about executing that?

David: It’s a bit autobiographical for me, because I’ve seen the effect of bad leadership on morale in groups who constantly face life or death situations, and it’s catastrophic.

We wanted to make that a big point of the story: these terrible leaders had sapped the will out of all these soldiers. We could use our main character to bring it back.

Scott: What that does, of course, is it really drives home this underdog dynamic. The sheer numbers of the smaller group of Romans versus the tens of thousands of Germans.

David: It was very important to us for it to feel like the characters weren’t orating at each other, and that they weren’t distanced from us by 2,000 years. We wanted it to feel like you were there with them.

They’re the same people around us today. I really believe this. People that I’ve worked with on our SWAT team, they’re the same guys. The only difference is now they’re wearing Kevlar and carrying AR-15’s, whereas back then they were wearing steel helmets and carrying a gladius. Nothing has really changed.

Scott: So you’ve got the central character, you’ve got the situation, and you’ve got this whole other cast of characters. I was curious how you developed them. For example, there’s a young soldier named Justin. How did he come about? What was your thinking about this character, and what he brought to the story?

Frank: He’s a new officer. It’s his first assignment. He’s the great counterpoint to the war-scarred veteran, Caelius. He can’t wait to confront the enemy and capture glory. His first battle leaves him in shock, questioning his own courage. In the end he becomes a hero. Of all the characters he had the farthest to go.

David: If you recall, Frank, he was the character we had the most difficulty with.

Frank: We changed him up several times. [laughs]

David: He was the hardest character for us to find, strangely enough.

Scott: He plays an important role not only in terms of the innocence to experience dynamic you have at work in the story, but you need to have an outsider who comes in to have someone explain the situation to.

David: Now I recall what the problem was. The issue with that character before was that it was too much about his story, and not enough about Caelius. We had to find the right character to be able to balance that.

Scott: A fascinating character is Ferox.

Frank: That means “fierce” in Latin. I love the character because originally we wanted the barbarians, the Germans, to be fierce, kind of like ghosts out in the forest that we would rightly be afraid of. The Romans used auxiliary scouts, native scouts, if you want to use the American cavalry analogy.

We decided to create this guy from Britain who was a champion in his own country, and he becomes the barbarian in our midst that can translate what they’re up against. Although he says early on when Caelius asks him why he’s here, “I’m here because the Germans aren’t going to stop. They’re going to eventually end up in Britain.”

That’s part of the reason. The other is he’s like a gunfighter going to the baddest town in the old west to test himself.

Scott: Yeah, he’s a really fun character. With my interpretive set of tools, I look at these primary character archetypes, and he struck me as being very much a Mentor figure, because he understood the Germans, he understood the woods, and he had a macro view of the world.

David: Talking about characters as tools: we kept the Germans in the woods, hid them away from our main characters to make them frightening, so we needed Ferox to help explain them.

He is saddled with exposition, but luckily his character is enough fun that it works. Readers have challenged us on Ferox, asking if he is supernatural. Our official answer is he’s connected to the old world, the world that’s passing away with the advent of Rome and new thinking and science.

Scott: You mentioned this twice. Frank mentioned this idea of the Germans being like ghosts. You, David, said, “We need to keep them in the woods.” That’s a really interesting narrative choice. You never break away from the Romans to show the German’s perspective. In fact, you don’t meet their leader until the very end. I was wondering what your thought process was in choosing not to do cutaways to the Germans.

Frank: We tried it both ways. We had written a scene at one point that cut to a warrior and his family, and all the rest of it. It just sapped away the mystery of it. Our idea was that we wanted to give the modern audience the perspective that the Roman soldiers would have had of these warriors from the forest.

There was a mystique about them. They took pride in the fact that they lived in a place full of mystic legends. All of the other tribes were afraid to live there, but not the Germans. They loved it. That was their home. They could live in the wilderness.

Scott: I thought it was something like Jaws where Spielberg didn’t reveal the shark until well into the movie. Create a heightened sense of terror, right?

