Interview (Part 1): Walker McKnight

My interview with the 2019 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Walker McKnight wrote the original screenplay “Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Walker about his background, 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, Walker discusses how he’s had to live with “imposter syndrome” in pursuing his dream of screenwriting and it wasn’t until his 8th script that he wrote “something that wasn’t abjectly terrible.”

Scott Myers: You live in Atlanta. Has that always been your home?

Walker McKnight: Nope — I’m from Milledgeville, Georgia, a smallish city about an hour‑and‑a‑half drive southeast of Atlanta. I stayed through my first two years of college, which I did at Georgia College. It anchors downtown Milledgeville.

From there I went to University of Georgia in Athens and finished up. Then a brief internship with the State Department in Geneva, and on to Atlanta in January 2000 for grad school in international relations, which kicked off a ten-year mini-career in defense consulting and international security (my film MA came later). I’ve been in Atlanta since then, minus three years in DC for work. It’s coming up on 20 years since I first moved to Atlanta.

Scott: Atlanta is an exciting place now, right? There’s a lot of production going on there.

Walker: It is. It’s sort of weird to see it. I joke with people about how when it first started happening…I can’t remember when they passed the tax cut that kicked all this off, but right at the beginning when film shoots would start to show up, and you’d pass them in your car and be like, “Oh wow, what’s that? I wonder what they’re filming?”

Now it’s so common that it’s just more like, “Oh, it’s another traffic backup.” But still good for the city. There’s still a ton of production coming here and happening and you see actors walk in and out of my little coffee shop where I write.

Friends often say, “Oh, this must be great for you as a screenwriter. Atlanta’s really blowing up.” I tell them, “Well, everything’s ‘below the line.’” It’s just production. All the creative is still in LA, for the most part. Things written and produced out there come her to shoot. It’s still nice for the city for sure.

Scott: Let’s jump back in time. In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you mentioned how your parents were a huge influence on you, reading books and renting VHS movies, you said, with monsters in them.

Walker: Right. I remember making that specific request a lot.

Scott: When did you first realize that there were people who were called screenwriters who actually wrote movies?

Walker: I don’t know. I think I must have always known on some level, but it’s embarrassing how long it took me to realize it was an actual career field. It didn’t occur to me that just anyone could write a screenplay until I was 30. I joked in the speech about how I still have no idea what I was doing in my 20s, but there’s some truth to it. It took somebody handing me Syd Field’s “Screenplay” to get me started. I remember watching the Oscars long before then, and there were screenwriting awards, but somehow I never made the connection as a career field. Maybe it seemed too lofty and distant a field. Unreachable.

But once I started reading the books that explained it step by step, it was like, “Oh, yeah. You can just do this, and here’s an act structure, and here’s all this stuff.”

Scott: In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you said that for the 15 years you were learning the craft of writing, an imposter syndrome was your constant roommate. In contrast to people who knew from the age of 10 or 12 they wanted to do this, you discovered it late. Could you talk about that observation a bit more, that imposter syndrome?

Walker: Part of it was me being insecure about coming to it late and imagining the only people who had success with it had been studying story and literature and writing since they were kids. Which isn’t true, and I know that now, but it was still something that affected me. It was a sort of selection bias — anytime that I would hear about some filmmaker, maybe not writers, but some filmmaker that I loved…you read about people like Steven Spielberg, or…God, I remember reading Robert Rodriguez’s memoir. And they’re 10 years old and they’re making movies in the backyard and they’re putting on shows and all this stuff.

And those are directors, not writers, but I think I conceived of filmmaking, and maybe screenwriting by association, as a domain of people who just had that magic innately from an early age. Or at the very least since college, taking creative writing classes and working at it.

I took my English lit requirements as an undergrad, but I just didn’t pursue these things. There was this feeling of “Who the hell am I to think I can do this?”

Even in the first screenwriting workshops I took at 30 — which is still not old — I was definitely on the older side of students there.

Some of this is also just core insecurity that is part of my personality. I put it all together and pigeonholed myself as somebody who started too late to have any success at it. What I didn’t consider was that being a voracious reader and movie lover since early childhood has been its own kind of education. And to be fair, it wasn’t like I talked myself out of writing — once I started, I never stopped. I couldn’t.

Scott: I sold my first script when I was 32, and I didn’t write my first script until I was 31. I had a similar trajectory as you.

Walker: That’s an awesome turnaround! You wrote your first one at 31 and sold one at 32. That’s amazing.

Scott: That was back in the day when things like that could happen.

Walker: Oh yeah, I guess. Spec market was a little different.

Scott: At some point, someone gave you Syd Field’s book, “Screenplay.” They thought you were a writer, or you’d expressed an interest in writing, or they just thought you’d be a good writer? What happened there?

Walker: It was my friend Colin. He and I had been big film buffs forever. He was the only friend that I had through high school and college who I could rely on to watch really out‑of‑the‑norm stuff with me.

He would find crazy stuff or we would just go to the video store and just pick out unconventional movies. We both subscribed to film magazines and we would read about newer, edgier stuff and seek it out.

I remember when Trainspotting hit theaters, there was only one theater in the whole state of Georgia where we could see it — that was in Atlanta. We would make those trips, two hours in the car just to go see original stuff on the screen because that was the only option.

There was definitely no streaming back then, and it sometimes take up to a year for the indie movies to reach us on rental.

Anyway, he knew how much I loved film, and he probably knew I wasn’t super‑excited about the career path I’d gotten myself into. He was also dabbling with writing, so he was just like, “Here’s this book. It might give you an outlet.” I think he just kind of knew.

Scott: You read the book and did you immediately connect with the idea of screenwriting?

Walker: Yeah. It was like I’d always been an addict, but I didn’t know drugs existed. Somebody just handed me the drugs and I was like, “Hey there!” It was off to the races.

I think I started trying to write my first script even before I was done with the book. Of course, I still didn’t know I was doing, so I started looking for workshops and… this was 2005 he gave me that book. Is that right? Yeah, about 2005.

I spent over a year on that first screenplay, thinking it was going to be the most brilliant thing anybody had ever read, and I was doing wonderful things and reinventing a genre…I had no idea that it would cause straight‑up nausea in people. It took the workshops to find that out. I signed up for two at the same time.

Those were the first two teachers I mentioned in the [Nicholl] speech, Jenna Milly and Michael Lucker, and they were both great. They managed to offer the perfect amount of constructive criticism about what I’d written while also being encouraging about the good aspects of it. And pushing me to keep going. “Oh, you have to write the next thing.”

I can remember Jenna said she was reluctant to tell students this, but her teachers at UCLA had told her that it took an average of eight screenplays for you to start writing good ones. That’s a difficult thing to tell a student, because a writer always needs to believe the thing they’re writing can be great, even if it’s the first or second. And there are exceptions to every rule, but it was right on the money with me — not until my eighth script did I write something that wasn’t abjectly terrible.

Here is video of Walker accepting his 2019 Nicholl Award last December:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Walker talks about why going to film school was a major benefit for him learning the craft, what script feedback he dreads the most, and what was the origin of his Nicholl-winning script “Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket.”

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

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