Interview: Neil Drumming

Neil Drumming is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and journalist. He is a former staff writer and editor at Entertainment Weekly, and his work has appeared in Wired, The Washington Post, Vibe, Rolling Stone, Essence, and Vanity Fair. He wrote and directed his first film Big Words, which the New York Times describes as “weaving race, class, sexual orientation and politics — as well as the evolution of rap music — into a wistful tapestry of male disaffection.”

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Neil in what turned out to be an insightful conversation about filmmaking and the craft of screenwriting.

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “I was really into storytelling. In high school you start dating and start going to more movies. Movies just seemed like the most exciting way to tell stories.”

Part 2: “I felt an urge to tell that kind of story about growing up, about growing older, about being a man. The setting that was obvious and most natural to me, a love/hate relationship with hip hop.”

Part 3: “I know gay black men, and I know gay black men who listen to hip hop, but it seemed odd to me that there were no gay black men in hip hop. It just seemed absurd.”

Part 4: “The other thing is I just never felt like anything that you see from them will ever live up to what it was. I don’t need the audience to believe that they were great, I just need the audience to believe that they wanted it at that time, that it was important to them then.”

Part 5: “I don’t like to use the word revelation because that implies something big and, for me, it’s usually never anything big. It’s just something little. They learn something about themselves or they open up a little bit.”

Part 6: “But everybody says that writing is rewriting. That is the most true statement I’ve ever heard. If you can’t fix it, meaning you can’t go back over it, and redo it or tweak it, then it’ll never get to the point it’s supposed to get.”

You can follow Neil on Twitter: @neildrumming.