David: Frank and I both had written horror scripts and monster scripts. I think we thought about what we like about that, and we used some of the same tricks. To go back to your original question, the fort is a lifeboat: they’re floating in an ocean of trees.

It’s as if someone was there with a camera, and no one knows if they’re going to survive. It’s the last three days of their lives, and we’re capturing it all on film. That’s why we stayed there, up close with them.

We attempted to cut away many times. We actually got into a couple of arguments about it. Ultimately we made the decision to never do it unless we were following somebody out, like Ferox.

Frank: Or Mouse.

David: Yes, or Mouse.

Scott: You know what? I think it was a smart choice. I tried to imagine in my head, what if you did cut away to the Germans. In a way, it would demystify them.

David: Quite frankly, it started as a budgetary concern. We wanted to make it one location so it would be more affordable. As we started working we thought, it’s not just a matter of budget, it will be better just to stay with the Romans, so we did.

Scott: There are a couple more characters I want to talk about. You’ve got these two characters who really put a face on what we talked about earlier, the level of respect towards Caelius, and how he bonds with them, connects with them, elevates them.

One is Marius, who we meet as he’s being whipped for insubordination. Another is Pugio, who has an immediate bad attitude towards Caelius and, over time, is won over. Talk a bit more about those two characters, and how they represent the face of that transformation that happens with the men as a whole.

Frank: Marius is an interesting guy. He’s kind of a Billy Bud character. He’s this guy that, after being whipped, volunteers for the suicide mission to go for help. He pays for it horribly when he gets caught and tortured.

Why don’t you tell him about Pugio?

David: There is a type of police officer, a very experienced street cop, who generally is really sour on leadership. They’ve probably been treated poorly over the years. They don’t really like what they do anymore, and probably haven’t for a long time, but they’re good at it. Pugio is this guy.

The trick is, how do you bring out that experience, and make use of it? That was probably the second most challenging character — don’t you think, Frank? — that we had to work with.

Frank: Absolutely.

David: Caelius dealt with him in a way that’s believable, and isn’t syrupy. We’ve been working with Pugio quite a bit in the recent weeks.

Frank: The polish, yes.

David: Everyone knows this guy, no matter what kind of work you do. He’s good at his job, but he’s just sour. He doesn’t like what he does anymore. That’s why everybody recognizes him.

Scott: I like to look at stories from a psychological standpoint, and oftentimes find that characters surrounding the protagonist are reflections of aspects of the protagonist’s psyche. It’s interesting to look at Marius as being a projection of the nobility of Caelius, and Pugio as being the path that Caelius could take. He could go down that cynical, sour path, but he’s chosen not to. This is a way for him to confront that aspect of his own inner voice.

David: Only a guy like Caelius could reach him, because he understands him.

Scott: Yes, he understands him.

David: Caelius is probably more like Pugio at the beginning. Pugio witnesses the transformation that Calius undergoes, and that leads the way for him.

Scott: Then finally, at the very end, Pugio comes around.

David: Yes. And anyone who is still reading wants him to live.

Scott: One of the surprising characters, the last one I want to talk about is Mouse.

Frank: Oh, yes. [laughs]

Scott: Ostensibly, a young boy, who then turns out to be a girl. When I read the script, I thought, “This is perfect.” She functions, really, as a surrogate version of Caelius’ daughter. Is that right?

David: Absolutely.

Frank: She was a boy, of course, when we wrote it. Then we thought, “Why don’t we reverse the gender?” It opened up for us completely.

The little water boy becomes the orphan girl hiding her sex to be with her brother. It adds a different level of emotion to the character. She ultimately becomes, arguably, the most courageous character in the script when she goes off to take the place of her brother, and climb up the tree to stand watch to warn of the approaching Germans.

Scott: Actually, that’s a great object lesson that we should challenge ourselves when we come up with characters, to think, “What if they were the other gender?” Just because, as you said, it did make for a much more interesting character.

