Interview [Part 2]: Frank DeJohn and David Hedges [2013 Nicholl Winners]

Frank DeJohn and David Hedges are one of five recipients of the 2013 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting for their historical drama screenplay “Legion”. It’s a terrific story set in the latter days of the Roman Empire and garnered a lot of attention for the duo including being hired by A&E to write “The One”, described as a “coming-of-age story of exploring Jesus’ early life and formative years as he comes to learn he is the Son of God and is destined for greatness.”

Frank and David have had an unusual path to Hollywood success, so I was pleased to be able to interview them at length about their respective backgrounds, their script “Legion,” and their approach to the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 2, Frank and David discuss some of the key characters in their script “Legion”:

Scott: Let’s talk about some of the key characters. The central figure is a soldier named Marcus Caelius. How would you describe his character to someone?

Frank: Our Caelius is a seasoned centurion about ready to retire when he shows up at a remote fort just as the Germans rise in rebellion. The fort’s commander dies and now Caelius is the most senior officer. If he stays, he’ll likely die. If he leaves the soldiers at the fort without a commander, they’re doomed. He makes the tough choice and stays.

Scott: Yeah, there’s that line on page 45 where Caelius says, “We’re not trapped. We choose to stay. We choose to fight.” That’s a line which is called back later. That obviously appealed to you, putting a protagonist at a crossroads like that and making a decision that, in some ways, would go against his best self-interest.

Frank: Absolutely. It’s really isn’t a debate about just whether or not they live, it’s a debate about what is the right thing to do in this particular moment.

Scott: This really is an archetypal hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell talks about the point of those stories is transformation. You’ve got that dynamic going on in “Legion”. Marcus Caelius enters into this fort where it’s really a pretty dissipated situation.

The people are grumbling and dissatisfied. He is squarely at the center of lifting the spirit of these people and getting them organized. Could you describe your thinking about why you made that narrative choice and how you went about executing that?

David: It’s a bit autobiographical for me, because I’ve seen the effect of bad leadership on morale in groups who constantly face life or death situations, and it’s catastrophic.

We wanted to make that a big point of the story: these terrible leaders had sapped the will out of all these soldiers. We could use our main character to bring it back.

Scott: What that does, of course, is it really drives home this underdog dynamic. The sheer numbers of the smaller group of Romans versus the tens of thousands of Germans.

David: It was very important to us for it to feel like the characters weren’t orating at each other, and that they weren’t distanced from us by 2,000 years. We wanted it to feel like you were there with them.

They’re the same people around us today. I really believe this. People that I’ve worked with on our SWAT team, they’re the same guys. The only difference is now they’re wearing Kevlar and carrying AR-15’s, whereas back then they were wearing steel helmets and carrying a gladius. Nothing has really changed.

Scott: So you’ve got the central character, you’ve got the situation, and you’ve got this whole other cast of characters. I was curious how you developed them. For example, there’s a young soldier named Justin. How did he come about? What was your thinking about this character, and what he brought to the story?

Frank: He’s a new officer. It’s his first assignment. He’s the great counterpoint to the war-scarred veteran, Caelius. He can’t wait to confront the enemy and capture glory. His first battle leaves him in shock, questioning his own courage. In the end he becomes a hero. Of all the characters he had the farthest to go.

David: If you recall, Frank, he was the character we had the most difficulty with.

Frank: We changed him up several times. [laughs]

David: He was the hardest character for us to find, strangely enough.

Scott: He plays an important role not only in terms of the innocence to experience dynamic you have at work in the story, but you need to have an outsider who comes in to have someone explain the situation to.

David: Now I recall what the problem was. The issue with that character before was that it was too much about his story, and not enough about Caelius. We had to find the right character to be able to balance that.

Scott: A fascinating character is Ferox.

Frank: That means “fierce” in Latin. I love the character because originally we wanted the barbarians, the Germans, to be fierce, kind of like ghosts out in the forest that we would rightly be afraid of. The Romans used auxiliary scouts, native scouts, if you want to use the American cavalry analogy.

We decided to create this guy from Britain who was a champion in his own country, and he becomes the barbarian in our midst that can translate what they’re up against. Although he says early on when Caelius asks him why he’s here, “I’m here because the Germans aren’t going to stop. They’re going to eventually end up in Britain.”

That’s part of the reason. The other is he’s like a gunfighter going to the baddest town in the old west to test himself.

Scott: Yeah, he’s a really fun character. With my interpretive set of tools, I look at these primary character archetypes, and he struck me as being very much a Mentor figure, because he understood the Germans, he understood the woods, and he had a macro view of the world.

David: Talking about characters as tools: we kept the Germans in the woods, hid them away from our main characters to make them frightening, so we needed Ferox to help explain them.

He is saddled with exposition, but luckily his character is enough fun that it works. Readers have challenged us on Ferox, asking if he is supernatural. Our official answer is he’s connected to the old world, the world that’s passing away with the advent of Rome and new thinking and science.

Tomorrow in Part 3, David and Frank delve into the rest of the primary characters in “Legion”.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

David and Frank are repped by UTA and BenderSpink.

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