Interview (Part 1): Sean Malcolm

My interview with the 2019 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Sean Malcolm wrote the original screenplay “Mother” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Sean about his background as a screenwriter, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Sean talks about how he was drawn to screenwriting and went about learning the craft as a “self-taught” screenwriter.

Scott Myers: Where did you grow up and what role did stories play in your childhood?

Sean Malcolm: I was originally born in Gainesville, Florida. A child of the late ’60s and early ’70s. My parents, as I often tell people, were part of a pack of wild hippies. We traveled around quite a bit, never in one place for more than a few years. I lived in a couple of different cities in Florida, then we moved out to Colorado. I spent some time in American Samoa with my dad and his new family in the late 70’s. Then I went back to Colorado, then back to Florida. Then I came out to California in the early ’80s and have been here ever since.

As far as stories, I remember when I was living in Denver in the ’70s — probably from the time I was seven onward, my mom loved going to the movies, and I would pretend to be asleep in her arms so she could sneak me in to all kinds of films, and not have to pay. There wasn’t a lot of ratings enforcement back then, so I saw everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Zardoz, Phantom of the Opera, Rollerball, Harold and Maude, all the mainstream, big, ’70s, golden‑era films. Bonnie and Clyde, the Godfather films, The French Connection, Apocalypse Now. I saw a lot of that stuff in the theater when I was very young, and I think it definitely had an impact on me, in terms of my love for film and stories.

I also read Grimm’s’ fairy tales, C. S. Lewis, and things like that. We didn’t have “Harry Potter” and all this YA stuff that kids have today, which is interesting, because my son, who is ten years old, is just discovering Harry Potter, and he’s super into it, which is great to see. It takes incredible writing and world-building to pull a ten-year-old off their devices these days.

So, I suppose I always loved films and great stories, and I always loved telling stories, too. I love setting up the framework and the context of a story, or a great conversation with a great payoff or a great punch line. Sometimes it drives my wife and my friends crazy because I need the audience to have all of the context. The details have to be right. If somebody starts telling their version of a story that I was part of, I might say, “Wait, wait, wait. That’s not exactly how it happened. Let me set the scene for you.” I’m sure it’s annoying sometimes, but that’s just who I am. The setup has to be right to give you the payoff! So yeah, stories have always played a big part in my life, whether films or novels, or anything else.

Scott: I was going to ask why screenwriting as opposed to novels and short stories?

Sean: It’s a great question. I never really wrote any short stories, and I only recently just tried my first novel. When I was younger, in my early teen years, I didn’t write, but I guess I was already creating stories, because I played a lot of role‑playing games. I was one of those “Dungeons and Dragons” geeks. We also played a game called “Top Secret” which was just a 007 version of Dungeons and Dragons. In those games, you would do things like design worlds and design maps and levels, and create goals and obstacles and characters, sometimes just in the moment as the game was unfolding. Sometimes we would play without anything, no dice, no books or maps, nothing but our imaginations. One guy would be the Dungeon Master, essentially God, and the others were the players. You just riffed for hours, setting up mysteries and characters and victories and tragedies. Sometimes God was fair, sometimes vengeful or capricious. We called them “make up games.” I really think that has a lot to do with my love of creating stuff on the fly.

Plus, I really enjoy the architecture of story, plot, setups, payoffs and that type of stuff. Maybe this goes back to my love of architecture in general. In fact, when I was younger, I used to think I might become an architect. “Architectural Digest” is one of the all-time best magazines to me. Anytime I see one, I have to pick it up.

But anyway, in the early ‘90’s, my first roommate, who was a little older than me, he was trying to write a screenplay. He had one of those old box-style amber-screened word processors that folded into a suitcase. I’m dating myself now, but I was so fascinated by that thing! It had a built-in floppy drive and everything. This was before most people had a PC or a Mac, let alone a notebook, and I thought it was so damn cool. Like if James Bond was a writer.

And he had the Syd Field book; I think it was called Screenplay. One of the originals. Now I’ve got a library of all those books that I’ve built up over the last two decades. But I was fascinated and started exploring it.

