Interview (Part 5): Sean Malcolm
My interview with the 2019 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.
Sean Malcolm wrote the original screenplay “Mother” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Sean his background as a screenwriter, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.
Today in Part 5, Sean discusses how he submitted the script “Mother” to the Nicholl competition three different times and rewrote it each time based on feedback he received… and the third time was a charm.
Scott: This goes back to what Joseph Campbell talks about, “A hero’s journey is not a journey of attainment but reattainment.” All that work you did in building up to these stages we just talked about, how incredibly resourceful she is, how strong she is, how resilient she is in surviving the day‑to‑day life in Syria.
There is this inner strength that she’s got. It’s there already. It gets molded into her essentially becoming a warrior. Isn’t that right? Didn’t you feel like she has to have that capability to be able to pull that trigger beyond just the training, those stages she had?
Sean: Absolutely. I’ll tell you, Scott, one of the things that I changed in the rewrite that I did earlier this year that ended up being a very substantial improvement to the story was that in the earlier drafts, she is sort of running around as a sniper on her own, going on her rooftop, seeing when they’re trying to penetrate the neighborhood, shooting some soldiers.
The situation continues to deteriorate. She didn’t have any training. The whole subplot about the rebel leader, the other female soldier coming in and everything, that did not exist in the original drafts. Quite honestly, I got some feedback. I got some notes from the Nicholl in earlier years, which are incredibly helpful.
By the way, if anybody is asking whether it’s worth paying for the readers’ notes, absolutely do it. It’s so worth the 50 bucks or whatever it is. They don’t know you. It’s the most objective feedback you can ever get. Totally anonymous. All based on what’s on the page.
But anyway, what I think was happening was people were reading the logline. They got an image in their head of what the story is. Then everything leading up to the point we were just talking about was all there. Then she runs around as a sniper. Then things get really desperate. Then you’re in the third act. But it wasn’t quite living up to the “promise of the premise,” as they say.
Then I walked away from the script and went and wrote a novel. My father passed away. I wrote a book that I knew he would have loved, took some time off screenwriting. It was another year before I came back to it. I realized there was a whole 30 to 40 percent of this story that I hadn’t told. That was the part where she formally becomes part of the rebels.
That introduced the whole second half of the film, and changed it, and had her becoming actively part of the rebel forces in order to continue to get food and have protection for her and her son. That completed her journey rather than her scrambling around as a sniper on her own.
Then you’ve got the ability to train her, and give her real equipment, and put her in more significant situations rather than being a solo operator.
Scott: That’s the Nasim character. The interesting choice there is that Nasim is a female. There are two other women. It’s these four women. Where did that come from? Was it inspired by the original article, that the woman becomes a sniper?
Sean: There are female sniper units. There are Kurdish female sniper units that are notorious. There are also female Syrian rebel snipers. Some of them are Kurds. Some of them are Christian. But because of the generally fundamentalist nature of the culture, the women are kept separate from the men. Those units are generally snipers. They’re very good and very lethal. They operate in all-female units. They wouldn’t throw her in with a bunch of guys and stick her out in the field. They sleep separately. They eat separately. They fight separately. They are extremely effective. That was stuff I came across and said, “Wow, that’s what it should be.”
Scott: It was terrific. I’m trying to imagine the script without that. It would suffer.
Sean: It added a lot of substance and gives you an extra window into the war. Plus there are some nice set pieces that came as a result of that, too. Plus comparing her to Nasim makes her feel less superhuman. I also built up her relationship with Amira, the woman she saves in the scene where she first fires the gun, and turned that into somebody she could save in the end also, besides just herself and her son. I also needed a place for Sami to go while she was off fighting, and creating Amira naturally fixed that. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You realize what needs to happen. Then you realize, “OK but if she’s gone, what happens to him? OK, well, he can go there. So what happens to Amira? Oh, I see…” Then it all starts falling into place. That’s the architecture part that I love so much.
It is like a giant 3D puzzle. You can see it floating in your head. You know it’s there. But you can’t quite see how the pieces all fit together. You keep playing with it and playing with it. Sometimes you step back. But eventually, if you’re lucky, everything locks in place. That’s just the greatest feeling when it happens.
Scott: You have one of those pieces that locks in with this Nasim character. You’ve got the setup where earlier on she has said to this soldier, “I don’t think I could be like you.” Then Nasim has this theological side where she says, “There is evil in this world all around us. So, God must be real too, right? He has to be. It would not be just if there was evil but no God. So, therefore, God exists. And, since God is all‑knowing, he knows we are fighting the evil, that we are not the evil ourselves. He must know we have no choice. So, he forgives us.”
