Interview (Part 1): Vigil Chime (2017 Nicholl Winner)

My 6-part talk with the writer of the script “Bring Back Girl”.

Vigil Chime wrote the original screenplay “Bring Back Girl” which won a 2017 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Vigil about her background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to her.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Vigil and I talk about how her experiences as a youth who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria, and how she developed an interest in writing and filmmaking.

Scott Myers: You were born in Nigeria, relocated to the United States, Houston, Texas when you were 10. What was that experience like?

Vigil Chime: Coming from Nigeria, I have to say, I was so shocked. I was just in such culture shock. In fact, I don’t think I recovered until I left for college. It was just so stunning, the American landscape.

One of the things I remember in trying to share the experience with people is the straight line. I found everything was in a line. There was such order everywhere to what my 10‑year‑old eyes were looking at. The streets were ordered. There were things called lawns, grass. You will come to a light, and then if it’s red you stop, if it’s green you go.

It was just stunning for having come from a place where this would be the opposite. [laughs] There’s nothing in a straight line as far as the Nigerian landscape of when I was a kid is concerned, and there’s just chaos everywhere. I hope Nigerians do not take offense in what I’m saying.

As a 10‑year‑old child, I just found the entire American landscape was just so stunningly ordered. I just froze. I think it froze me spiritually. When you come into a country, your eyes are taking so many things in. That was the first things my eyes took in. That was one.

Secondly, the second shock was school. We were immediately enrolled at the elementary school that was closest to us. I just found that the children were horrifically mean because we were from Africa.

I learned that the word Africa was almost like an insult. If you call somebody an African it was an insult, just because of the negative impressions Americans maybe at that time had of Africa as a whole. For the fact that myself and my siblings were Africans, we just had a very, very rough time in school. That didn’t help.

What I’m saying to you is that that experience in particular, elementary school and the meanness of the children, was what really got me going as a writer. In trying to escape this place where there was no love, all I did was just started reading. Reading became my escape. I would just go to school, deal with it as best I could, and then come home.

I didn’t go outside because the children in the neighborhood basically were the children who were also in school. It was extremely tough for me and being a female, being a child, very tender, innocent. It just felt like the neighborhood was against my siblings and I, so it just made me escape into books.

This was the beginning of my evolution, I think, as a storyteller. I read so much. Everything I put my hands on was a book. Every bit of allowance I received from my mom I threw back into books. My favorite place to go was the local library where I just went from A to Z as far as books. I would just start from A and I would just read to Z. I just did that.

I focused on my work. When I say my work I mean my schoolwork. I was very good at school just because I had focused on it. It was the one thing I thought I owned. If I could get my As and my 100s that gave me a little room to be somebody at school. And so was reading the books, really, really just disappearing into stories. I think the segue became that eventually it made sense to me that I myself would write stories.

Scott: You went to University of Houston as an undergraduate and studied literature.

Vigil: Yeah. I studied a whole bunch of stuff. My father is an architect, so the first thing I thought I would do would be an architecture. No, no, no that was the second thing. The first thing I really wanted to do was to be an astronaut. I was such a Trekkie. I watched Star Trek when I was a child and I gravitated towards being a Trekkie because I felt humans were just so wicked. I looked forward to sci‑fi and anything outside of earth was just what I loved to read, and so I thought when I grew up I would be an astronaut.

That I would someday be captain of my own ship, but when I got to college my first class was physics. As an astronaut to be, you had to take a lot of physics classes and I was just horrible in physics. I could not understand what the physics teacher was talking about, just did not get physics at all.

I dropped out of that department that semester. I said, “No, I’m kidding myself.” That was when I went to the architecture department. It was fine. It was creative. It was really OK.

The only problem was we spent so much money buying the material we needed to complete our projects and I had no money. I didn’t know how to get it, so this was the reason I left the Architecture Department, because I could not afford to always complete these projects that we would have to do.

That was now I floated to the English Department. It’s cheap in the sense that you wrote papers, so this is cheap. My expenditure was based really on getting the books for my semester. Once I got the books then I was OK. I didn’t have to continue to come out of pocket buying anything. That was it. Of course, English was so easy. It actually made me feel bad.

I just felt like life should be a little tough. When I was in English class it was so easy for me that I felt a tinge of guilt. I was like, “I don’t think it should be easy. I think that school should be hard,” but it wasn’t. I had so much fun. I loved reading. I loved discussing. I loved writing these papers. It was just fun, but it was easy. I had to just make that OK spiritually.