David: The risk of writing about Roman soldiers in a fort is it can be aimed just at men. I think a lot of people who haven’t read the script assume that. Mouse is more courageous than any other character in that script. She’s so powerful. I’m glad we did that. Ultimately, it keeps the script from being just a celebration of all things manly. It ends up being more of a study in human courage, something I’ve been observing very closely for many years in my line of work.

Scott: A lot of fight scenes. How much of a challenge was it for you to write those? Did you read any action scripts or watch action movies to inspire you?

Frank: A few scripts and many historical novels. The armor, the weaponry for the period is out there when you dig a little. The fights sequences are challenging but fun. You break down the action, choreograph the moves, plan the shots and hope your imagery translates to something exciting.

Scott: Similarly, you faced a challenge because you’ve got that “rally the troops” speech on page 77. Obviously, there’s a long history of those types of speeches, going back to Shakespeare, and movies like Gladiator, Braveheart, and The Lord of the Rings, to name a few.

Knowing you have to do this, how did you go about writing that “rally the troops” speech that Caelius gives?

David: The rousing speech bar was set by Shakespeare in Henry V, for sure. We talked about maybe not doing it. Then we realized, “There’s no way we cannot do it.” The challenge was how do you do it so that it doesn’t feel like everyone’s heard the exact same thing before?

We spent a lot of time trying figure that out. It was more of the setup, like bringing the wounded out of the medical tent, that helped that moment.

Scott: I’m always looking for themes. One thing I saw in the script, certainly one of the themes that was running through it, is a single word that’s repeated several times: Steadfast. What’s the derivation of that? How does that, in your opinion, tie into the thematic dynamics of the story?

Frank: It’s a way to say you can always count on me no matter what happens. Fighting back-to-back, that sort of thing with a hint of honor underlying in it.

Scott: I think it’s so wonderful that it’s this one word. It’s like “freedom” in Braveheart.

Frank: Exactly.

Scott: Let’s talk about winning the Nicholl. How did you find out? Don’t spare us the juicy details.

Frank: We knew we were in the finals. We were very excited about that. We didn’t know what that would mean, really. We had no idea. I was driving going home when I got the call. On the phone was Gale Anne Hurd, saying “I’m here with the Academy Nicholl Fellowship Committee we have some great news… you are a Nicholl Fellowship winner.” Then committee applauds in the background. I had to pull over.

Dave has his own story.

David: Confession time: I knew very little about the Nicholl competition because the way our gig worked was Frank was the enterer of contests. We would win some money in a contest, and Frank would say, “Let’s roll this over into more contest entries.”

I would say, “OK.” Honestly, I knew very little about the Nicholl contest. Was it in September that we got the call, Frank?

Frank: Yes.

David: I was actually scooping dog poop in my backyard. My wife handed me the phone, and said, “It’s some guy named Greg.” I’m thinking, “God, what’s he selling?” It was Greg Beal, from the Academy Nicholl Fellowship, and he said, “Congratulations, you’re a finalist.”

I said, “Great, thanks.” I really had no idea. He said, “Most people don’t remember anything after I tell them congratulations.” I said, “You can tell me. I’ll remember. What’s the big deal?”

Greg said, “I’ll email you details so we can make travel arrangements for you.” Then he hung up. I called Frank, and Frank was flipping his lid, and that’s when I began to get an inkling of what this was going to mean. It was a great ambush for me, because I had no idea what was coming.

Frank: Greg Beal from the Nicholl Fellowship said, “I’m going to call you guys on Friday, and give you the details on what the Awards Week is going to be like. You’re a finalist and whether you’ve won or not, you’re still invited to that week.

He called us on the Friday, which is the day they release the names of the finalists. He gave us the details then he said, “It’s almost 11:00 o’clock, have fun guys” and hung up.

Literally five minutes later my computer blows up. We started getting emails from producers, managers, and agencies, wanting to contact us. It’s the most remarkable thing. After, literally years of sending out hundreds of query letters, entering contests, and going to pitch fests, and getting nowhere, all of a sudden, people were contacting us for representation. It was unbelievable. It’s hard to even describe it.

