Interview: Nikole Beckwith (2012 Nicholl Winner, 2012 Black List) — Part 2
Nikole Beckwith’s original screenplay, the gripping drama “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” won a 2012 Nicholl Fellowship and a spot on the 2012 Black List.
Nikole was kind enough to agree to an interview and we had a probing conversation about her background, her award-winning screenplay, and her unique insight into the craft of screenwriting given her background as an actor, musician and playwright.
Today in Part 2, Nikole talks about the genesis of “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” and the story’s key characters:
Scott: Here’s a logline for “Stockholm Pennsylvania” from the Black List: “A young woman kidnapped when she was a kid returns home to the family she barely remembers and struggles to feel at home.” What was the genesis of this script?
Nikole: Well, it is a couple of things. One was a very good friend of mine, Greg Moss, he’s an amazing and talented playwright. He had written this play “House of Gold” that I had gone to a reading of years ago. It’s about Jean-Benet Ramsey in the underworld. At its core it’s about a girl being taken from the Earth. That really stuck with me. I wanted to write a response to that, I wanted to write a play about a girl being returned to Earth. I was just meditating on that and trying to figure out “What would that be?” and from there I started thinking about missing children reunited with their families. And how in our culture we are very focused on the unknown, the sensational side of the stories; how they survived, what happened to them. And when and if missing children are reunited with their families, that seems to be the period at the end of their sentence. To me that doesn’t seem like the end of anything. It seems like the beginning. It seems like their life is finally about to start, but as a culture we don’t often focus on that part of it, that transition back into the living. But I am very focused on and intrigued by what that transition is.
Scott: What precipitated you thinking this could be a movie and writing it as a screenplay?
Nikole: I love theater and I loved writing it as a play, but it definitely struck me as a story I wanted to explore in an even more intimate way. Theater is intimate in that you’re all you’re all together in the room and it’s happening there at the moment, and you’re breathing the same air. But film is intimate in a different way, you really feel like you’re inside of it, and you put yourself emotionally in the screen and in the space. It really takes you in. There’s no fourth wall. We dissolve into it. That’s the magic of movies. I wanted to explore the story and this character in that intimacy. When I first started writing the screenplay I…just for the hell of it to see what would happen, I cut and pasted the play and copied it and put it into film format. It was like 499 pages of just talking.
Scott: Wow.
Nikole: Horrifying. So I started for square one in the retelling. I wanted to play with a new structure and find ways to tell the story visually and subtly and to communicate things that you can’t on stage, see things really close up. I was thrilled to be able to invest myself in the story again.
Scott: It sounds like you not only were writing the story when you were writing the screenplay, but also adapting it from a previous source, your play.
Nikole: Absolutely, yeah, which was harder than I thought it was going to be, the adapting. It’s a different part of your brain, and I knew that plays and film are very different, obviously. But you don’t know how different until you really get in there. It is a different animal. I think the most important part of the process for me was allowing it to be its own thing, allowing it to be its own body, independent from the play, because if you don’t do that you end up writing a film that feels like a play.
Scott: Let’s talk about “Stockholm” a little bit more deeply. There are basically four primary characters. Three of them, Leia, a young woman in her early 20s who had been kidnapped when she was five, Marcie, her mother, Glen, her father, those are those three characters. You’ve already explained the inception of them. Why the particular articulation of the parents? How did they evolve?
Nikole: Marcie and Glenn? How do you move forward without moving on, and without giving up? Their lives became a vigil to their daughter, so unified in their loss and their grief. Then I thought what if what they’ve been waiting for this whole time is actually what tears them apart in the end? That’s where their story is, and their relationship. I have deep affection and deep frustration for both of them.
What I really think of “Stockholm” as just the story of people trying to do their best under completely unknowable circumstances. There’s no good or bad nor right or wrong, really, in the film. It might seem that way, but doesn’t it always? Everybody’s working with the best intentions, even the kidnapper. Even he was acting out of the truest and best intentions for himself and for Leia. It’s a confusing story about the gray area, basically, which I think is where we all live.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Nikole reveals how she felt about a key character in “Stockholm” who abducted the Protagonist and some of what it was like to win the Nicholl Fellowship.
For Part 1, go here.
Please stop by comments to thank Nikole and ask any questions you may have.
Nikole is repped by ICM Partners and Manage-Ment.
Twitter: @nikolebeckwith.
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