We would sit up drinking all night and just riff on story ideas. We were going to write a road trip film together; I think it was called “Road Trip to Vegas” or something. We were heavily influenced by David Lynch at that point. Twin Peaks was all the rage. And we wanted it to be super dark and noir and creepy, with a suitcase full of found money, and a femme fatale that kills Billy Zane in the end or something. But we never actually got beyond the outline phase.

I think about a year later in ’93 I just tried writing my own screenplay, because it seemed so cool, and I figured it looked pretty easy. Ha! But that was the era of the big spec sales, and so the idea that you could write 110 or 120-page script and suddenly sell it for a million bucks seemed incredibly possible.

I tried it, and that’s when I first realized I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I went out and got some books and started to get a little bit smarter about it. The first time, I tried it in WordPerfect. That was just a total nightmare, with all the rules around page breaks and format, and then I discovered Final Draft. I think I had Version 2; it came on like 15 diskettes. That was a lifesaver. Then, it was just really trial and error from there on out.

Scott: Yeah, ’93. You’re absolutely right. That was the heyday of the golden era of the spec script, between Shane Black and David Koepp and Joe Eszterhas and others, all those big specs sales. You say you accumulated a lot of these books.

I know when you did the Nicholl speech, you talked about yourself as being “a self‑taught screenwriter.” What was your process there? How did you teach yourself?

Sean: I mean it really was trial and error. There are certain books that resonated with me from an “unlocking story” perspective. I’m just actually looking at my library here. One that I love is “Stealing Fire from the Gods” by James Bonnet, which is very much about the Hero’s Journey. It’s got those elements that go all the way back to Greek story structure.

I’ve got a lot of older ones here, but the concepts are still timeless. “Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade” by Bill Froug who I think is, or was, a UCLA professor. “How to Write a Movie in 10 days.” What’s this one? “101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters.” I love Karl Iglesias. He’s done some great stuff. I actually had him do some script coaching with me on a script a few years ago. “Adventures in the Screen Trade” by William Goldman, and of course “Story” by Robert McKee. Everyone has to read that. I’ve got a few by Michael Hague. And “Save The Cat” I think is great for having a clear framework to work within, a common language that goes a bit beyond the simple three act structure.

I never took any classes, I just read a lot of books. I read a lot of websites, blogs, that kind of stuff too. Wordplayer.com by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio is phenomenal. You can learn so much there and it’s just incredibly generous of those guys to leave it up, even if they don’t update it much anymore. John August has a great site and podcast. And of course, reading as many scripts as I could get my hands on. Now days you can just go download screenplays all over the Internet. But in the old days, I would have to go down to Samuel French in Hollywood on Sunset. The first two scripts I bought were The Shawshank Redemption, because obviously, it’s Shawshank, and then Basic Instinct, because that was the highest-selling spec sale at the time.

Not because I wanted to write an Eszterhas film. It was more about, hey, if this is the gold standard for what the level of detail is, and how much or how little is required, and where the beats hit the page count and all that, then that’s the model I want to look at.

When I met my wife, she was at Universal in the physical production department. She would loan me her watermarked copies of scripts in production. So I read a lot of what they were shooting, in real time, from 2004 to 2013 or so.

A lot of that stuff was like Judd Apatow, raunchy comedies, different stuff like that, not in my wheelhouse but very successful box office stuff. It’s interesting, when you look at those scripts while they’re in the middle of production — and I think a lot of writers might do this and I was guilty of this, too — I know now I slaved away far too long over my verbiage and my descriptions, thinking of it as poetry and holding everything so precious.

But when you see working drafts and you see the golden rod versus the pink vs. the shooting copy… I mean there’s lots of typos and super-terse description, because they’re cranking it out in the moment. One of the things I have tried to do is become less precious about the words I’m slaving over, and spend more time on character and story development, and less time on the mechanics of the verbiage on the page.

Here is video of Sean accepting his 2019 Nicholl Award last November:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Sean talks about how a photograph was the inspiration for writing his Nicholl winning screenplay Mother.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.

For my interviews with 53 Black List writers, go here.