Interview (Part 3): Vigil Chime (2017 Nicholl Winner)
My 6-part talk with the writer of the script “Bring Back Girl”.
Today in Part 3, Vigil and I continue to explore her award-winning script “Bring Back Girls”.
Scott: I figured that much. Once you re-establish her, you do cut back and forth between Khalilah and Boubaka. In fact, you actually cut back to Lidal, too, as well, when she goes over to extract some information from the woman who set up for…
Vigil: Yes, Miss Mary.
Scott: Miss Mary, right. The story turns into a rousing action narrative. Really, it’s quite thrilling. Boubaka is like a force of nature. He will not be stopped. Some of the things he does, creating a fire as a diversion…
Vigil: Yeah [laughs]
Scott: …assaulting a man with a knife, and threatening to toss a baby out a window. Were these things you’d heard about or read about?
Vigil: No, not at all.
Scott: Your imagination?
Vigil: Yeah, totally. Here’s what I was trying to do. Remember what I said at the beginning of our conversation? If I don’t have it, I don’t write it in. After I wrote this story, I, Vigil, was going to go to Africa immediately and shoot this film.
In trying to present what this father could do, just think about everything he does, they’re very simple. I can’t get a car. [laughs] It’s going to be very difficult for us to get a car and crash the cars.
Like, no, no, no, no. I’m not going to go get cars and crash them. I’m not going to have him dangling somebody off a roof. I’m not going to have him running through the freeway because we’re not going to get that.
Everything I presented to you was me thinking, “How can I go get an actor in Nigeria? Probably with one camera. How are we going to shoot this thing? I need it to be an action film.”
Everything that Boubaka does is so simple. It is so simple. Like, “Go get a wheelbarrow…” I know I can go get a wheelbarrow, throw garbage in it, set it on fire. I know that I can push that wheelbarrow up against somebody’s gate. We’re going to have the Fire Brigade, as they are called there, on standby because nobody wants their gate lit on fire in Africa, but we’re going to do it. That’s what we’re going to pay them money for.
Then, I’m going to have Bouba take the guy into his living room because I know many people whose living rooms we can use. Then we’re going to get him to a bathroom and he’s going to force him to tell him information.
As I wrote these scenes ‑‑ even when he goes upstairs and goes to the balcony ‑‑ I know we can get that. I can see my camera following him as he runs in. I can see the camera with him while he’s grabbing the child. It’s just a baby. We’re not going to dangle any baby off any balcony, we’re just going to pretend that we did that.
Everything that I did, that he did, it was a poor man’s action flick.
[laughter]
Scott: A poor man’s action flick.
Vigil: Yeah, given his means. He’s a very poor guy. These are not wealthy people. His thinking has to be it’s him against ordinary men like him. He is very powerful, he’s a strong man. He’s not an old 70‑year‑old father, no. He’s a 33‑year‑old dad who’s looking for his child without money. He’s looking for his kid without money.
I had to present, indeed, an action film, but everything that dad did is so ridiculously cheap when you compare with what Hollywood would do. Say with the Liam Neeson TAKEN series. All the things that Liam did, I can’t afford all those things. I had to keep my dad very simple with his hands. He’s doing all those things with his legs ‑‑ he’s running and fighting with his hands.
These are the things I knew I could control and that was why I wrote them in.
Scott: You have a benefit from a character standpoint because he’s a hunter.
Vigil: Yup, I had to. I thought of what he could do. You see, when I chose hunting, I said, “Oh, nobody’s going to believe this if this guy is an accountant. Nobody’s going to believe it if he’s a farmer.”
Although you could probably write it as a farmer and it could still work. A farmer is just a man who farms, but his daughter has been kidnapped, so he can beat people up trying to get to her…I could have made him a farmer but, no. I said, “No, no, no, no. I need a hunter.”
Someone who was cunning, someone for whom this is quite natural in terms of finding things, because that would be what a hunter does. Knowing what the father would do, that was why I chose that his profession should be hunting.
Scott: Also killing things.
Vigil: Yes.
