Interview (Part 3): Cesar Vitale (2017 Black List, Nicholl Winner)
My 6-part talk with the writer of the script “The Great Nothing”.
Today in Part 3 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Cesar and I talk about death as a theme in movies including his script “The Great Nothing”.
Scott: Obviously, in a story where you want a pair two people up, in this case Dan and June, you’ve got to figure out some way to do that. The way you achieved that I thought was very clever, which is that June is not doing very well in school. In fact, she’s in danger of having to repeat a grade.
There’s a character in the story who’s had to repeat the grade twice and has been socially ostracized, and so this becomes a really negative thought in June’s mind. Through a set of circumstances, Bill is a colleague or an ex‑colleague because Dan no longer teaches at the university.
Dan has this idea that he can tutor people to make money for his drug habit, and June finds this flier that Bill brought home. One thing leads to another, and she basically hires Dan to write papers for her at school. How did that whole mixture of locking these two characters together? Was that problematic, or was that easy figuring out, or how did you come up with that idea?
Cesar: That went through several changes and different drafts, and there were versions where she was already a fan of Dan’s work. She had read his book. There were versions I played around with where she was forced to take lessons with him because her father was like, “You’re not doing well in school, so you’re going to work at home with a private tutor.”
Ultimately, I think the version that ended up on the final draft, the version where June herself sees the flier and goes after Dan, was the most effective because she’s the driving force behind that decision. I think that’s very important, that she was the spark that ignited the relationship in the story, and the whole story that follows.
Scott: At first I was thinking, “Well, he’s an author. His creativity’s stymied,” so my mind was going to like movies like Finding Forester, Wonder Boys, or Field the Dreams where a younger character connects with, intersects with an older character who’s a creative, and the creative is having some sort of writer’s block.
There’s a bit of that going on here, but, really, I think a more interesting parallel from the movie standpoint is in the Pixar movie Up, where Carl is this guy who’s basically stringing out his days, and a young person comes and, in effect, revitalizes him.
This story doesn’t have quite that tone, but, in effect, June does at least create someone that Dan can focus on, and at least find some sense of meaning in that relationship. Is that fair to say?
Cesar: Yeah. I hadn’t thought about the comparison with Up before, but that’s interesting. I think that she’s the one that has the bigger arc, that she’s the one that changes for the better. That’s the clearest arc in the story. But Dan changes too, in the sense that he finally does something that’s not selfish.
At the end, he finally decides to go in and help someone for no other reason than he started to care about that person. That is growth, but I would say…Obviously it’s not just for me to say. Everyone that reads and, hopefully, one day watches the film can have their own interpretation, but I think that, to the very end, one thing that didn’t change about Dan was his fear of dying.
He starts the film terrified of the fact that he is going to go extinct, essentially, but the silver lining’s that, before that happened, he got to help someone who’s not dying, who has their whole life ahead of her, and I think there’s some beauty to that. But by the end he’s just as scared as he was at the start.
Scott: Yeah. Obviously, I think June does go through the larger arc. I didn’t mean to suggest that Dan doesn’t, he does have that selfish to selfless bit of business there.
Cesar: Absolutely. Yeah.
Scott: I went to Divinity School and studied religion, and I’ve always been fascinated with the meaning of life, and, as a result of that, how does death help define life, and how do we deal with that?
Then, later on in your script, you bring in Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with A Thousand Faces,” which is a huge influence on me, too. I was quite interested when one of the larger sequences in the story is when June gets an end‑of‑year assignment in school in which he’s going to have to be doing a 15‑minute video presentation on the afterlife.
When did that idea arise in the creative…? I mean, it’s natural. You’re dealing with the story of death so well. I hear people have come up with this concept of the afterlife. Well, why not take that on? When did that arise, and how did that arise in your thinking creatively?
Cesar: That was there from pretty early on. The essence of the story has always involved having these two characters explore the concept of — not necessarily the afterlife, but at least of death — and the two interviewing people who have very different views of what happens after they die was a cool way of exploring that, I thought.
So the interview with different religious figures, and people like Dan who believe in nothing, and people who are agnostic that don’t know or don’t think about it ‑‑ that was there from early on. That was the way that I found to explore those issues. Like you, I’m also personally very interested in them, and that was a way to bring that to story format.
Scott: You did a cool cross‑section of interviews. There’s Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, some weird unnamed…
[laughter]
Cesar: Some weird unnamed religion. Yeah.
Scott: How much research did you have to do on that front, or was this just stuff that you had accumulated and aggregated over your life of just reading?
Cesar: Some of it was stuff that I had accumulated, that I knew from my life. Some of it I did a little bit of research to make sure I wasn’t saying something that was blatantly wrong about this or that religion, because I’m not religious myself.
The scene doesn’t dive deep into any system of beliefs or any religion. It’s just very surface in a lighthearted way. So I didn’t go too deep on research to write that… just some reading to make sure that I wasn’t saying anything that was very, very, very wrong.
Scott: You talk about how, basically, for the first half of act two, June is resisting. Still trying to maintain those masks, the hyperactivity. Then, at some point in her relationship with Dan and things going on in her life, she begins to open up, and actually even asks Dan what it’s like to be dying. If you don’t mind, I’d like to read this one side, his response to that question because it’s starkly beautiful, I think, and just want to get your reaction to it.
“Dan replies to her: “Like standing on a very tall cliff with the city lights shining way down below your feet. And you look down at it all, and it slowly dawns on you that every one of those window lights shining down there is a life.
“‘A person with their own hopes, dreams, demons, thoughts, and quirks that you’ll never know about. And it’s so beautiful, and you realize you want nothing more than to jump down and dive into this ocean of light and life shimmering down there, but you can’t. You can’t, so you just watch them from far away, and it’s really lonely.
“‘Then you turn back, and there’s a guy standing right behind you in scrubs, and he’s like, ‘Hey Dan, guess what? You have cancer, you piece of shit.’’” When I read those words, I’m just curious what your thoughts and feelings are when you hear those words.
Cesar: That was a fun mini monologue to write. I think at the heart of it is what I think Dan is feeling at that moment and, I imagine, what a lot of people that are terminally ill must feel, which is a sense of detachment from society in general:
Everyone’s going around about life all around you, and making plans for the future, and, “What am I going to do next year,” etc, and if you’re dying, you can’t really feel a part of any of that because society works under this misconception that we don’t die. That we live forever. Everyone goes around and lives and makes plans like they will live forever.
Thankfully I don’t know this from experience, but I imagine that, when you find out that you have a very limited window to live, you must feel a very strong sense of detachment, because you can’t play this game of pretending anymore. You can’t look away from death. So you feel a little bit like, “I’m not part of this society anymore. Everyone is carrying on and I just don’t matter. It’s just a matter of time until I literally stop existing.”
That was what was behind the whole serious part of the monologue. I didn’t want to end on such a depressive note, and I was afraid that to leave it there would be a little too dark. Hence, the joke at the end.
Here is a video featuring the 2017 Nicholl winning writers receiving word of their awards including Cesar:
Tomorrow in Part 4, Cesar and I delve into the Protagonist of his script “The Great Nothing”
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Cesar is repped by APA and Untitled Entertainment.
For my interviews with 25 other Nicholl winning writers, go here.
