Interview: Nikole Beckwith (2012 Nicholl Winner, 2012 Black List) — Part 3

Scott Myers

24 Apr 2013 • 4 min read

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 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:

Scott: That’s really one of the most fascinating aspects of this script, I found. That fourth character, Ben, who is the kidnapper, had a profound influence on Leia. Of course, he was with her for many, many years, and that pivot you do with this idea of Stockholm, which I’m sure is a reference to the Stockholm Syndrome…

Nikole: Yeah.

Scott: …Whereby, on the one hand, Leia is obviously influenced by Ben, obviously for all those years. But then once she comes home, her mother reverses the tables, doesn’t she, and it’s almost like she becomes a quote‑unquote “captor.”

Nikole: Yeah. [laughs] I also have immense affection for Ben. I had to write Ben from a place where I felt very close to him, because if I didn’t have any affection and reverence for him, then I have no business writing him. Then we see it again while Marcie makes her shift where she becomes a captor. We see where she’s coming from and why she’s doing it. It’s not comfortable. Maybe you want to be yelling “No, don’t do that. Stop. What are you doing? But at the same time, how are we to know what our instincts would be in those situations? One thing that Marcie certainly didn’t expect was that it was going to be harder to find her daughter when they were actually sitting in the room together.

Scott: There’s a line that Leia has, I think it’s in a flashback or perhaps in a fantasy moment with Ben, where she says, “If you go away, what am I?” That raises the question of identity. Isn’t that a major theme in this story?

Nikole: Yeah. The film is very much about identity and family, and love, the different kinds of love, nature versus nurture. Who are we? What makes up a person, and then who’s to say if that person is right or wrong? Leia is the sum of her experience, and I think what’s hard for her is that she is who she is. She is 23. Then she walks into this other world where they say, “What you are is wrong.” It’s an extreme situation that raises a lot of familiar questions, I think.

Scott: It seems like, Leia, Marcie, Ben, the father… Each one of them, you basically inhabited them in a way as a protagonist, like you looked at the story universe through each of their eyes, as they would see it, and it really is reflected in the way that you treated the characters.

Nikole: Mm‑hmm, yeah, I think if you’re inviting people into a story, you should invite them into all parts of that story. I tried to inhabit each character as fully as I could. It’d be funny, because I’d be writing some Glen stuff and I’d be really in Glen’s state of mind, and writing some Marcy stuff and be really in Marcy’s state of mind, and then from my point of view, stepping back looking at the whole story, I would get so frustrated with them both sometimes, as much as I inhabited them, they would also frustrate me as though they’re their own people. I have no control over them, in a way.

Scott: How long did it take you to adapt from the play into the screenplay?

Nikole: Three weeks. I was given a deadline to do it, and so I did it in three weeks.

Scott: That must have been a lot of long hours, then.

Nikole: They were very long hours, yeah.

Scott: How did you happen to learn about the Nicholl in the first place?

Nikole: The Internet. The brilliant, brilliant Internet, and I found out about it basically right after I finished the film. It was very serendipitous. The last day to submit to the Nicholl was the day I found out about the Nicholl, which was the day I finished the film. As a writer, you just submit so much. You send so many things to so many places. I will get a rejection letter in the mail and I have to go back into my email to try to figure out what exactly it is I’m being rejected from. It’s just the name of the game, so I sent it into Nicholl and then I honestly didn’t think about it. And then when I got my finalist notification, it was all I could think about.

Scott: What was your time like in Los Angeles when you went out for the Nicholl Awards and met all the other finalists?

Nikole: It was great. The finalists and the fellows are just amazing. I never thought I would be so misty‑eyed leaving a Marriott hotel, but it was a really a wonderful experience. We’re all still in touch. I can’t say enough good things about them. I adore them. They’re brilliant writers, and they’re incredible people. I felt very lucky to get to spend a week with them. Greg and Joan too, who run the Nicholl, were just really generous and amazing. It was an unbelievable introduction to Los Angeles. You go in, and you have a support system in place. We’d go out for meetings, and be doing these things and then come back to the Marriott, and we’d hug it out.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Nikole discusses the Hollywood ‘bottle water’ tour, the current status of “Stockholm, Pennsylvania,” and what it was like to make the Black List.

Sign up for more like this.