Interview: James DiLapo (2012 Nicholl Winner, 2012 Black List) — Part 3

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 3, we explore how James handled the protagonist in “Devils at Play,” a character capable of humanity… and monstrosity:

Scott: Are you familiar with the idea that JJ Abrams talks about promoting the mystery box?

James: No.

Scott: He has a TED talk. Basically there’s this thing called the mystery box, literally a box that evokes mystery. JJ uses it to remind him to create mysteries in his stories, big and small. You do that really well with “Devils At Play,” especially at the beginning.

The script starts with this little snippet of a dream or a memory of this wintry field with a fence and barbed wire fence, and so immediately, we’re like OK, what’s that. Then your Protagonist is winding his way through the prison headquarters where he passes by some guys carrying a body bag, and there’s movement inside the body bag, but we don’t know what that is. And then quite literally a character gives him a box, the contents of which the script doesn’t reveal for pages, and again, it’s like what’s that? So I guess since you don’t know about the mystery box, that was kind of an intuitive thing on your part, where you’re planting these little mysteries, and pulling the reader into the story. Was that a conscious effort on your part, or was that an organic thing?

James: It wasn’t something I did consciously, but what I wanted to do was get the audience to actively engage with the setting. I didn’t want to have a cue card of the opening that explains the backstory. I didn’t want to preface this with exposition. I wanted to just put us there with the characters and turn the audience into detectives during the first 15 minutes of the film, piecing together what is going in. You’re rewarded for it, I believe, because it makes you understand the setting and it’s politics, and that energizes your brain for the process of being in a detective story afterwards with a mystery at its core. Now you’re searching for the clues. Now you’re putting the puzzle together along with the protagonist.

Scott: Yes. And it works very well. The story has a lot of twists and turns in the plot, and yet as I read it, it feels like a story of three acts. Act One, you set up a story world. Act Two, the commencement of a competition between two key characters. And Act Three, where all the threads play out to a final struggle and resolution. Did you consciously work with that as part of your approach, three act structure, or was that, again, an organic expression of your process?

James: I’m a very big advocate of three-act structure. It doesn’t have to be terribly overt in your story, but I think it usually needs to be there, and the more you practice it the more it intuitively and naturally enters into your writing process.

Scott: But speaking of this idea of the competition, it’s a rather twisted thing. It’s a race between Stepan and a character named Volkov, basically his rival, to be the first to land 100 traitors, or supposed traitors, in order to get the transfer of their choice. Stepan definitely wants to get out of this environment. Was that something you hit on early on in the story crafting process? Because it’s an important choice, it provides a spine to the plot, dramatic tension, and a ticking clock.

James: It was on one of the earliest things I thought of. There are a lot of stories in the Soviet Union about workers being pushed into very crazy competitions, not so much in the police departments- but if you were in a factory worker, how much could you do in a day? If you were mining, how much could you mine per day, pushing people almost to an absurd level of exhaustion and mental trauma. I thought it could be very compelling to put that sort of strain into the mindset of the secret police. How it would warp them, how would it play off the sadism in their minds. It is a game they get to play now with human lives.

Scott: Would you consider the story’s protagonist, Stepan, to be an antihero?

James: It’s a redemption story, so I see him as a hero. He has a very dark road to go on, but it’s a quest to eventually absolve his soul.

Scott: We hear talk a lot in Hollywood about giving a protagonist a flaw, but with Stepan, you go much deeper in that he’s a radically conflicted person. We see enough of him to learn that he’s capable of both humanity and monstrosity. What are you trying to get at in exploring his journey?

James: I wanted to put the audience in his mindset. To show them that there is the possibility within the human spirit for both for great cruelty, but also for great redemption and acts of heroism. It became this high wire act. Can we root for him while he’s doing things that get more and more morally ambiguous? I didn’t want us to turn against him as a character. I wanted us to be capable on some level of sympathizing with him, even when he’s down the darkest path possible.

Scott: That makes this story so much richer. You do such a great job of hitting that point of exploring the dark side of the character, Stepan getting in touch with his shadow self, but also dropping in these moments of humanity. You see human side of him, and we’re rooting for him to get out of this prison environment. It becomes a really interesting psychological experience for a reader to keep himself going on this journey with him.

James: Yes, sir. You said it better than I did.

Tomorrow in Part 4, James discusses the theme of redemption in the script “Devils at Play.”

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, 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.