Interview (Part 2): Cesar Vitale (2017 Black List, Nicholl Winner)
My 6-part talk with the writer of the script “The Great Nothing”.
Cesar Vitale wrote the original screenplay “The Great Nothing” which not only won a 2017 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, it made the 2017 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Cesar about his background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl and being on the Black List has meant to him.
Today in Part 2 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Cesar and I dig into his Nicholl Award winning script “The Great Nothing”:
Scott: Let’s dig deeper into both Dan and June because they really are at the heart of this story. The central character, Dan Hopkins, who wrote a book called ‘The Great Nothing’, which is, of course, the title of your script.
You mentioned that he’s a professor of nihilism, this book is about nihilism. In fact, the first words we hear being read from the book by a college professor are these: “Loneliness in the face of death is the defining trait of humankind.”
Apart from Dan being terminally ill and having a background where he teaches nihilism, unpack his character a little bit more. What are other circumstances going on in his life, when we first meet him?
Cesar: I think he’s pretty much someone that’s given up the second we meet him. I think he’s someone that spent his whole life dealing with death every day as his job, but there was always this distance.
It was a hypothetical thing that he studied and he wrote about, but the second it became real was the second he realized that everything he preached about, the nihilism and the meaninglessness and whatnot, was all painfully accurate, much more so than he ever thought before. He realizes he was right. That there really is no point in him getting up in the morning, or shaving, or doing anything, because he is just waiting around to die.
So suddenly, all that hypothetical pessimism that he used to preach in his books becomes real in his life, when he is diagnoses as terminal. So by the start of the film, he has no idea how to deal with that. He just gives up.
Scott: He has some money, but he’s using it for a character that we’ll talking about later. He’s a drug addict, a heroin addict. At first, all we know is that he was a very successful author. In fact, there are requests for him to go speaking, and he deletes those emails, essentially a shut‑in.
He takes to watching videos of himself, and going to college to hear someone talk about his books, which is interesting. I want to talk to you about what that motivation was. Why do you think he is basically peering into his past?
Cesar: He doesn’t have kids. He doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have a wife. He doesn’t have anyone in his life, so these last few months of his life he spends trying to relive the past, looking back on the days when he was popular, and when he was writing those books, and everyone was praising him for being this genius and whatnot.
I think it’s kind of pathetic when you’re looking at it objectively. He’s trying to recapture something that’s not coming back because he has nothing going for him in his present life. I think that’s why he does that.
Scott: This is a quote from one of the videos you have in the script. “Someday, we’ll all die alone under a godless sky. Humans revolt against meaninglessness. It’s our nature, and with good cause, too. It’s insulting that we live to die, that we get to know that we die as we live. It’s almost degrading.”
That’s a good example of how he understood it at a conceptual hypothetical level, but, in his real life experience, as the cancer is taking a toll on him both physically and…, it is degrading. He’s literally degrading in a physical sense at this point, isn’t he?
Cesar: Yeah, exactly. It’s the difference, like I mentioned earlier, between the hypothetical awareness of death that he had while writing his books, and that we all have, really ‑‑ we all know that we’re going to die ‑‑ but it’s that distant thing that’s waiting far, far ahead where you don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow they’re going to invent a pill that you don’t die. You don’t really think about it — you put it in the back of your mind. It’s the difference between that and actually having a date, like “you won’t make it to Christmas.”
He can’t give interviews about death anymore when he knows it’s coming and it’s coming really fast. That’s the discrepancy between pre‑cancer Dan and post‑cancer Dan. Death went from becoming a distant, almost hypothetical thing to a very real and inescapable reality of his life.
Scott: You start with the Dan character. Then you said it was like a natural instinct for this June Morgan character to emerge. She’s 13 years old. She’s experienced death, but in a way that’s different than Dan. How you would describe her and her life circumstances at the beginning of the story?
Cesar: Until the halfway point of the script, until the midpoint, she’s pretty much deflecting. There’s a whole persona to her ‑‑ the irony, and the jokes about her mother’s death, and a whole hyperactive personality — that is just not real. It’s just the way that she learned to cope with her mother’s death, because her father’s not there for her. She doesn’t have anyone to talk her through what’s going on, so her natural reaction is to just put on a face, put on a mask.
She starts off like that. Then, as the story goes on, the mask eventually falls off. We see that she’s in a lot of pain and she has no one to guide her through this and teach her what it means to lose someone.
Scott: Yeah. She’s deflecting, she’s hyperactive, running a mask, basically trying to busy herself so she doesn’t really have to go into the processing.
Cesar: Mm‑hmm, exactly.
Scott: We do see her…In fact, the script opens with her talking to someone, essentially her deceased mother’s grave. It makes sense from a character standpoint, but you also have a benefit as a writer in that, because she “talks” to her mother at the grave, you get a chance to reveal what’s going on in her inner thoughts and feelings.
Was that part of your thinking at least? Not only just that she would be seeking out her mom, but also that it gave you an advantage of letting us open up and see what she is inside?
Cesar: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think half of a writer’s job is usually trying to come up with innovative ways of delivering an idea or an emotional beat. You want to avoid sentences like, “You know what I think about you?” and stuff like that, and try to get across how someone is feeling without having them state to another person how they are feeling.
When I came up with that first scene, I thought it was a nice way of doing that, to have a conversation that would be very natural and something that we’ve seen before a lot of times, with a character telling another one about their day and a dream they had, but then you have this little twist on this trope, which is that one of the characters is dead. So it’s really a monologue.
Scott: It also becomes a runner because she visits her mother’s grave pretty frequently through the story, so you get to track her emotional development in some respects by these monologues. It’s also a setup for another gravesite scene at the end of the movie, but I will talk about that later. What about June’s father, Bill?
Now, obviously, June’s mother died in this sudden senseless car crash, and that impacts Bill as well. What’s going on with him at the beginning of the story and how has that impacted his relationship with June?
Cesar: Bill was a tricky character to write because, in some sense, he’s an antagonist — and he’s certainly an antagonistic force to June. He’s the thing standing in the way of her getting over what happened…Well, maybe not standing in the way, but he’s not certainly not helping.
But the thing about him is that he can’t be such a bad character and such a negative influence on June that you just hate him, because he’s not a bad person. At the end, he finds redemption and it must feel earned. You can’t feel cheated that he found redemption because you hated him so much at the start, but he also can’t be too good for June because, otherwise, there’s no drama there.
So he needed to be trying his best and failing, to the point that he is posing a hazard. He’s doing damage, but not in an evil way. It’s just that he’s at a stage of depression where he can’t help but damaging his daughter by not being there for her.
Scott: He’s consumed with doing a book of photography. His wife was a photographer and that becomes his obsession. In the same way that June is deflecting by her hyperactivity and just busying herself and putting up that mask of defensiveness with his terrible comments, his way of deflecting from dealing with the grief is this book, right?
Cesar: Yeah, exactly. The longer he works on the book and the more he obsesses about it, the less he has to think about the fact that he lost his wife.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Cesar and I talk about death as a theme in movies including his script “The Great Nothing”.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Cesar is repped by APA and Untitled Entertainment.
For my interviews with 25 other Nicholl winning writers, go here.
