Interview: James DiLapo (2012 Nicholl Winner, 2012 Black List) — Part 2
James DiLapo’s original screenplay “Devils at Play” not only won the young screenwriter a 2012 Nicholl fellowship, it also landed on the 2012 Black List, garnering 28 votes, the 9th highest total of any script on the list this year. In January, Warner Bros. hired DiLapo to write the futuristic re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey.
In addition for those of you who happen to be in Marfa, Texas this weekend, there is this:
Ballroom Marfa’s distinguished Filmmakers’ Selection Committee has chosen Academy Nicholl winner James DiLapo’s script “Devils At Play” to be presented as the 2013 production of The Reading on Saturday, May 18 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas. Film director Julia Dyer (The Playroom and Late Bloomers) has been brought on board to direct the staged performance of “Devils At Play” for The Reading. Veteran film producer Carolyn Pfeiffer and Ballroom Marfa board member Nancy Sanders return as producers. As part of Ballroom Marfa’s continuing film program, “Devils At Play” will be performed by actors with scripts in hand, full stage direction, state-of-the-art lighting and sound for this year’s presentation of The Reading.
James was kind enough to agree to an interview and recently we had a wide-ranging hour-long conversation in which we covered a lot of territory related to screenwriting. I will be posting the whole interview over the course of this week, definitely a Q&A you will want to read in its entirety as James offers some terrific insight into the craft.
Today in Part 2, we dig into what attracted James to the script project “Devils at Play” and his approach to writing it:
Scott: You’ve moved to LA now, right?
James: Yes sir, I moved here about a month ago.
Scott: And how has it been so far?
James: Moving from New York City to Los Angeles is kind of a surreal shift. And spending all your time in cars is especially is a unique experience for me, but you get to drive around blaring hip hop, so it’s got its perks. I miss New York pizza, but the writing’s going well here so far, and that’s the most important part.
Scott: I’ve heard a ton of acceptance speeches, but not one like yours where you spoke at the Nicholl ceremony, where you jokingly offered to offer up one of your body organs for the opportunity to write a specific movie. Can you explain what that was about?
James: Yeah, so the offer still stands. I said at the award ceremony that if anyone from Disney wants to bring me in to discuss working on a Star Wars film I will give them one of my kidneys. My manager wants me to negotiate on that, maybe start with a spleen and work my way up, but I disagree. Let’s show them I’m committed, I say.
Scott: So above and beyond the Al Pacino movies in the ’60s and ’70s, you were a big Star Wars fan, I take it?
James: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The Star Wars films broke open my imagination as a kid. If you want to become a story-teller, I think one of the best things you can have is an creative world like that to engage with. As a kid I use to make up my own Star Wars adventures and characters. It was a perfect entry point to telling my own stories.
Scott: Let’s talk about your Nicholl winning script “Devils At Play.” Here’s a logline I found for it:
“In the Soviet Union, 1937, a worker of the People’s Commissariat for internal affairs finds a list of traitors, which he thinks is going to be his way out.”
What was the inspiration for this story?
James: I was cramming for a mid‑term for a Soviet history course at NYU. I was reading a book by Robert Conquest called “The Great Terror”. There is a chapter in there where Conquest breaks down what the arrest process was like. When you’re arrested, how many people could you expect to share your prison cell? What were the strip searches like? When you were interrogated, what were the sort of methods they would use?
Reading that, reading the details, I started to see flashes of the story. It was inspiring, but it was a script that I knew would take a very long time to research. I didn’t have the time to devote to this project until I graduated and received the WGAE Fellowship.
Scott: Putting on a conventional wisdom hat, right? You’ve got a period piece set in the Soviet Union in the 30’s. You got a deeply flawed protagonist. There’s a lot of violence, and torture. There’s no real love interest per say. You used flashbacks, which some people in Hollywood aren’t fond of. The conclusion, which is beautifully realized, is definitely not your typical Hollywood happy ending. Were you aware that this script was cutting against conventional wisdom on so many fronts?
James: To be honest, I didn’t think about that. I just tried to tell a story to the best of my ability. I think it becomes problematic for us as screenwriters to create only what we think is going to sell, or only what we think is going to attract attention. It’s better just to write as well as you can, and hope that it creates opportunities for you afterwards. At the end of the day, you just have to tell the stories you want to see on film. That will be your best writing.
Scott: What about the story made you think this can be a movie?
James: I think we have a tendency when we discuss this time period, whether it’s Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, to see it from the view-point of the victims. What it was like to be oppressed by these nations, for example. I think it’s more uncomfortable for us to tell a story from the other side of that perspective. What was it like to be the secret police? That involves us imagining that there are perhaps darker sides of our humanity. That was something I wanted to address with this story.
Scott: You talk about this idea that Richard LaGravenese talks about emotional authenticity. For a historical piece, too, you also, one of the thresholds you have to accomplish is create a sense of plausibility about the world, a sense of realism there, too. You did that incredibly well. I mean, all these little tiny details, suicide nets and things like that. How much research did you do and what type of research was it to create that sense of verisimilitude?
James: When it comes to the details of the world, I mostly read textbooks and historical non‑fiction. I tried to find as many specifics as I could, while also giving myself the creative freedom to build the narrative that I thought would best serve our story.
Tomorrow in Part 3, we explore how James handled the protagonist in “Devils at Play,” a character capable of humanity… and monstrosity.
For Part 1, go here.
Please stop by comments to thank James for taking the time for the interview and post any follow-up questions you may have.
James is repped by Verve and Kaplan/Perrone.
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