In a way, it’s providing your protagonist a philosophical framework in which to justify her actions, right?
Sean: That’s right. At that point, Farida’s become fully embedded in this. It’s no longer just once out of self‑defense and then once, out of saving somebody else. She’s now fighting for the cause. But she has doubts. And that logic and that theology appeals to her spiritual side to say, “God gives you a pass. You’re fighting on the right side.” It’s how I imagine religious warriors of all stripes through all of human history must justify what they do. We still have to sit outside of what she’s doing and say, “Yeah, but now she’s shooting people, too. Is that OK?” I don’t know. But those are the big questions.
Scott: As I was working my way through the All Is Lost end of Act Two and then into Act Three, all the sequences. It was one horror after another. I was reminded of a quote from a writer, Janet Fitch, who said, “The writer’s both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love then we torture them. The more we love them and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.” Does that resonate with you with regard to writing Mother? You take your characters to Hell and back.
Sean: Yeah, it really resonates. There’s a less harsh version that somebody else wrote which was, “Put your characters in a tree and just keep throwing rocks at them.” There’s different versions of that same sentiment.
Definitely, in this case, in order for the emotional weight to begin to even touch on the reality of this stuff happening in the real world right now, even as we sit here tonight, I felt like I had to go as far as I could without being gratuitous, in order to take them to Hell and back, and take the reader to Hell and back. That was the impetus in the beginning, to say, “This is Hell and it’s happening right now, and it shouldn’t be in the modern world, but it is.”
My hope is that the further you go, the greater the sense of relief and the greater the release of pressure at the end, hopefully, after the last page, you read the end and you feel like you’ve really been somewhere.
Scott: Let’s talk about that ending. It’s not your classic Hollywood happy ending. It’s not ultimately a tragic ending. It’s in the gray. Did you always know you’d end it in that way?
Sean: Yeah, I did. I knew from the beginning that I needed them to survive. It would be too sadistic to have a down ending after all that. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted it to be a survival story, not just a story about death. And I didn’t want it to be a “Hollywood” happy ending as you said. That’s not reality over there right now. I needed to find a way to balance those two requirements.
The fact that ISIS did overtake Palmyra and release all the prisoners from the prison there, essentially because they wanted to cause chaos and it was the regime’s prison, all of that actually happened. When I came across that fact, then I worked backwards and made sure that’s where he ended up, so that there was a way for him to get out. That happened, and of course those refugee camps exist. So it was, to me, that perfect bitter‑sweet combination of survival, but the future is still unknown. Hopeful and fatalistic at the same time.
Scott: I saw, doing some research, that this script made the top‑50 in the Nicholl in 2016. You’ve got a history. I know you said you stepped away from it for a year. When did you…?
Sean: What happened was it was in the spring of 2016 when I stumbled on the photo. I started doing all the research and trying to find my way in. Probably, like I said, a month, month and a half later I stumbled on the female sniper component of the story. Then I knew I had something. I told my wife I was going to bang this out. It was the beginning of April and the deadline was May 1. I’ve never in my life written anything anywhere close to that fast. I wrote the first draft in 2016 in three and a half weeks, before the May 1st deadline. That also forced an extreme economy in the writing, which I liked, because I wanted it to have a very documentary style. I didn’t want the words or the writer to get in front of the story. I wanted to try and make it read like you were looking through a window. Transparent.
I knew the power of the story was going to be in the events, and in the action, and in the characters, and in the journey, and in the reality of it, not so much in the choice of words or description. I really, really tried to strip it down, to give it that super‑economical, super‑lean kind of feel. I actually read some Hemmingway and “iceberg” theory stuff to try and aid in that.
At the same time, I did it out of necessity because I just didn’t have time. That draft was done in three‑and‑a‑half weeks and it made the Top 50. I had been participating in the Nicholl for 17, 18 years prior to that with nine other scripts, and I had never made the Top 50.
That was huge and blew me away. Then in 2017, I resubmitted it with minor tweaks, and I know it made the quarters, it might have made the semis again. But again, I got the readers’ notes, both in 2016 and 2017. I had managers and agents requesting it, because of how far it went.
But it was that similar pattern where people saw the log line, loved the idea, read the script, and then the response was, “There’s just something that wasn’t quite what I thought. It’s good, the writing’s good, but I’m just not sure what’s missing.” I knew that there was a piece missing, but I just couldn’t solve it.