Scott: Have you signed with a manager and/or agent?

David: Yes. The names were released on Friday morning at 11:00. We got all these requests for the script. We were sending them out as quickly as we could. Friday night, I was at a wedding. Frank called and said, “Jake Wagner and Daniel Vang are calling from Benderspink. They’re reading the script right now.”

I said, “OK.” I’m moving away from these people boogeying on the dance floor and trying to cover my ear to hear what he’s saying. He calls back, and he says, “They’re halfway done. They’re really excited and they want to meet us this weekend.

Then a little while later, Frank tells me, “They finished the script. They called and said, ‘Where are you? We’re driving to wherever you are’.” The next morning, Jake and Daniel drove up to meet us in Santa Barbara. We had brunch, and signed with them right there. It was 24 hours after our names were released.

Frank: The next week, Jake arranged for us to meet with all the major talent agencies. We had interviews on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Finally, we made the decision to go with Jon Huddle and Emerson Davis at United Talent Agency. It’s been great.

Scott: Speaks to the power of a well-written script?

David: Yes, and a great contest, and the reputation of the Academy of Motion Pictures.

Frank: It just opened doors like you can’t imagine. Every one of the agencies, all the people had read the script, and they were very excited about it. We didn’t know if we had won or not. We had already won, because we got representation.

As important, people who we respect in the industry read our script, and said it was good, and well crafted. If you’re a writer, that means everything, really.

David: The hardest thing for every screenwriter is the absolute and utter indifference you face on a daily basis. We all have those moments where we ask ourselves, “Why am I doing this?”

Not too long before the Nicholl announcement, I actually had that conversation with someone. I said, “I blew it. I shouldn’t have been spending all this time writing these scripts. Nobody is interested. I should have done something else with my life.”

A month before I got the phone call from Greg Beal, I was ready to throw in the towel. I was walking through the back lot of the police station and one of the SWAT guys sees me and asks, “How’s the writing going?” I said, “Fine.” He knew I was lying and stuck his finger in my chest and said, “Don’t you dare give up. You hear me?” This was Danny McGrew, a guy that had been at my side during some of the most dangerous, insane moments of my SWAT career, a guy that I trusted with my life, so I walked away thinking, “I am NOT going to let him down.” He was one of the guys who drove down to the awards ceremony.

And the Academy really was amazing. Those people were so good to us, and so gracious, and they’re all true believers.

They’ve all been in the business for a long time, but they still believe. They still have that spark. That was a really amazing experience. I don’t know that I’ve ever been treated as well as we were treated by the members of the Academy: Gale Anne Hurd, Eva Marie Saint, Buffy Schutt, all of them.

Frank: In every meeting we took the people wanted to know our story. Here are two guys that have been trying to get their work noticed for years, and now they’ve caught a huge break. We’ve met people that are very supportive and encouraging.

Scott: That’s the goal. Find those people and cling to them.

Scott: You’ve been doing this for many years, so I’d be curious to ask you some craft questions, okay?

Frank: Sure.

Scott: First, how do you come up with story ideas?

Frank: I am always on the search for some incident; some event that has a human interest angle that has slipped under the radar. A good example is the story of Louis Zamperini the subject of the upcoming movie UNBROKEN. That fabulous story was out there waiting to be discovered for decades until the author found it.

I like to look is through newspaper archives. Pick a period of history you like and check out the stories.

David: I’ve tried scouring the headlines, and I’ve never gotten a good story that way. It just may not be the way I write.

I think we’re more aware now than probably we ever were before that if you don’t have a good idea to begin with, you’re wasting your time to try to chase it down.

Scott: That speaks to the next question, which is this idea of the story concept. You have this character for “Legion”, the Caelius character, but the underlying concept is survival against odds, three days in a fort, like a contained action story. How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength and viability of a spec script?

David: It’s critical. You have to step back and ask if the overall concept is something that is going to be entertaining. Is it going to be a good story to tell?

