Interview (Part 1): Justin Piasecki (2016 Nicholl Winner)

My conversation with the writer of the winning script “Death of an Ortolan”.

Justin Piasecki wrote the original screenplay “Death of an Ortolan” which won a 2016 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Justin about his background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 1, Justin talks about his background and how he wound his way into writing as a passion:

Scott Myers: You grew up in Iowa, your father works for John Deere, your first job was detasseling corn. That’s an obvious starting point for a Hollywood screenwriter.

[laughs]

Justin Piasecki: Yeah, clearly that’s the genesis. One of the few jobs that they’re willing to hire 13‑year‑olds for. I went to University of Iowa for two years, did their film program, ultimately transferred to NYU. But I’ve been writing probably since that corn detasseling job.

Scott: What was the role of movies and TV and books in your life when you were younger?

Justin: I worked in the town library. That’s a great place to be exposed to material that wouldn’t otherwise be on your radar.

Scott: What types of stories were you most interested in?

Justin: Just by assignment, the first section I was assigned to rebook was the Large Print Western section. It was a lot of Louis L’Amour. That’s where I first found “Lonesome Dove”

But I would say eventually, I’d settled into history. A lot of nonfiction stuff.

Scott: “Lonesome Dove”. One of those books where you get done and you say, “I just don’t want it to end.”

Justin: I absorbed the last 180 pages in a sitting, and I’m a really, really slow reader. [laughs] So I sat up until something like 3 in the morning to find out if Gus lives or not.

Scott: At NYU, what did you major in there?

Justin: Film. They do a great job at exposing you to everything, and you can kind of start to specialize in your later years.

Scott: So you’re living in New York, you said for like a decade, and I think you worked for people like Wes Anderson in MTV and Nickelodeon. Those gigs, what did they consist of?

Justin: I started with feature films, TV sets, internships and a lot of production assistant, then personal assistant stuff. Eventually got a day job in the advertising world.

My wife, who I met at NYU’s film program, she gravitated toward the camera department, she was an AC on “Boardwalk Empire” so I’m watching her do film while I’m going to an office every day. I just got out of the stream of things.

Scott: During that time in New York, were you writing scripts at all, or were you not writing at that point?

Justin: I was writing but for not seriously enough at the time.

I got a few scripts done. I did a few jobs on commission. But I wasn’t really satisfied with myself in terms of the work being put in.

Scott: The idea of going to LA, that was an all-in commitment type of thing.

Justin: Yeah. I quit my job when she came home one day and said she wanted to be a dentist. We put in our two weeks, and we moved a couple of months later. That was it. We worked for 10 years or so. We saved up.

Now, we’re going to take our savings and pay ourselves to take a year off to do what we want to do. The script that you read was the result of that.

Scott: When did you move to LA, what year?

Justin: We got settled early 2015 in Pasadena, LA proper…for about 90 days.

Scott: Apart from whatever academic training you had related to screenwriting, how have you gone about learning the craft?

Justin: Read as many screenplays as you can. That is a total education in itself. Read what is getting made. Any time you see a scene in a movie or on a television show, and you feel something as a result of that scene, figure out how they did that. Figure how they accomplished that visual emotion, linguistically.

Type in any movie, and then the letters PDF. You’ll find a huge library out there.

Scott: I’m glad to hear you say that because I don’t know how familiar you are with my blog or not. I harp on that all the time that there’s just a kind of learning that you can get by reading scripts that you can’t get in any other way.

Justin: Definitely. You get different styles, too. If you read the first page of “Days of Thunder,” it’s prose. It’s an entire book. Then, you read ‑‑ oh gosh, I don’t know ‑‑ Capote or something. It’s these little three, four word sentence scene directions. You’ll develop your own style.

Scott: This time of year is great for screenwriters. The Black List comes out, the Nicholl winning scripts announced, so they have a chance to read some of these scripts. The people who are responding to it in the here and now gives you a really good sense of what the contemporary sensibilities are.

Justin: You’re right. Different voices, different styles, and the more you’re exposed to them, the more opportunity you have to explore your own voice and land on your own style, so, again, I concur with you a hundred percent on that, read the scripts.

Here is video of Justin accepting his 2016 Nicholl Award in December of last year:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Justin and I dig into the Protagonist in his script “Death of an Ortolan”, a disgraced, isolated soul named Walter.

Justin is repped by CAA and Zero Gravity Management.