Interview: Neil Drumming — Part 6

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 Part 6, Neil offers words of advice to aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers:

Scott: How about this idea of theme? Is it something you start with or something that evolves as you’re writing a story?

Neil: Theme definitely starts with character, then becomes a very big part of it. Like Big Words is definitely that loss, regret thing, which really comes with the character. It’s hard to separate them, but if not immediately, very soon after. With what I’m writing, right now, themes are like faith. Faith is a big part of it. Honestly, in that one, the character and the theme work simultaneous. I grew up very religious, and I’m almost 40. I turn 40 next year and for a long time people had pressured me to write about my relationship to religion, which is very boring, and my relationship to faith. I had not been able to find a way to do it so I’d always wanted to do it. I felt like it would be somehow a release in terms of writing about it.

I had a character and an idea about technology that I wanted to write about. Then I realized, “OK, this is the perfect way to address this theme of faith,” and so they merged.

Scott: What about when you’re writing a scene? What are your goals?

Neil: When I had mentioned before I was working with a bigger Hollywood producer, one of the things she said that drove me crazy was, “Your writing is too chatty.” Which hurts me to my core because I’m a [Richard] Linkletter fan. I love talking. I like writing scenes where people talk. Basically, what I try to do is write an exchange between two people and then dial it back as much as possible. You know what I mean? Usually, if it was up to me in my perfect fantasy world, everything would be a long conversation. But I try to accomplish what I would accomplish in that long conversation as quickly as possible, now.

This draft of Big Words is a lot more succinct than earlier drafts. That’s the way it is with everything. Now, I’m getting to the point where I write scenes without dialogue, but it’s still an exchange, I hope.

Scott: That’s interesting. The title Big Words and your affection for conversation, right?

Neil: Yeah.

Scott: How about this? What’s your single best excuse not to write?

Neil: Oh, man. Research. I’m researching. I’m at a bar. I’m taking notes. That’s my best excuse. I use it fairly often.

Scott: That’s a dangerous thing to get into, right? Someone asks you where your script is and you say, “Oh. I’m doing research.”

Neil: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Scott: You say you don’t really enjoy the process of writing necessarily, but is there anything about it that you could say actually love?

Neil: Like I said, when I said the results, I don’t mean the finished movie. If I wrote a scene that made me laugh. If I write a scene, and I go back, and read it and I think that’s funny. Like there’s a line in Big Words where Annie says to John, “Your story is everything I know about you.” I love that line because I feel like it was a hard line to write. All the scenes with John and Annie at the end were difficult scenes for me to write because what little closure there is in the movie, comes in those scenes. Wrapping up ideas and things was tough. The notion that this guy has been living his life around this one single story, this one incident that happened to him, is really powerful to me. I actually managed to basically say that in the line that works, and doesn’t seem too on the nose, I hope. It’s just one of those things, I look back and it makes me laugh. That’s the part that makes me happy, that I wrote it. That’s the part of the writing process that I like is that getting something right.

Scott: When you have those moments where it’s almost like it magically appears, those lines or those moments.

Neil: Yeah, yeah. Because it’s like, man, you know you did the work to do it, but you still can’t figure out how you got there.

Scott: Where do you see yourself in five to 10 years?

Neil: I would like to make this next movie and then have somebody pay me something, somewhere to make another film. I would love to continue to make movies, maybe, not of this size. Big Words was pretty shoestring, but I would like to be able to live off of it. It’s really, I have pretty mild expectations. I would like to be a working film maker. Like I actually like genre films. Big Words is not that. I’ve written a zombie movie, but it has my twist on it. Again, it takes place in Queens. It’s about, not particularly, necessarily, zombies, not particularly vampires, but the undead who live in the projects. That’s the kind of thing like…People read the script and they say, “Is this a black hood movie or is this a supernatural movie?”

I’m like, “Well. It’s a couple of things.” Which is OK with me, but for some reason that’s not necessarily the way Hollywood wants to categorize things. I would like to be able to survive doing the kind of melding that makes me satisfied.

Scott: Finally what advice could you offer to aspiring screenwriters or film makers about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Neil: The best advice I could give is just write a lot. Really, it is just that. Don’t be afraid. Luckily, because I was a magazine writer, I got edited a lot and you have to be able to rewrite. 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.

As a magazine writer, when I started, I was pretty good. I was fairly talented and I can turn a phrase. I thought I was great. When I was in my 20s, I thought I was a really good journalist. I would write stuff at the last minute, and I would get drunk and spit it out on the page. I’d get some accolades. Then I started really paying attention to editors and letting them go back over my work, and stopped drinking as much, and take it very seriously, and then get really good. That’s what I believe, you got to learn to rewrite and take people’s advice.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Part 3, go here.

Part 4, go here.

Part 5, go here.

You can follow Neil on Twitter: @neildrumming.