Interview: Patty Jones (2013 Nicholl Winner) — Part 3

I only have anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me the Nicholl Fellowship does not often select a comedy script as a winning entry. So when Joe Banks won in 2013, I was excited to reach out to its writer: Patty Jones. The script is funny. Very funny. And as would be expected, so is Patty.

Today in Part 3, Patty shares much more about her Nicholl-winning script “Joe Banks”:

Scott: Joe’s got this voracious appetite for life and, in particular, sex and alcohol. You would think, “OK, writer, sex, alcohol, that’s probably a negative addiction that’s masking some deep needs and insecurities.” You don’t get that feeling from Joe. It’s more like he really revels in life in a frenetic, tactile way.

Patty: [laughs] Yes, he’s very tactile. That’s right. As we should all live. We should be tactile. [laughs]

Scott: Similarly, in his interactions with Sam, even early on one gets the sense that, yeah, he’s got a lot of edge towards him and he can be pretty rough with Sam. But it’s more about him wanting to get the kid to experience life directly.

Patty: Yeah, absolutely. He thinks that he’s lived a sheltered life and been protected by his mother, probably. He wants to strip all that away. I have to say, I labored over a couple of those monologues because I thought, “Oh God, I worry about sincerity and here’s where you have to be sincere.”

I tend to turn everything comic, even in real life. People will often say to me, “I can’t tell when you’re being serious. You seem like you’re joking all the time.” I did want people to feel that sweetness, and I wanted it to feel poignant.

And I quickly realized that I had gotten myself into something when I started the character of Joe and I thought, “You better keep this up.” There were moments where I thought, first of all, “Can I come up with any more euphemisms for testicles? Can I come up with more?” I was online searching and then I made up a whole ton of them. Then I thought, “He can’t peter out,” no pun intended. He’s got to stay Joe right to the end.

In the sex scene where Sam is being read aloud to from Joe’s novel, I had to write what was supposed to be an actual part of the novel. I thought, “Oh, shit, I’ve got to write like this guy. How am I going to do it? I’d better do it. I’m a writer, and I’d better try to write like this guy.”

And I’ve been to Russia, so I thought, Where can I stick him? I’ll stick him at the Russian border, which is exactly what happened to me. The border guards took away our passports and we thought we were never going to get them back.

Scott: This is with Book Store Chick, right? The beat‑up, old Lada had stopped at the border guard.

Patty: Yeah, there’s a lot of Ladas.

Scott: I was thinking Joe must have been a lot of fun to write, but it sounds like it was also a challenge for you to sustain his bombastic, colorful personality throughout.

Patty: Yeah, but I loved him. He was real. I wrote that first draft at UCLA, and my teacher gave me notes — all apologies to him, but I realized afterwards that I never looked at the notes. I just submitted to the Nicholl. My boyfriend read it three days before the deadline, and he said, “It’s 70 percent there.” Then I thought, “Fuck it.” I squeezed in another nine hours, which is why I call it not quite a second draft. A draft and a quarter. I submitted it to the Nicholl with no one having read it but me. That was a very kamikaze pilot act to do.

Scott: I want to talk to you about some narrative choices you made. The middle of the story consists of a road trip. Sam’s been conscripted to be Joe’s minder on a book promotion tour. I was wondering, are you a fan of road trip movies?

Patty: I love road trip movies, but it was probably more an awareness of the world of books — what is happening to books in our world. It was a little bit of a love letter to books and authors.

It was probably more about book tours than about a road trip per se, but it was very handy. I did put in things I love. I’ve never been to Boston, but I do know the Chateau Marmont. Although when I was writing it, the Chateau Marmont driveway had grown longer in my mind. [laughs]

I was putting in what I want. I was probably putting in my fantasies, including the African savanna. I thought, “Put Sam somewhere he doesn’t want to be and with a person he doesn’t want to be with.”

Scott: That dynamic is really interesting to me. Some of my favorite movies are the combining of a sheltered, confused younger man forced to spend time with a more impulsive older man like My Favorite Year, Scent of a Woman or Zorba the Greek.

Patty: I love all those movies. Who’s going to forget hoo‑ha? Who’s going to forget Pacino. I also loved Peter O’Toole. I wasn’t particularly thinking about them, but I’m a fan of all those things.

