Interview: Sam Baron (2014 Nicholl Winner)

U.K.-based writer Sam Baron wrote the original screenplay “The Science of Love and Laughter” which won a 2014 Nicholl Fellowship. Recently Sam and I had a transatlantic interview in which we covered a lot of territory in a provocative and informative conversation.

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “I went to a drama class when I was 12, and me and another kid had this crazy idea to make a feature film. It took a year to write it, then another year to convince a bunch of friends to help us make it, then a year to edit it. But by the time we were 15, it was finished.”

Part 2: “How could you tell that story and not have the audience just hate the guy who wants to leave his wife who has cancer? That’s really the most unforgivable thing that a person could feel or think, so I wanted to explore if that could ever be a justifiable thing to feel.”

Part 3: “What do you do if the world is telling you that you have a great career, but your gut instinct is telling you to pull away, and you have nothing else to compare it to?”

Part 4: “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a ‘happy ending’ to a relationship drama in which the characters divorce?’ It’s an anti‑rom‑com in that way.”

Part 5: “Every time I have an idea for a script, I pop it into a Gmail thread. When a script’s thread has around 100 messages in it, that’s when I start thinking about it properly. So things tend to percolate for a couple of months before I actually take them seriously.”

Part 6: “There is something very satisfying about cracking a script… But God, there’s also something absolutely miserable about the experience of not being able to crack something. It’s a very strange pursuit and I don’t know why we do it, but there’s the compulsion.”

Here is Sam with her Nicholl Fellowship acceptance speech:

Sam is repped in the U.K. by the Curtis Brown Agency and in the United States by 3 Arts and UTA.

Twitter: @baronifish.