Scott: I know you said you are the kind of writers who work up an outline. What is your prep process like?

David: I think we’re going to continue to do that. Frank likes to write scenes without an idea of where it’s going. That’s how he gets his creative juices flowing. We have an idea. We talk about it. He sits down and writes scenes.

I have a hard time doing that. Maybe it’s my other job, but I need to know where we are going. What time do we arrive? What does it look like? Who is going to be there? I have to have all these questions answered before I depart on this mission.

I wouldn’t say it’s a struggle between us, because it’s probably a good thing that we go back and forth on that.

Frank: The bottom line is before we really start to write the script, we make sure that the outline is complete. While we’re writing if we get stuck and it’s not working, we go back to the outline before we continue on with the script.

David: Scott, don’t you agree that you are always running into this issue where you have the structure and you have characters but it isn’t always necessarily your character making the decision to do what needs to be done? Because honestly, if you always allow the character to decide what he’s going to do, he will probably make the boring decision and not do anything, and you wouldn’t have a good movie.

Sometimes, there’s a fine line between allowing your characters to speak to you, and also making sure that they make decisions that are worthy of being in a movie.

Scott: [laughs] That’s said. That kind of little dance with you, where sometimes we are in the story universe with them, just observing them, and then there are other times when we are outside that story universe, and we are kind of poking the elephant.

David: That’s one of the difficult things about screenwriting. You don’t know when you are supposed to do one or the other. Recently, I was re-writing a scene in Legion, and it wasn’t working. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized the reason it wasn’t working was because one of the characters was looking at me like, “What are you writing? This is not something I would do.” That’s the moment when the character saves you from writing something that’s dull and uninteresting. The character remind me: “Here is how I would make this scene wonderful.”

Scott: That speaks to the next question which is, how do you go about developing your characters? Are there any recurring techniques you use, or tips you have on how you get to know them?

Frank: That’s a great question. That’s something I think we have the most fun with developing the character profiles and their arcs. I like to work up biographies for each major character the same way an actor would prepare for a role. Get to know them inside and out.

David: Frank is good about doing that; he wants to know where the guy came from. I never do that. I’m terrible at it…

Frank: When you start talking about a character, you want to know where they have been. What has happened in their lives before your story takes over.

I want to know what Marcus Caelius’ wife is like, how close is he to his daughter. How does he view his years of service in the Roman legions? The answers you dream up will influence your writing of the character.

David: I’m bad at it. I try to do it, I just can’t.

[laughter]

David: It’s like reading a resume. Now I don’t want to even talk about the character anymore, because he just seems really boring.

Scott: Clearly, you two need each other!

[laughter]

Frank: Thank you!

Scott: I’ve written with two partners. You come to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and rely on each other’s strengths. It sounds like you all have managed to identify those things and play to that.

Frank: Yes, that’s right. The important thing is that it works and we have a good time doing it. It’s work sure, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Scott: Let’s talk about that. What is your writing process?

David: Usually, we’ll get together and talk ideas. Nothing’s off the table, no idea too insane. We’ll riff, and let that settle and see what we have. If we feel like we’re making progress, we’ll go from there in the outlining process, and pass that back and forth for a while. Once we start writing, we can’t sit in the same room together and work. I don’t know if anybody does that.

Frank: I don’t know how they could, but some people do, I guess.

David: I drive Frank nuts if I’m in the room and he’s trying to write. Just the way I walk drives him crazy. He can tell if it’s a different pace when I walk.

[laughter]

David: What works for us is we give the other person absolute overwrite privileges. In other words, if I hand Frank five pages I’ve written, he can rewrite anything in there. The only restriction is that it has to be better.

Frank: That’s the key. The way we did it with “Legion” was one guy would take the opening sequences and the other guy would jump ahead in the story and write on. Then we’d pass it back and forth.

David: The cool thing about that is, at the end, people ask, “Who wrote that scene”? Or, “Who wrote that line?” There are always lines that you remember you wrote, because you remember when you thought of them, but much of the time I have no idea.

