Interview (Part 1): Cesar Vitale (2017 Black List, Nicholl Winner)

My 6-part talk with the writer of the script “The Great Nothing”.

Cesar Vitale wrote the original screenplay “The Great Nothing” which not only won a 2017 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, it made the 2017 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Cesar about his background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl and being on the Black List has meant to him.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Cesar talks about growing up and living in Brazil, his admiration for novelist Cormac McCarthy, and the inspiration for his Nicholl-winning script “The Great Nothing”:

Scott Myers: You are from Brazil and live there now, right?

Cesar Vitale: Yeah. I was born and raised in Brazil. I lived in LA for a while, but now I’m back home.

Scott: What were you doing in Los Angeles?

Cesar: I moved to LA to study advertisement, actually. I majored in advertisement in Brazil then moved to LA to do an advertisement program. I ended up doing a screenwriting one right after that and things just took off from there.

Scott: In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you thanked your first screenwriter professor, Phillip Eisner. Was that that at UCLA?

Cesar: Yeah, that was at UCLA Extension.

Scott: Okay, let’s jump back a little bit. How did you get into screenwriting as an interest?

Cesar: I’ve always studied screenwriting on my own as a hobby. I think I might be the only person that read Syd Field for fun, growing up. [laughs] I never considered it a possible career path, though. The filmmaking market in Brazil is so small it doesn’t make much sense to try and make a living writing scripts here. Which is not to say that people don’t do it, but it’s very, very difficult.

I kept screenwriting and my love for filmmaking in general as a hobby for a long time, and studied it on my free time and wrote scripts in my free time. When I got in touch with the UCLA Extension people ‑‑ the Screenwriting Program ‑‑ that was an opportunity to see what would happen if I took this path a little more seriously.

Obviously the market in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in general, is much larger, so there are more opportunities. I took the chance, and then did the program, and started working on scripts in English. Things just happened from there.

Scott: That’s one of the advantages of living in LA. The upside is that it’s so concentrated there, the entertainment industry, that, if you come from some place where it’s not that big of a deal, you really realize, “Wait a minute, there are people that make a living doing this.”

Cesar: Exactly, yeah. [laughs]

Scott: The downside is every coffee shop you go into there’s someone writing a script, so it feels like…

Cesar: Yeah, because everyone has that same realization about LA. [laughs]

Scott: You took some classes through the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. How important do you think it is for aspiring screenwriters to find teachers and mentors to facilitate their education in the craft?

Cesar: Oh, I think it’s essential. Maybe not for every writer, but, for me, certainly it was essential. The sense of…How do I put this? Just the fact that you have…First of all, you have to force yourself to write new pages every week, because otherwise you don’t have anything to show for in the next class. So you have people to hold you accountable and force you to write every day, or at the very least every week. That’s great if you’re not very organized, like me.

Also, you get some outside perspective on your work. I think a lot of amateur writers don’t realize how important feedback is and how it’s easy to get too close to your work to really analyze it objectively.

To have someone with experience and someone who has been produced and has been working with this for 20, 30, 40 years, however long, just read your work and give their feedback on it, it makes all the difference in the world. At least it did for me.

Scott: Jumping even further back, what were some of your most important or memorable movies from your youth?

Cesar: Oh, that’s always a hard question to answer, because I always leave some stuff out, but on a general list of favorites, I’d include probably Pulp Fiction… Casablanca was one that made an impact on me… A Clockwork Orange too, which I think might have been the first film that made me see movies as more than just entertainment, but an art form.

I’m leaving a bunch of films out, but those are three. Blade Runner is also one that I usually mention as one of my favorite films. These are by no means the only ones, but those are some of the films that inspired me while I was growing up.

Scott: It’s interesting that three out of those four ‑‑ Casablanca, let’s set that aside, but Pulp Fiction, Clockwork Orange, and Blade Runner ‑‑ they all veer toward the dark side of life. You mentioned in your Nicholl speech that Cormac McCarthy’s an inspiration, right? And he writes some pretty dark stuff.

Cesar: Oh yes, yes, Cormac definitely. Growing up, I was very interested in novels and short stories. I’ve always written, not just screenplays. Short stories, too, and even a couple of novels. In that realm, to me, Cormac McCarthy is probably the best living writer alive today.

Scott: His material, lots of death and whatnot in his stories.

Cesar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever read a happy Cormac McCarthy book. [laughs] I don’t think there is such a thing.

Scott: That’s actually a nice segue into your script “The Great Nothing,” which deals quite directly with the phenomenon and the reality of death. Here’s a plot summary for the script.

“In order to sustain his heroin addiction, a terminally ill professor of nihilism takes on the job of doing homework assignments for a colleague’s daughter, who’s herself struggling with grief in the wake of her mother’s sudden death.”

There are two deaths at the center of this story directly affecting three characters and, indirectly, several others. I’m assuming you wanted to write a story about death. What was the specific inspiration to tell this particular story?

Cesar: I’ve always wanted to write something about death, as depressing as that sounds. It’s always been a subject that interested me in a morbid way, and I’ve always felt like I wanted to tell a story involving it, and try to understand the concept of death through that story. I didn’t know what that story was going to look like because there’s been so many stories about death already, both in novels and in films, and I didn’t want to do something that I’d seen before.

I think the tipping point for me when I decided to tell this story was Dan’s character. I’m sure there are similar stories, but I didn’t recall having ever seen a film that involves a terminally ill person that’s not a great person.

Usually when you have a film that involves someone that’s dying, you’re on their side from the very beginning. They’re great people and they’re just trying to do what’s best for their family when they’re gone, etc.

So I wanted to tell a story about a selfish person that’s dying that’s never done anything for anyone in his life, and he’s now coming to the terms with the fact that, if he doesn’t do something for someone else in the next three or four months, he’s going to die leaving the world in the exact same place he was born into.

Scott: Dan’s character was the starting point.

Cesar: Dan’s character was the starting point, and then June was just a natural reflection of that. What would be an interesting character to struggle with the concept of death, opposed to this character that spent his whole life studying death and is very knowledgeable about it, philosophically speaking?

The opposite of that would be someone that’s just now dealing with death for the first time, in the wake of a tragic family loss. So that was the starting point of June. Usually, when I start writing, I start with the characters, so that was where I started. With the relationship between Dan and June.

Here is video of Cesar accepting his 2017 Nicholl Award in December of last year:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Cesar and I dig into his Nicholl Award winning script “The Great Nothing”.

Cesar is repped by APA and Untitled Entertainment.

For my interviews with 25 other Nicholl winning writers, go here.