Interview (Part 3): Elizabeth Chomko (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Elizabeth Chomko wrote the original screenplay “What They Had” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Elizabeth about her background as a writer and her award-winning screenplay.

Today in Part 3, Elizabeth and I delve more deeply into her script “What They Had”:

Scott: There’s an aside that Bridget has early on with Emma which sums that up. She says, “It’s about distance and things, you know. It’s a long journey, honey very long for us. Maybe it’s possible that journey might’ve run its course, or maybe it’s the time when you have to feed yourself first for a change, maybe for the first time ever. Which I know is not easy for anybody or for me.”

“Feeding yourself first means people you love are going to go hungry. Don’t think for a second it isn’t very hard for me.”

It seems like into this unsettled state, her mother getting loose, is like a Call To Adventure. It’s almost like the universe is saying, “You need to deal with this stuff.”

Elizabeth: Sure, yeah, I think so. I didn’t have that awareness at the time. I wrote it on instinct. I’ve never thought about writing from a screenwriterly perspective. I still always write what feels right without thinking too hard about it. Especially with a first draft.

But yes, Bridget is confronting the demons of her past, and also witnessing what is possible. That journey inspires her to make the biggest change, the change she could never have imagined making before.

Scott: That comes across very well in the script. She goes home to the Midwest. She’s going to be with her brother, with a guy that had a thing for her back in school. That’s confronting some of those issues there from her past. Then also, her father, Burt and her mom, Ruth.

There’s a family reunion in the hospital after they find Ruth and bring her back. Burt, you get a sense of his character right off the bat because he keeps saying, “She’s fine. She’s fine. She’s fine.”

Later on, as much of a stubborn character, he’s a mentor figure. He says to Bridget, he’s not shy about opinions, he says, “I’ll tell you what your problem is. California, that’s what. Reading the paper, people out there don’t know how to hard earn money to be self-actualized. What the heck is that?”

He says, “You know who you are. I’m a husband, a father, an antiques dealer, a Catholic. I know it. I never once had to think about it.” He’s got this remarkable contrast. Bridget is in this state of coming undone or questioning herself versus this guy who is filled certainty. He’s cocksure. She’s unsure.

Elizabeth: Yes, exactly. Very well said.

Scott: She even has an opportunity to dress up and act a little fanciful with a potential old flame character to explore that aspect of her life. In a way, he said it, that she’s going to go back in time into the past and explore these “demons” in her past.

Elizabeth: Yes. I would say if I had to give this script a type or genre — it’s a coming of age story, coming of age at 50. And it’s a love story. There is certainly a conventional love story in Bert and Ruth, but it’s also Bridget falling in love with herself for the first time.

Scott: That comes across. There’s two asides to this love thing going on her relationship with Ruth and relationship with Burt.

You’ve got so many touching scenes. One is a scene where she and her mother are stripped naked in her shower, Bridget’s helping Ruth wash her hair in the shower. I was wondering, was that fictionalized or was that something that came from one of the family anecdotes? It’s quite moving.

Elizabeth: Thank you. That’s me and my grandmother. I volunteered to give her a shower one day. It’s a precious memory for me. How she came in and out of the past and present — it almost felt like her mind was this record that kept skipping. She had six seconds in each moment. Then her memory would reset.

I took that moment, and gave it to Bridget, and fit it into where I was at in the story. It felt like it had to be in there somewhere. Again, I didn’t write with an outline. I just sat down and told the story.

The shower scene from “What They Had”

Scott: Someone said that by the time a person gets college age, they will have read, heard, or seen 10,000 stories in their life.

Elizabeth: That doesn’t surprise me.

Scott: A lot of that stuff is instinctual. We intuit it based upon all that material we’ve ingested. Life doesn’t happen in three act structure, but your story has three acts. She starts off at her home. Then, she travels back to the Midwest, and she comes back.

Elizabeth: Exactly. The stories that move us all have a beginning, middle, and end. Instinctually, we get the rhythm of that. I think everybody has that instinct. We know the rhythm of storytelling without having to read a book, or study it, or even think it over. We’re always telling stories. It’s how we communicate — because it’s effective.

Scott: I want to go back to that scene in the shower. Not to get too highfaluting here or to suggest you weren’t intentional about this, but stories open themselves up to interpretation. There’s a physicality to it that’s obvious that maybe helps ground Bridget from that conceptual world. Being stripped naked, a layer of her life being pulled away. In that moment, a visual way of suggesting that she is deconstructed. She’s going into herself and removing some of those distractions. Is that a fair assessment?

Elizabeth: That’s definitely fair, thank you. I love the fact that you’ve thought about that. It’s so cool to hear how the things we just spit out evoke something in other people.

It’s amazing how little things can touch us. And how the little thing that touches one person maybe only touches that one person, but it touches them tremendously. I am constantly surprised by how many different things people pick out as being the thing in this script that touched them most.

Scott: There’s another small moment which really grabs you as a reader. My father had Alzheimer’s, too. “Ruth’s face searches the memory for more behind her closed eyes. Then suddenly, her face goes slack. Her eyes pop open blank. Her mind has “reset.” She’s lost the memory. Her face tenses. It’s the anxiety of not knowing who she is, where she is, and why the hell she doesn’t know these things.”

It’s rather novelistic, yet it’s very impactful. How important was it for you to go into Ruth’s experience and put the reader inside what she was experiencing with her Alzheimer’s?

Elizabeth: Very. I’ve observed my fair share of people with Alzheimer’s. The way it presents seems to be wide-ranging.

I wanted to be very exact about Ruth. I wanted her to feel authentic; I wanted to capture my grandmother’s spirit. Most of all, though, I wanted to make absolutely certain that she wasn’t this “stock” Alzheimer’s character, that there was more to her than her memory loss. It bugs me when people read the logline and imply that Alzheimer’s has been done already. As though a full, round, complicated human being who has been molded by decades of life experience gets diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and suddenly it’s all they are. There are seven stages of the disease, they all present differently. And the people with Alzheimer’s are as unique and varied as the people who don’t have Alzheimer’s. If you write them that way, their stories are endless. Almost every family has somebody with memory loss.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Elizabeth and I talk some themes at play in the script “What They Had”.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2 here.

Elizabeth is repped by ICM Partners and MXN Entertainment.

Twitter: @elizabethchomko.