Scott: Did you do the same process in, like a reverse engineering kind of way, where you figured, “Well, I need for Khalilah to be able to understand herbs and so, therefore…”
Vigil: Yes. The thing with Khalilah was this. I said, “I look for what Lidal could be because I’m a female.” I’m very sensitive to men saving women in films, very sensitive. I said, “I, as a female, cannot write yet another story where my females are practically useless, just waiting for Daddy to come and save them.” I said, “Hell, no. I’m not going to do that.”
What I did was, I made…I don’t want a housewife. I don’t want Lidal to be a housewife. I wanted her to have a job. Her job became natural medicines and she’s very good at it. Then I said, “OK, that’s good.”
Her daughter wants to be a doctor, we know that. I said, “All right. I need…” Obviously, the mother would have taught her daughters some aspect, in fact, everything she knows about herbs. The reason for this is that Khalilah will use it later to save herself with respect to Mustafa.
I want to say to other writers out there, you can outline. Everybody has a process, you see? Some processes is that we have to write an outline before we think about writing whatever. I never…I don’t even know what is…I can’t outline. I just don’t know how to do that.
What I do, I just start writing. I start writing once I have what I consider 75 percent of the images of what this film was going to be about. I start writing, but things like herbalist, I never would have thought of that. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this woman is a herbalist,” before I started. No.
As I’m writing, I think, “Oh, I need her to be a herbalist!” As I’m going along, I start thinking of the things I need to make the story work. All of a sudden, I needed her to know medication, so I thought, “Oh, this is awesome. The girl loves medicine. This is really great. She’s going to use this later to save herself. I needed this 13‑year‑old to be able to save herself somehow.”
In planning how this was going to be, I thought about it for a while. The father can go to the compound and get his daughter out, but I thought, “Man, if he gets to that house, there are way too many men in that house.”
There are too many men and remember, he does not have a gun. It would be, I think, impossible for him, by himself, without sort of like an army to infiltrate the compound and dispense with each of the men one at a time with his fists alone.
I said no. Why? It would mean that my daughter is sitting in a house waiting for her father to save her. I said, “Hell, no. I’m not doing that.” What I wanted to do was I wanted Khalilah, at 14, to get herself out of that compound even as her father is coming for her. I need her to do her damnedest to get out of there in case her father is not coming. That was some of the decisions that I made as a woman, that I was going to have a daughter escape. Then her father will still meet her and finish it. The father is like the mic drop moment.
I need the daughter to get herself out of that situation. Those are some of the choices I made. Herbalist had to be a part of the story because she uses it later to exact the promise from Mustafa.
Scott: You do a similar thing, as you did earlier, where the father takes over the narrative for about 15 pages where once you’ve got Khalilah established and Mamadou, that household there, you pretty much stay there until she escapes. Then she meets up…
Vigil: With her dad. Yeah. Again, I hope that it…what do you say … it works. Once you see the film, I hope that people…
Scott: Sure, it does.
Vigil: Yeah. People are like, “Oh, my God. Why does the father disappear? Oh, no. I wanted you to cut between the father and the daughter.” [laughs] I didn’t want to do that. Once we are in the compound, we stay there. What I like that I did though is they just meet.
When the father gets to the tent, they meet. I gave Khalilah two days ahead. I gave her two days running time so that when her father gets to that tent, her two days conclude in the desert. There’s her dad. I went back and then brought you forward again, if that makes sense.
Scott: Yeah. First of all, well, the girls, they’re all brought to the place. These guys bid on them. Does that actually happens or your imagination at work again?
Vigil: No. It’s my idea. It’s my reimagining of how it could happen. That is imagination.
Scott: You know, I’ve got to say though what you did with that, once she’s relocated to the household with Mamadou, that whole thing is written in such a way, it felt plausible to me.
Vigil: There’s going to be controversy over it, of course. The Nigerians in Niger are going to be like, “What? Are you saying this is what we do in our land?” It’s just a film. It’s fiction. Take heart. I’m not saying it’s nonfiction. It’s fiction. Everybody, calm down. [laughs]
Tomorrow in Part 4, Vigil and I continue our conversation about her movie script “Bring Back Girls”.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Vigil is repped by Elevate Entertainment.
For my interviews with 27 other Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting writers, go here.
For my interviews with 53 Black List writers, go here.