On that same tack, I think everything is combining in what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced, and that’s what’s in there too. Joss Whedon talks about filling the tank, seeing and experiencing life and art. Somewhere in there, all those things are in your subconscious. As a writer, you absorb all these things and you maybe imitate, but you end up sounding like yourself. We’re lucky. We don’t sound like that person. In the end, we sound like us.

Scott: You led me into this other thought. One of the things I resonated with in the story is the duality of life. Head versus heart, inner world versus outer world.

You’ve got these two characters, Sam and Joe, each representing different aspects of the human experience. It’s such a nice construct, particularly when the inevitability of them bouncing off each other, bashing into each other.

But father and son finally, at the end of the day, bonding in a way.

Patty: Yeah, I really felt it. It’s a hideous thing to say that your own writing almost makes you teary, but I felt it. I felt for them. They were real to me. I wanted Sam to have that, and I wanted Joe to have that. It moved me, and, like I said, I’m not either of those characters.

I, by the way, do not always believe in “write what you know”, in terms of basic human experience. We know what it’s like to be human animals and doing our best on the planet and doing our best to be hardworking, kind people and to do something great. I believe in the human imagination.

Luckily, we are able to make things up. We’re not dung beetles and we’re not lemurs — not that I don’t love dung beetles and lemurs. What I’m saying is, I don’t have to know what it’s like to be a 21‑year‑old guy or a 50‑year‑old guy, and I still feel the emotion of it. We hurt and we yearn, and then we try to be funny. We do our best.

Scott: I was going to ask you about that. You say your friends say, “I don’t know when you’re not being funny.” Where do you think that sense of humor comes from?

Patty: It’s probably fear. I have a credo. The credo is never be boring. It comes down to thinking: don’t lose people’s interest. Maybe, again, it’s vulnerability, a fear of being vulnerable and being yourself. I never want to write about myself. I have to write about me through things, apparently. I don’t want to talk about myself ‑‑ [laughs] as I’m doing now.

Scott: In that vein, I’d like to wrap‑up the discussion on the script before we get to craft questions with a few Joe‑isms that I drew from dialogue. Here’s a line Joe had.

Patty: Are they about testicles?

Scott: I avoided the testicles with two of the quotes. First one: “A writer must write women who he wants to make love to, preferably ones who can use a crossbow.” What are your thoughts on hearing that line?

Patty: [laughs] I thought that was funny.

Scott: It is funny. “Preferably one who can use a crossbow.”

Patty: Again, respect for women. Joe thinks women are fantastic. Obviously that’s a strong woman, a woman who can use a crossbow. And, uh, don’t get in her sightlines.

Scott: Here’s another quote that he had. He’s poo‑pooing the modern technology, Twitter, whatnot, and somebody mentions PowerPoint.

He says, “PowerPoint? I once made a power point with a Cape Buffalo in the Zambezi Valley. Wrestled, mixed it up. In the end, we called it even.”

Patty: [laughs] That’s a little bit of Hemingway. That’s obviously old‑school masculinity and a nod to that. I had to look up the Zambezi Valley. [laughs] There was research on, you know, dangerous animals like Cape Buffaloes. Sometimes maybe I’m not being super-complex, I’m trying to be funny.

I remember my teacher at UCLA asking me, “Should we see Joe as telling the truth or is he not a truth‑teller and it’s all in his head where he’s fooling us?” I see him as a truth‑teller and these things really happened. I don’t think he’s boastful or into himself. He just is.

Scott: Here’s one more for you. Joe says, “I know how to goddamn live, and it’s a goddamned, soul‑juicing, glorious thing. Do you even have the goddamned cojones to live?” If you had to, in a nutshell, sum up the message Joe would have for Sam, does that zero in on it?

Patty: Is nutshell another euphemism?

Scott: Didn’t want to stray too far from testicular humor.

Patty: Yeah, that would probably be a nice thematic summing‑up. That would be what Sam would need to ask himself. Then, of course, Sam does get Joe to acknowledge some things, as well, things Joe cared about, like the Nobel Prize, which he professes not to care about but, in fact, he quite does. Yeah, that’s probably very good. [laughs] Yes, well done.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Patty shares what it has been like to win the Nicholl.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Patty is repped by Benderspink.

Twitter: @heypattyjones.