Then, in 2018, I stepped away, wrote a novel, and came back earlier this year. Again, it was one of those race‑to‑the‑deadline situations, but this time I felt like I had finally cracked it. I told my wife, I said, “Here we go again. I’m going to go one more time. Third time’s a charm, but this time I’m going to make this huge change. It’s going to be like 40% better. I can feel it.”
I just mapped it all out, rewrote, and, boom, here we are.
Scott: Quite an experience for you, the Nicholl Week.
Sean: Yeah. It’s a pretty incredible experience. It’s hard to believe it’s already been over a month. It seems like a dream. Quite frankly, the best thing out of that is the networking and the people that you meet. They brought in some winners from prior years to tell us what to do and not to do, what they’ve experienced since, what they would do different if they could do it all over again. Plus, it’s just really cool hanging out with the other winners and the Nicholl team. They’re fantastic. They are so fired up and so professional. They took us on a tour of the Academy archives. You’re in a vault, and you’re standing there with the legal pad that Robert Towne wrote the first draft of “Chinatown” on. [laughs]
You’re looking at the typewriter that “Psycho” was written on. Hand-drawn shots of the crop duster sequence from “North by Northwest.” It’s awe-inspiring. It really gives you that sense of history and, “Wow, our scripts are going to be in that same library, forever, long after I’m gone.”
That stuff is really cool. I love that kind of stuff. I get off on it. But the biggest thing, more than anything, was connecting with all the other writers. Now we honestly are part of a family. There’s an alumni dinner the night after the awards. It was kind of like a high school reunion. Where there’s all these prior fellows from different eras and decades. Susannah Grant came in and had breakfast with us, and talked about her experiences, her career, and what she’s done since then up to now. It’s so valuable. I’ve got an email list for every single person who’s ever won the Nicholl. I can reach out to them now and ask for advice, or network.
Separate from the glitz and the prize money, there’s a little bit of sadness that I can never participate again. It became such a part of my life for the last two decades. At that same time, I just feel so privileged. It’s been my writing school. This was my version of going to school for screenwriting. It was the Nicholl. And now I’ve graduated.
I don’t think I would have stayed in it for the last two decades with the lack of success that I had up to now. I doubt I would have kept hacking away at it, if there wasn’t that brass ring hanging out there every year, luring me to take one more shot.
Scott: What’s the status of the script now? I now you mentioned in your speech that at one point you’re getting producers calling you and whatnot. What’s the status of the script?
Sean: The status of the script is I’m actually executing an option on it. We’re passing legal drafts back and forth with a producer named Chris Donahue. He is an Academy Award and Emmy Award‑winning documentary producer, who is a member of the Academy and is a judge. He read the script in the semi‑final round.
He’s been doing it for, I think, about a decade. He’s never reached out to a writer. He tends to focus on issue‑oriented type stuff, as you would expect with a documentary producer. He fell in love with it. I think he understands the heart of the material and has great taste and integrity. It’s obviously difficult material. It’s not commercial, especially since it will be shot in Arabic. So, getting a package together will be tough, but I have faith. A lot of the managers and agents who read it have said, “I love it, but I’m not sure what to do with it. What else have you got?” which is to be expected.
While my peers are all signing and getting repped and doing deals, even ‑‑ I’ve heard about one today that’s still confidential — it’s been a little bit of a slower process for me, because of the nature of this material, but I’m totally fine with it. I’ve become a very, very patient man. [laughs]
Scott: Yeah. I was thinking Participant Media…
Sean: For sure. You have several finance companies who’ve already told us, if we bring a package, if we can put a lead on it and get a director, they like the script enough to put it together.
Scott: Bottom line ‑‑ no matter what, it’s a great writing sample.
Sean: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate that. It’s going to exist forever. But there is this sense, because it’s so topical, that, obviously, the time really is now. Certainly, for me, there’s a real sense of urgency. Eight months from now there will be a new crop of Nicholl finalists and semifinalists, and they’ll be the hot new thing, and they deserve to be. So it feels like there’s this window and I need to push through it. That’s probably more perception than reality, because it will always be a great writing sample, but there’s a window right now, where I can get into rooms and get meetings with people, and so I’m trying to take advantage of that as much as possible.
Tomorrow in Part 6, Sean answers some questions about his approach to the craft of screenwriting.
For Part 1, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Part 4, here.
For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.
For my interviews with 53 Black List writers, go here.
