Interview (Part 3): Sam Baron (2014 Nicholl Winner)

Sam Baron wrote the original screenplay “The Science of Love and Laughter” which won a 2014 Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting. Sam and I had a great conversation which I will be sharing with you this week in 6 parts.

Today in Part 3, Sam delves more deeply into the script’s Protagonist character:

Scott: One of Daniel’s character traits is how he goes about his life. He’ll observe a situation, pull out his iPhone, then record his thoughts as a voice memo, basically starting each one with a stand‑up comedy idea. That not only reflects his interest in comedy, but it’s also a great narrative device because you can externalize through dialogue what his character is feeling and thinking inside. Do you remember coming up with that idea, how you hit on that? Were you thinking, wow, this is a great idea, to be able to talk about himself?

Sam: I didn’t think of this character as being someone who was very comfortable sharing his innermost thoughts and feelings with his friends or anything. He has one friend character in the movie, but even that friend is sort of estranged from him. He doesn’t have a close confidante. So yes, I wanted in a way to get inside his head, and that particular habit is something which I do every day. When I have an idea, or I observe something, I pull out my iPhone and record a little note to myself. So I was just doing that one day and I thought, “What if he does that?”

Scott: You mentioned something that I thought was quite interesting, that Daniel is a kind of guy who takes the first thing. There’s another Disunity aspect of his life that he’s grown really weary of this job as an academic that he went at without exploring other options. It reminded me of that Joseph Campbell quote where he says, “There’s perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.” Daniel has climbed the wrong wall, hasn’t he?

Sam: Exactly, or at least, he doesn’t know. This is the interesting thing about having always chosen the first options in life — you have nothing to compare anything to. He’s a guy who clearly has scientific impulses, and science is all about comparison. But always choosing the first thing actually requires a huge leap of faith — to believe that the first thing might also happen to be the right thing. What do you do if the world is telling you that you have a great career, but your gut instinct is telling you to pull away, and you have nothing else to compare it to?

Scott: Actually, there’s a similar way that that plays out in another area. With regard to his sexuality.

Sam: Yes.

Scott: Basically, Emma is the only woman with whom he’s had sex.

Sam: Correct, yes.

Scott: And so, he’s got this lingering concern, even fear, that he’s not really experienced all that he can on that front. That’s your point. It’s how can you compare if you’ve only had one woman? Especially in this current situation where they’re not even being intimate because she’s so angry at him. We see him making these tentative efforts in the course of the narrative to play around on the sexual front. Like he kind of cyber-stalks some young woman. He almost has an affair with another woman. Yet, on a very pragmatic level, sex being about procreation, he does not want to or is at least deeply dubious about having children. There’s a whole mixed bag of things going on with regard to sexuality and Daniel. Could you maybe talk a bit about what you think is going on there with him?

Sam: It’s the same thing as on the career front. This is a guy who is deeply unhappy and doesn’t know why, because he’s just taken the first thing that’s come along in every field of his life. Because he lacks those comparisons, he finds it very hard to figure out what to change in his life, where the change needs to be. I mirrored that in all sides of his life, to make his decision over whether or not to leave this woman, who he’s spent years and years with, who now has cancer, as difficult as possible. He knows nothing, except that he’s miserable and it’s making her miserable. Should he change his career? Should he change his relationship? Should he change something else? There’s no way to diagnose it with science. It’s ultimately just about him getting in touch with his gut instinct once and for all. I don’t want to over analyze it, but I guess that’s the mix that’s in there.

Scott: Then, sexuality is also, we could use that as a bridge to jump over to Emma’s character. Because at the beginning of the story, after you jump from that seven years ago preface, she’s deeply resentful, even angry, at Daniel. One way she takes out her hostility, finds an outlet is she goes socializing in nightclubs, like she goes drinking with people and dancing with other men. But even she’s divided on that front. She flirts to the point of overt sexual intention, then pulls back. Could you get into what’s going on with Emma in regard to her own sexuality and psychological state?

