Interview (Part 1): Minhal Baig
I first met filmmaker Minhal Baig at the 2013 Black List Screenwriters Lab in Las Vegas. She struck me as a bright, ambitious, and talented storyteller. Since that time, I have followed Minnie’s progress with great interest. This week she is launching a Kickstarter campaign for a short film called Hala. It tells both a compelling and important story about a Muslim-American girl who faces the tensions between faith, family, and sexual exploration. This project is hopefully a first step toward a feature-length movie.
As I see part of the mission of this blog to support independent filmmakers, I took the opportunity to ask Minnie some questions about her background and what she envisions for the Hala project.
Here is Part 1 of our conversation:
Scott: What is your background?
Minhal: I was born and raised in Rogers Park, a small, diverse neighborhood in Chicago, by immigrant Pakistani Muslim parents. I had a fairly happy childhood. My parents knew I was the “artist” in the family, but they didn’t really expect that I’d pursue that professionally. I was always writing creatively, whether it was fiction, poetry or plays. At Yale, I chose to be an art major and studied painting for three and a half years. I also took classes in playwriting and screenwriting. By the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to tell stories, and that filmmaking combined my interests in art and narrative.
Scott: How did you find your way into writing?
Minhal: I found my way into writing through art. When I was really young, six or seven, my dad would bring home reams of paper from work — fax paper with perforated edges. At the hospital where my dad worked, they’d recycle the paper if it had any writing on it, so he would bring some home to me because he saw that I was interested in drawing. Eventually, my drawings were accompanied with words and they turned into longer stories. I spent my summers making elaborate picture books and sharing them with my friends at school.
As I got older, I got really interested in fan fiction. I always felt a little like an outsider at my middle school, so I retreated to the Internet to find friends. I found communities of people organized around their favorite books, television, anime and movies. These same communities had a lot of people writing stories using the characters from their fandoms. Those communities still exist on forums and blogs everywhere today, and they’re even more popular now because of social media. Back then, it was a cool little thing I did that nobody at school knew about.
Between the ages of 11 and 17, I wrote a lot of fan fiction — hundreds of thousands of words across dozens of stories for my favorite anime, videogames and TV shows. I posted my work online on a whim and suddenly there were people who responded to my work and wanted more. They’d leave positive reviews and share the story with other authors on the site. I had a small following on fanfiction.net for a few years. I’m too embarrassed to share my username but there’s still a few stories still posted, they’re from about ten years ago. At some point in high school, writing characters from preexisting stories didn’t appeal to me anymore. If I was writing thousands of words anyway, I might as well write my own characters.
In college, I took several classes in playwriting. I credit a lot of my development as a writer to the work I did in two classes, taught by Donald Margulies and Deb Margolin. They were phenomenal teachers. By the time I graduated, I’d written several full-length plays and a screenplay. I moved out to Los Angeles and started working at a talent agency, but continued writing plays when I could. Sometime after moving to LA, I shifted my focus to screenplays and I’ve been writing them ever since.
Scott: What are some influences in terms of movies, TV, and books?
Minhal: The first time I went to a theater, I watched Salman Khan swing on a chandelier and sing to his co-star and legendary Indian actress, Madhuri Dixit, in Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! These were the masala movies of Bollywood that my family saw at the small theater that played them. We soon migrated to watching American movies in the great effort to fit in. Jurassic Park was the first Hollywood film I saw in a theater and it was a life-changer. Movies could transcend national and cultural boundaries. They could be entertaining, universal and accessible.
Some of my favorite working filmmakers came out of the independent filmmaking movement: Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Gus Van Sant, Richard Linklater, Darren Arronofsky and Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, to name a few. Foreign filmmakers that I love: Asghar Farhadi, Wong Kar-Wai, Jean Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Jane Campion — there’s so many more. The directors that I admire the most have a unique perspective and/or point of view on the story they’re telling. I’m just going to go ahead and list some movies that have inspired me over the years, in no particular order: A Separation, Pan’s Labyrinth, Shame, Blue is the Warmest Color, Black Swan, Fight Club, Boyhood, Lost in Translation, Rachel Getting Married, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Spirited Away, In The Mood for Love, Margaret, The Fountain, Russian Ark, Blue Valentine, Once, Melancholia, Before Midnight, Mother, Children of Men, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fish Tank, Winter’s Bone, Psycho, Memento, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Network, The Graduate, Minnie and Moskowitz, Pieta, It’s a Wonderful Life, Pulp Fiction, Lawrence of Arabia, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, The 400 Blows, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, and The Shining. My favorite films of the past year or so: Whiplash, Foxcatcher, Nightcrawler, Wild Tales and Ex Machina.
In terms of television, I’ve really enjoyed Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, The Fall, Top of the Lake, Twin Peaks, Downton Abbey, Freaks and Geeks, The Killing, Louie, Futurama and The Golden Girls. I’ve just recently gotten into Bojack Horseman and Bob’s Burgers and really like them so far. When I was growing up, I watched a lot of anime, and still love some of them today: Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Paranoia Agent, Grave of the Fireflies, and every film to come out of Studio Ghibli, but especially Princess Mononoke.
I’ve also been influenced by videogames and comics. I grew up on role-playing games like Final Fantasy and Watchmen was one of my favorite comic books. The last video game I really enjoyed was The Last of Us and one comic that is currently blowing my mind is the new Ms. Marvel. There are too many books that I love, but The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is my favorite of all time.
Scott: I first got to know you when you were selected as one of six fellows for the first annual week-long Black List Screenwriters Lab in Las Vegas back in 2013. What was that experience like and what did you take away from the workshop?
Minhal: The Black List Labs was a really incredible experience. When I found out I was selected, I was back in Chicago, living with my family and working as a sales associate at Gamestop. It was all a little unbelievable for me at the time. Franklin flew out the six of us to Las Vegas for a whole week. We had group workshops and then one-on-one meetings with Brian Koppelman, Billy Ray, Kirsten Smith and you. We received notes on our scripts and workshopped them. The Labs was like screenwriting camp. Everyone there had a common love of story. Before Labs, I didn’t really have a community; after labs, the act of writing felt less lonely because I’d found out that even accomplished, professional writers had the same writing problems as me. My biggest takeaway from the Lab was the importance of revision, and being able to throw away something that was just ‘good’ so you could make it great.
I wrote a longer piece about my experience at the Black List Labs on Medium. You can read it here.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Minnie discusses her first feature length movie One Night.
About Hala: Hala, a sixteen-year old Muslim teenager, has a rich and complex inner world, which serves as an escape from her socially conservative home. When she meets Jesse, a boy from the skate park, she experiences a real and immediate connection. Hala must keep their relationship a secret from her religious parents. In their Islamic faith, dating and premarital sex are expressly forbidden. Her twin identities, however, inevitably collide, and not without consequences.
A teaser for the project Hala:
You can read more about the story here.
Minhal’s director’s statement here.
The Hala team here.
The movie’s website here.
Twitter: @minhalbaig.
Declare Your Independents! Support Minnie and her movie project Hala by donating to her Kickstarter campaign here. And spread the word!
