Interview (Part 2): Michele Atkins (2016 Nicholl Winner)

A 6-part chat with the writer of the winning script “Talking About the Sky”.

Michele Atkins wrote the original screenplay “Talking About the Sky” which won a 2016 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Michele about her background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to her.

Today in Part 2 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Michele and I delve into her Nicholl winning script “Talking About the Sky”, focusing on its Protagonist Walter Mackay:

Scott: Whatever path you took worked because you wrote this wonderful script “Talking About the Sky” which won 2016 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I’d like to jump into that if I can. Here’s a plot summary provided by the Nicholl.

“Walter Mackay is haunted by a shameful past. The next country music star working at a slaughter house discovers he has cancer. Thinking life isn’t worth living he has a spiritual experience and searches for his daughter.”

What was the original inspiration for your story?

Michele: Originally the story idea came from a couple documentaries I’d seen. One was on a country bluegrass singer/writer who was essentially told if didn’t stop drinking he’d die. He didn’t stop and he passed away shortly after that.

During that time, it was during like a two, three month period I saw another documentary about a guy that killed a bunch of family members in his car driving inebriated. After the fact the family really fought and wanted to clear his name that he actually wasn’t inebriated while he was driving.

I thought, “Gosh, didn’t the worse thing already happen?” Like you’re fighting after the fact that he wasn’t inebriated but they already did test proving that he was. So change in thinking can be difficult for those surrounding us as well.

The idea came about of how do people change? How does one person change and what tragedy has to happen to make someone able to go down a different road?

Scott: Fascinating how synchronicity works in our lives. Here you have these two documentaries you saw months apart, you pull those together and come up with what sounds like a central question or theme you were able to explore with the script.

Michele: I think so. I thought back to how I came up with the idea because it’s not on either of these people because they both drank. They both had alcohol in their system during their story and I wanted to be very careful that my lead character did not. I did not want to see Walter drink through this entire film, which he does not.

I wanted to see how he lived sober. Even though he changed, because of his experiences something more had to happen for him to decide to seek his daughter. Even though, he had some bad things happen to him it still wasn’t enough to try to repair his family.

Scott: That’s basically the announcement of the cancer is like his to adventure to start that journey, right?

Michele: Yes.

Scott: Your script introduces Walter this way. “His demeanor bears a weight, the kind held only by those who have gone through misfortunes that alter the way one carries themselves with each of his steps the burden of life seems to be lifted and dragged forward upon his body.”

You began the story with him in a visually arresting environment, which is a cattle slaughter house. Why that opening image?

Michele: I thought a lot about the luck or lack of luck we all have in life and what makes someone get the set of cards that they receive when we’re born.

How do you end up with the lucky life or the unlucky life? How are people born in a certain country or how is a cow immediately born for slaughter. Some people are born into poverty and some born into wealth… are these situations deserved?

My thought was there’s a bunch of uncontrolled circumstances that we’re born into and I liked the idea of these cows going off to slaughter. It wasn’t because they did anything right, it wasn’t because they did anything wrong. It was just their luck in life. Walter had a drinking problem and was that something that he brought about himself or is that just his luck in life. I wanted to compare the randomness.

Scott: It also sets the tone of dealing with this theme of death which runs through the story.

Michele: Yes.

Scott: In fact there are several animals. There’s a raccoon, a squirrel, and an intersection with a stag. That was a conscious thing on your part, right?

Michele: Yes, very much so. I went on a trip to visit my father for his 80th birthday party in North Carolina.

I lived in Tennessee for a portion of my childhood, and then moved back up to Buffalo, but my dad moved over the mountain to North Carolina.

There is a lot of road kill there and they’re in all different positions, some their mouths open, some are splattered, and there’s a lot of it.

I thought once again about people and animals luck in life. About how little control we really do have and how much control we actually think we do have.

Scott: I was going to ask about because I’ve lived in the South for much of my life and the script really is quite accomplished in creating that sense of authenticity, a place.

Michele: Thank you.

Scott: You had lived in Tennessee for a while?

Michele: Yes. We lived in front of a cow pasture in Johnson City. We had a cow pasture behind our house and a slaughterhouse in that pasture.

Scott: In reading the script there are a number of themes, but I was struck by two quite prominent ones. One is regret. In fact at a key moment in the script very late in the story after Walter has gone on his own hero’s journey, if you will, into his past, he says aloud to himself, “It might be easier, not having to live with regret on my mind.” Could you speak to that theme in the story, regret?

Michele: I think that the logline you read at the beginning describing Walter with his shameful past, really touches upon how Walter looked at some of the things that he did.

Although he was trying to change the way he lived and trying to reconnect with his daughter there were some things that he just could not forgive himself for.

Scott: Yes. He’s got a lot of things to look back on as failures. There’s a failed marriage to his ex‑wife Lynn, a failed relationship with his daughter Delilah, a failed musical career — he’d not only married to Lynn, but at one time they’d been in a pretty famous Country‑western duo. And then a major incident in his past which ended up putting him in prison.

The major drive in the story is him seeking out his daughter Delilah and in doing that it intersects him with people from his past in a way it feels like this journey of trying to find Delilah it services him having to face down these many faces of regret from his past. Is that an accurate description there of what you were going for?

Michele: I think it also had him face the music career he once had because when he has to seek out Delilah’s ex, that here is this famous country music star, Caleb Steele. It was once what Walter was, that he can no longer have, because he’s aged, and he’s at a different place in his life.

There’s a little bit of facing some of his demons, and some of the things that didn’t quite work out for him.

At this point he has his eye on the prize, which is seeking out his daughter, and trying to heal that relationship. That becomes the most important thing to him, is to try to do right by the people who actually have a place in his life at this point.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Michele and I delve into two other key characters in “Talking About the Sky” and their connection to the story’s theme of redemption.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Michele’s commercial reel, go here.

For my interviews with 24 other Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winners, go here.