Scott: Let’s talk about that. Screenwriting is really scene writing. What do you think about when you are writing a scene? Do you have specific goals in mind?

Frank: Sure. Every time. How does the scene advance the story overall? What’s that conflict?

David: I have to know where I’m going to go in a scene so I can come in at the last moment, and get out as soon as possible.

Scott: Dave was talking about when you are in the middle of writing a crappy scene. Which brings to mind this question. What do you hate most about writing?

Frank: What do I hate most about writing? [laughs] I’ll tell you. The thing that I hate most is the thing that I love the most. You find yourself stuck. You know what the scene goal is from the outline but you can’t access it. Eventually you crack it and write the scene and it works. Overcoming what appears to be a block is huge boast.

Scott: How about you, David? Anything in particular about writing that you hate?

David: I think the thing I hate about writing is you have this piece of mashed, bleached wood pulp that you’re going to make these black marks on. Someone is supposed to pick that up, and become involved in these marks you’ve made.

It’s insane when you think about it! The idea of trying to connect another human being that way, it’s so difficult. That to me is what every time I start a project, I’m always like, “How am I going to translate what I am seeing in my head, and make somebody understand?”

The wonderful thing about writing is that I just love dialogue. I’m a Shakespeare nut, and when I have a scene where a character really has something to say, I’m happy.

It starts with awful moments, a blank computer screen. You stare at it, you type. Everything you write sounds awful, like it’s been done before. Every single writer goes through that.

Scott: So you’ve achieved this wonderful breakthrough. Where do you see yourself in 5 to 10 years? In an ideal world, what are you both doing?

Frank: We’d like to see LEGION up on the screen of course. I’m very excited at getting a shot at writing assignments.

David: We’ve been dealing with this quite a bit lately, because the minute you get that phone call, everything does change. You don’t get to write when you feel like it anymore. The question becomes, “Can you be a professional writer?”

We are making that transition. We are focused on trying to get good at that, to the point where anyone can come to us with an idea, and we can say, “Yes, we can do that. We’ll make it better, and get it back to you in short order.”

Scott: Finally, what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about wanting to craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Frank: Don’t quit; don’t ever give up. Get your work out there any way you can; contests, pitch fests, query letters. Keep writing. The next script you write may be the one that opens the doors.

Scott: David, do you have any advice for aspiring screenwriters?

David: Yeah, run like hell! Just kidding.

[laughter]

David: I would say the same thing: never, ever give up. Be willing to evolve and get better.

Frank: And don’t listen to the people who say you are wasting your time because “the odds are against you.”

David: Hey, Frank, remember that time you pitched “Legion” to that producer? You know Frank, he’s a very passionate person. So he’s pitching this story. It’s a really good pitch. At the end she says, “Why would we care about Romans, the bad guys?”

[laughter]

David: For some reason, I’ve never forgotten that. It was like all that work we put into writing about people trying to live the last days of their lives, and you want to make a connection, you want people to care. You have this thing you want to say, and then [laughs] you are completely bashed, because it’s about Romans.

It’s so symbolic of what all aspiring screenwriters are up against, and it is amazing in a week to have it completely flip flop.

Now we are writing a television movie for A&E/Lifetime about the lost years of Jesus. Thinkfactory is producing and they have been a lot of fun to work with.

A month ago we got notes back from A&E on our outline, and Alex Maggioni (she’s one of the producers) calls and says, “Arturo loves the outline, but he doesn’t like the opening scene. Can you cut it?” I said, “Done.” Silence. Alex asks, “Do you want to talk about it?” I said, “Not really.” And she just bursts out laughing. I think she thought we were going to throw a tantrum and she was going to have to sweet-talk us into cutting it.

So we don’t have any horror stories about “real” writing work. So far it’s been a good time, working with very smart people who are quite funny.

The first time I see my name on the screen I think I will fall on the floor. It’s been a long journey!

For my interviews with every Nicholl winner since 2012, go here.