Interview (Part 4): Justin Piasecki (2016 Nicholl Winner)

My conversation with the writer of the winning script “Death of an Ortolan”.

Justin Piasecki wrote the original screenplay “Death of an Ortolan” which won a 2016 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Justin about his background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 4, Justin and I do a deep dive into some of the key creative decisions he made in writing “Death of an Ortolan”:

Scott: You started thinking maybe I’ll do this Vince-Walter relationship will be the key one, but then eventually you moved more toward the Reed character as being the focal point of Walter’s emotional change.

Justin: I just realized that Vince was a really good vehicle for personifying Walter’s younger self. I think that because that haunts him so much, that was an important thing to be present in there.

Scott: There’s a “Charlotte Observer” reporter Corddry. What was her function in the story?

Justin: That goes back to the rotating first acts. Walter’s first reincarnation after being fired was a food critic, essentially another version of an antithesis of his former self, somebody that snobs on food. And death row was for a column. I realized, like with Vince, that needed to be a separate relationship as well.

She’s the perfect sidekick too. A food critic Robin to his Batman.

Scott: Also someone that he can talk to. You can get him to convey whatever’s going on, also provide just some information, like facts and stuff like that.

Justin: Right, Like you said, he is not a social guy. He’s not a friendly guy. He’s definitely a shut‑in. I needed him to rebloom and rebud with someone.

Scott: I’ve got a metaphor for you because I’m sitting here listening to you. It’s fascinating to hear you say, “I started off with this character being over here, but then thought this.” You’re like a chef. You’re changing ingredients around. This is a screenwriter as chef.

Justin: Yeah. I started off making a frittata, and then I ended with something way more dramatic, which is good. It just took a while to figure those out, but that’s what outlining and notecards on the wall are for.

Scott: Great chefs do. They experiment.

Justin: Absolutely.

Scott: I wanted to talk to you because you have a series of shots in this script. Normally, I tell my students, “Really just try to avoid this,” because there’s hardly any way that you can make this approximate what’s going to be on the screen.

Most readers, their eyes glaze over when they see these things, but your series of shots were actually really I thought quite compelling because I think you have the benefit of, A, you’re watching these ingredients go together. It’s series of shots of a cooking preparation type of thing. Then there’s this mini‑story, a beginning, middle, end as the food goes from ingredients to final product.

Then a couple of times you did that the last step involves serving the food to a death row inmate. It’s like they’re really a compelling little mini‑stories whereas I think oftentimes in scripts these series of shots sort of lay flat. So I compliment you on that. Thoughts on the series of shots at all?

Justin: To start, I totally agree with you. Typically when I read it in other scripts, I’m like, “Did that need to be there or not?” You’re telling your students the right thing in my opinion for sure. In this case, I think that there were a few expositional things that I knew were important to see. I wasn’t going to get it through dialogue.

The main example for that is the inmate head count. Again, it’s a really small medium security prison. They have about 200 inmates. This is a real thing that they do every morning just to figure out the logistics of prison meals and how much to make, but I think it was important to see…He’s used to this static number. If you go in every day and it’s…

Scott: 199, I think was the number.

Justin: Yeah, it’s 199. Then they get four.

Scott: So it’s 203.

Justin: For the first time ever, he sees this number change. It’s almost like “Truman Show” when the sun comes up three minutes late or something. It’s just like, “In 30 years I’ve never seen that change.” Then you saw them ticking down.

That was a stab at saying, “Listen, to a lot of people, to a lot of state budgets, these are numbers on a page.” We’re going to see those numbers on a page, but we’re also going to get to know those numbers intimately.

There are some really hard cuts after executions where you see that number and you see it’s changed, you’re like, “Geez, that’s…”

Scott: Somebody’s just died.

Justin: Yeah, that’s a cold wake up. That’s why I made the exception for some of these things was…

The other example is a blue book that the White House chef has. It’s basically a chronological history of ever meal ever made in the White House. That’s a real thing too, though I took some liberties. A lot of this stuff I discovered while researching and was like, “Gotta have that. Gotta have that.” At one point you could buy Linden B. Johnson’s chef’s blue book. In fact, if you have an extra 7,000 lying around of something and Christmas is coming up, I’ll give you my address. That would be so cool.

There’s a montage later in the script where it’s famous meals throughout history. JFK’s birthday. Reagan’s assassination attempt, etc. I used that book to portray that mystique without a weird picture thing or archive footage.

Scott: That third act is quite powerful, and I would imagine took quite a bit of effort and rewriting to get to the point where you got it where you got a lot of cross‑fitting going on between parallel stories. How about that ending? Now that you think about it, what were some of the bigger challenges that you had in writing that third act?

Justin: That was a product of massive outlining ahead of time, but it was also a product of letting go of what you thought the ending was going to be the entire time. You’re really bitching and moaning when you’re just like, “Ah, it’s not going to work.”

I always knew that I wanted to bookend with that opening monologue, that opening voiceover. That is probably the biggest piece of advice if I’m ever at a point where someone would want to know advice from me, is I went into this having 15 things that I thought would either be cool or interesting or that would need to be in there because it’s this type of script or whatever. At the end, there’s maybe three of them. They were three things that I just loved. They were why I was working on the story.

So tent poles are important, but you can only have a few of them.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Justin describe what it has been like to be a Nicholl Fellowship recipient.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Justin is repped by CAA and Zero Gravity Management.