Scott: I read somewhere where you had a friend who said he was going to go to Southern California and study film studies, and that had an influence on what you did next.

Vigil: Yes. Writing was the first degree. I’m coming towards the end of the degree, and so we students are all thinking, “What are we going to do next?” My classmate and friend D. Rogers was like, “Vigil, you’re going to New York, right?” Right. I had come to New York the year before for my uncle’s wedding.

I loved New York. I love New York. I said to Rogers, “I’m going to go to New York. I’m going to live in New York.” That was what he was talking about. He was jumping on that. “If you’re going to go to New York,” he said, “what do you want to do?” I said, “Well I don’t know. I suppose I could do English on a Masters level, I guess. That would be like the trajectory for an English writing major.”

He said, “Look, you are going to be in a City that has the two best film schools. It’s at NYU and then at Columbia. Why don’t you do film?” Up until that time I had never, I didn’t even think people went to school to go to film school. I just thought you go to the theater and the film just is there.

It didn’t occur to me that this was a profession one could do at school. When he said it, it resonated. I thought, “I can make up stories that way.” I looked at it as still fiction, but with movement. Now audiences could see it as opposed to if you wrote a book. People would have to read the book. I just thought that I was taking my storytelling just one level more with film.

If you’re trying to get people to consume your work, it made sense that more people would consume a film than would go and pick up a book and read it. That was my thinking. Without ever having considered film, my friend Rogers mentioned this thing to me.

It was just like wow and it just made sense. When I came to New York I took the year off. I arrived in 1990. I took ’90 off. It gave me time to come into the City and apply to graduate schools the following year. I applied for ’91 to both NYU and Columbia and got into both. In fact, NYU gave me a little scholarship for whatever reason, I don’t know. I went to visit the two campuses.

I went all the way downtown to see NYU. Then I saw that there was no grounds. There was no campus. It was weird. Then I came uptown and I went to Columbia, passed through the gates and saw these amazing grounds that is Columbia’s grounds. I saw grass. I thought, “I’m going to go to this school.” I choose Columbia only because it had a campus. That was it. That’s how I ended up at Columbia University.

Scott: You did film studies there, then segued into your making a series of low‑budget movies, writing and directing them. How did that evolve?

Vigil: I’m a screenwriting concentrate at school. Why did I choose that as opposed to directing concentrate? Again, it came down to finances. To be a screenwriter, all you had to do was, at the end of your time at Columbia, you had to just write a final project, and that was paper.

I thought, “OK, I can afford paper.” If you were a directing major, you’d have to go direct something, and I just didn’t know how I would amass a small fortune to go shoot a film, nor was I a producing concentrate. Writing, again, it just made sense that I would be a screenwriting concentrate.

But, when I left school, I had no idea what to do. It’s really sad to say, but I don’t think that school really prepared me for life after school. I had no idea how to make a film. All I knew was how to write one. I stumbled into temping for a little while because I still had to pay my bills.

I didn’t know what I’m supposed to do after school, but I kept writing. The funny thing is, I just kept writing. I would write something, I would put it on my shelf. I wrote all these features, and I just shelved them. Then, after a while, instead of shelving the films, I now started writing smaller, smaller things.

I said, “If you make them small, you can shoot them.” I went and bought a film camera and I taught myself how to shoot these stories, how to edit these stories, how to produce them. This is my experiences of filmmaking. Honestly, it’s weird to say, but making films came after school.

That was how I learned the production of film. The writing of a film was taught already, but the production of film, it affected my writing, actually. I would write things because I’m not producing them. I’m not going out to shoot them. There was no care, really, in the writing of those stories that I was not going to go out and shoot myself.

They were huge, those stories. Big, they were outlandish. But when I started producing film, when I started directing them, when I started editing them, this process somehow affected the writing. It was bizarre. [laughs] It was really bizarre. I now know, if I can’t get the location, I’m not going to write it in the story.

I started writing things for practical purposes. If I can get it, then I’ll write it in. No longer was I moved, you can say, by story. I was more concerned with, “After we write this thing, can we go shoot this thing?” It really affected the stories I started writing.

My stories became smaller and more real, I would say, and very manageable. It was all because I started shooting and editing and producing my stuff.

Scott: You were wearing all those different hats, and that was affecting the screenwriting.

Vigil: Yeah. That affected screenwriting. Absolutely.

Here is video of Vigil accepting her 2017 Nicholl Award in December of last year:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Vigil and I dig into her award-winning script “Bring Back Girl.”

Vigil is repped by Elevate Entertainment.

For my interviews with 27 other Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting writers, go here.

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