Sam: She is someone who has ended up very unhappy, possibly as a result of Daniel’s unhappiness. She’s yearning to be loved in the same way that he’s yearning for various different things, including to be loved. One interesting thing with her character is that she could really love him. She’s not flirting with other guys because she’s dissatisfied with Daniel on a superficial level. She flirts with other guys because she’s deeply pained by the state of their relationship. I thought that was really interesting. She’s a character who it’s very easy to form a negative first impression of. But hopefully, by the end of the film, we realize that she’s so much more than that, and that so many of those character traits which might initially seem distasteful or something are actually just expressions of her deep emotional complexity, and her capacity for love, and yearning for children, and yearning for satisfaction in areas where it’s not being given to her by the man who nonetheless daily tells her he loves her.

Scott: She discovers a lump in her breast basically toward the end of what you’d call Act One. Then, the story does an interesting dance. I was thinking about this as a writer, how tricky this must have been for you. Because you sustain that reveal of exactly what that means, both the confirmation of her cancer and then the revelation of that to Daniel… you sustain that for a good period of time in Act Two. Actually, there’s a parallel thing going on with Daniel where he’s seriously considering telling Emma he wants a divorce, yet he can’t screw up the courage to tell her. Basically, for the first half of Act Two, you’ve got these two characters each with a hidden agenda, yet they’re not sharing what they know or want. I’m thinking, that must have been a tricky bit of writing, how to sustain those dual secrets and that tension for that period of time. Did you work on that quite a bit do you think or remember?

Sam: Yeah, for sure. That took a lot of tries to get right. You don’t want to drag it out too long, because then people get frustrated by it. But equally, there’s so much emotional tension there, I felt, and you can use that tension to actually spend decent time exploring these characters without necessarily needing to be ramping up the stakes of the story any higher than they already are.

That double-secret was the first idea I ever had on this project. Wouldn’t it be interesting if one person had a secret that they wanted a divorce, and one person had a secret that they had cancer? Who goes first when you have that conversation? That section of the script was very tricky to get right.

Scott: I think it works very well. That’s actually a good object lesson to aspiring writers, not to just lay out all the facts. She could have easily have said to him, “I’ve got cancer,” and he could have said to her, “I want a divorce.”

Sam: Right. In the first draft she did, and he did, and it did not work at all.

Scott: Yeah, because now you’ve got that question, actually two questions. When is he going to tell her? When is she going to tell him? As I say, it’s like a little bit of a dance. You managed to plot it so that you drew it out, giving you the chance to explore each character individually. Then finally, when the revelations did come out, it felt like a good, sustained release.

Another Disunity dynamic are the various fabrications the couple spins to hide secrets, especially Daniel, who tells a lot of lies. But they’re lying to themselves, too, as they try to avoid dealing with some painfully unnecessary decisions. Could you talk a bit about lying? Where you cognizant about that that much in terms of it as a dynamic for the characters?

Sam: Yeah. I always think about lying when I’m writing. People have spoken at length, and far more eloquently than me, about how movies can be very powerful when characters are not saying the thing they want to say, or when you don’t see the thing that you should be seeing. What’s off-screen or what’s unspoken can usually tell you far more than expositional dialogue.

And of course, people often find themselves in dishonest relationship dynamics when things aren’t going well. It’s incredibly hard to be fully honest with someone all the time.

Dishonesty is a huge part of their “status quo dynamic” at the start and how they each choose to battle it out in this complex, messy situation that they find themselves in, particularly Daniel. But in a way, the ending of the film is about finally giving these people honesty in their relationship. When they are finally able to be honest with each other, it allows them to have the catharsis that they do, despite everything that’s happened.

Tomorrow in Part 4, we wrap up our discussion about “The Science of Love and Laughter” and learn how Sam discovered he had won a 2014 Nicholl Fellowship.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Sam is repped in the U.K. by the Curtis Brown Agency and in the United States by 3 Arts and UTA.

Twitter: @baronifish.