Interview (Part 4): Amy Tofte (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Amy Tofte wrote the original screenplay “Addis Abeka” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Amy about her background as a writer and her award-winning screenplay.

Today in Part 4, Amy and I discuss three themes running throughout her script “Addis Abeka”:

Scott: I’d like to talk about, quickly, three thematic elements in the script. The first is ping‑pong. Where did that come from?

Amy: [laughs] The other thing that people will say is, “Well, it’s a sports movie, so you’ve got to make it a sports movie. Where’s the Rocky moment?”

Scott: Absolutely. I said the same thing. I had, “OK, I’m going to put my Hollywood producer hat on.” As soon as I saw the ping‑pong I’m going, “Oh, yeah, so this is like a sports movie.”

Amy: We saw kids outside Addis with these homemade ping‑pong tables. Were they playing to the level that they play in my script? I don’t know, but I’m like, “Why can’t they?” There was one table where it looked like it was a broken one that they had put back together with a homemade net.

I saw that and thought, “Huh, isn’t that interesting?” To me that constant juxtaposition of the unexpected is also part of the landscape there, and the thing with the Coca‑Cola signs everywhere.

Everywhere we went you could get a Coke. There are things like that, those juxtapositions. I’m always drawn to the outlier or the two things that don’t fit together, and then I want to see how they would fit together. I never would have thought I’d see kids joyously playing ping-pong along a roadside in Ethiopia.

Scott: It’s a major plot component. Is there anything metaphorical going on there? I was thinking back and forth, batting the ball back and forth. He gets bounced around a little bit. Or is it strictly ping‑pong, it’s a narrative device?

Amy: To be honest, I love that. [laughs] What you just said, I’d like to think I was smart enough to have thought that, but, no, I didn’t. But I also think that’s the beauty of storytelling. That should happen with a good story, it makes me happy that maybe there is something deeper in there and if I were to unpack it I could find it, too, and see what you see.

For me, I saw the ping‑pong and I thought, “You know what, Abeka’s going to be good at ping‑pong. That’s going to be his gift. That’s going to be his superpower, and I don’t know how it’s going to entirely work, but that’s his superpower.” The Chinese factory compound was a real thing I saw, too. And I think seeing that made me also think…ah, ping-pong. The Chinese are good at ping-pong…so there’s a potential conflict there.

I knew I wanted Abeka to be gifted and unusual in an active way, not just, “Oh, he’s wonderful and we root for him because he’s wonderful,” but that there was something else that you could really point to on the outside and say, “This.” It was ping‑pong.

Scott: That plays to your point about juxtaposition, it gives you something specific about the character, and it’s cinematic. Here’s another theme that’s at work in the story, stars. What’s going on there?

Amy: One of the things that’s really wonderful in Ethiopia is there are very lush areas, as well as very dry, arid areas, and that’s what’s really beautiful about it as a country.

We went to a hot spring with trees and water, and then the area all around Addis was pretty dry and dusty, but with some beautiful gardens inside the city.

It reminded me a lot of where I grew up because South Dakota is like that. There are areas of South Dakota that are very lush and there are areas that can be very dry. And there were tons of fields around Addis which totally reminded me of home.

So to me, I think the stars in the story reminded me of South Dakota and the open night sky that you don’t get in LA. I saw stars in Addis. I think that’s where the star imagery came from, me connecting to my own childhood, and looking up at the stars at night, and dreaming or telling stories as a kid with my own brother.

Scott: You may have conveyed a little bit of that desire for home or that connection for home with the boy’s stars. Trying to find a sense of place is definitely part of the journey that he goes through.

Amy: It’s the one constant that he can count on.

Scott: The stars?

Amy: Yeah, you can look up and the stars are still there even though you’re in a different house.

Scott: The third thing I want to talk to you about is the story, the jaguar and the hyena. It goes through its own little beginning, middle, and end. There’s the first version of it, which the brothers tell each other, then there’s a second version that Abeka writes and it has a different spin on the jaguar character, a little more.

Then there’s the third version at the end. Something starts to evolve. I think that that official has his comment where he basically is asking Abeka to rethink his perspective of what a hyena is, that the hyena’s not so terrible.

She’s a scavenger, yes, but she’s resourceful, a survivor. No wonder she’s fierce and loyal, which sounds an awful lot like Abeka. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit. What was going on there with that story element?

Amy: I knew that I wanted a story to bind the brothers. I knew that, and of course the hyenas are part of the culture there. Hyenas are in town. They’re out in the countryside. They’re everywhere. There are stories and legends about them.

But the jaguar is the one who wins, is the one who sits in the tree satisfied without worry, while the hyenas are scavenging for scraps. That was the way the brothers saw themselves, they had this reverence in their story about the jaguar while they were the hyenas.

That’s the self‑loathing of when you grow up poor or you grow up thinking you don’t deserve better. I didn’t grow up with very much. Obviously, not like these boys. But I remember always having hand-me-downs and things like that. I think that sense of worry or shame does develop in us at a young age, or it can.

The evolution of the hyena story is the evolution of Abeka, and that was definitely intentional. Also, the other story point in there is creating that misunderstanding between Sweto and Abeka where Sweto is constantly a little bit suspicious of him because he comes from the country and because he is poor. Abeka sees the jaguar as a hero but Sweto assumes Abeka is saying Sweto is selfish.

To me that was a really important moment, the realities of charity. Sweto has all the power. He holds all the cards. He has money, he has influence, and Abeka looks up to him. But that misunderstanding of the story actually deepens their relationship when Sweto learns that what Abeka has most of all is a good heart. Sweto has underestimated him.

The thing with the official at the end, that final moment about the hyena story was actually a happy accident. I had the hyena story there, but later in the process of the script I was doing more reading on hyenas to really understand them.

I found a video of someone talking and he said all these amazing things about hyenas. Out in the wild they’re very different than how they are in the cities where they’re a nuisance. Out in the wild they’re actually a very resourceful, loyal animal and something that should be respected.

The way that idea tied the three stories together and described who Abeka truly was felt really beautiful for this script. I was very excited that day. I was like, “I’m so rewriting that scene. I know how to do this now.”

That’s another thing about writing. Even after I got back from Ethiopia I was constantly reading about it. About the politics. About the culture. I was reading about all these things I saw and figuring out how that worked into the script.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Amy shares what it was like to learn she had won the Nicholl Fellowship and her experiences during the week of the awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

To read Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Twitter: @AmyTofte.