Go Into The Story Interview: Allison and Nicolas Buckmelter

My interview with the 2018 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winners.

Allison and Nicolas Buckmelter wrote the original screenplay “American Refugee” which won a 2018 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with the married couple about their backgrounds, their award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to them.

Scott Myers: OK, Allison, let’s start with you. I believe you hail from Portland, Oregon.

Allison Buckmelter: Yes.

Scott: Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, how did you catch the movie/TV/writing bug?

Allison: I caught the bug early on. It’s one of those fun full-circle stories. My high school had a playwriting class, which I took and loved. At the end of the year, screenwriter Mike Rich, who’s from Portland and had a connection to our school, came and spoke to our class.

He had won the Nicholl fellowship a couple of years earlier, and “Finding Forrester” had just come out. That was his Nicholl‑winning script. He talked all about the screenwriting business, and I was really taken with it.

I remember I went up to him after class, and I said, “How do you do this? How do you get to be a screenwriter?” He said, “Oh, well you just need to win the Nicholl.” [laughs]

I was like, “OK. Cool. I’ll remember that.” Over the years, I started applying to the Nicholl. When Nick and I finally won it, we met another writer who had won the fellowship around the time Mike Rich did. I told her the story, and she reached out to Mike that night.

Soon after, when Nick and I were in Portland for Thanksgiving, we found ourselves having coffee with Mike. He had remembered coming and talking to my high school class. He’s the nicest person. I think we talked for a couple of hours. He’s been great about giving us advice.

That’s a fun thing that’s come out of this, being in contact with him.

Scott: He’s been quite successful. He did The Rookie and Secretariat. I know he’s involved in that. I think he even did some writing on Cars 3 for Pixar.

Allison: Yeah.

Scott: Did you ever attend the Willamette Writers Conference there, or no?

Allison: No. I’ve never done that.

Scott: I’ve done that twice now as a presenter in workshops and whatnot. In fact, they invited me back again this year, too.

Allison: It sounds great. I haven’t gotten a chance to do that yet. I went to the University of Oregon and they had, at the time, a pretty small film program. It wasn’t even really a full department, but they had screenwriting classes and so I took all those.

It was fun, because James Ivory is a University of Oregon alum, so he came and spoke to our class. That was really inspiring. Right after graduating I came down to LA ‑‑ a month or two after graduating ‑‑ got a job as a receptionist at a management company, started interning at a couple production companies, and reading scripts and that kind of thing. Then met Nicolas. The rest is history.

Scott: I was going to say, nice segue. Nicolas, you’re a native of Los Angeles.

Nicolas Buckmelter: I am.

Scott: You might not have had the fateful intersections with Mike Rich or James Ivory. You had the omnipresence of entertainment world around you 24/7 growing up. Did that inspire you to get into screenwriting or was there some other path?

Nicolas: Although I was born and raised in Los Angeles, my family wasn’t connected to entertainment. It was always, from my perspective, something that other people did. It took quite a while to come to the realization that this was something that I could do as well, that I wasn’t disconnected from the process because I wasn’t involved in it early on.

Scott: Were you a movie and TV fan growing up? When did you start to make the connection, “Oh, there’s people who actually write this stuff?”

Nicolas: I was a writing major at the University of California at San Diego, where they put me through the wringer with all kinds of writing from journalism to poetry to short stories to drama. My last two years there were heavily involved in playwriting and screenwriting.

In those two years it started to really click that, “Yeah, I can do this. I can be involved in this. This, one day, could be a job to pursue.” I had dabbled in playwriting in high school, but just for fun and to amuse my friends. It wasn’t until college when I really started to believe that this was potentially a vocation.

Allison: It took you a little while to get to it. You were an editor for a newspaper.

Nicolas: That’s true.

Allison: You were a musician.

Nicolas: Yeah.

Allison: You started writing. Then you started entertainment and then brought those two together.

Nicolas: After college I worked as a writer and an editor for the Mammoth Times, the local newspaper in Mammoth Lakes, so I was doing a bit of journalism. From there, through a roundabout process I was hired as a musician in Japan for Disney and then for Universal.

I was constantly trying to write scripts, even while I was living in Mammoth and in Japan. After returning from Japan I met Allison, who had just moved down from Portland. We began looking over each other’s shoulders at projects we were working on, and at some point we each felt comfortable enough to chime in.

I became a big fan of Allison’s writing, and apparently she liked what I was doing. Eventually, we turned it into a partnership and started working together.

Scott: Did the partnership come before the romance or vice versa?

Allison: No, we started dating first.

Nicolas: It was romance right out of the gate.

Scott: You knew right away.

Allison: I was interning in Santa Monica, but I lived in Echo Park. That’s quite a commute. To wait out the traffic, I would go over to an Irish pub called Finn McCool’s. They had an open session where musicians would bring an instrument and play, and I would go there and do that, and so would Nick. That’s how we met, playing music.

Then, when we started really talking to each other, it came out fairly quickly that we were both writers. When we began dating, we’d let each other in on what we were writing. I thought Nick had such great ideas. I just wanted to get in on it.

[laughter]

Allison: When we first started writing together, we were writing more relationship‑romantic comedies, dramedies, that kind of thing. To be dating and writing those was really fun, and it was helpful to have a guy and a girl perspective. That’s what we started out doing. Then we pivoted to dramatic thrillers.

Scott: I’ve read where you were initially writing these romantic comedies. Now you’re more drawn to what you would call “character‑driven thrillers grounded in reality.” Maybe you could unpack how that came about and what that means a little bit more.

Allison: We really like writing romantic comedies. They’re surprisingly challenging to write. I don’t think they’re always given the credit they deserve in terms of craft. They’re more difficult to write well than they might seem. We really like character driven stories. It doesn’t matter if it’s a thriller or romantic comedy. We’re all about character.

Nicolas: At some point, most writers we know go through this process where they’re trying to read the tea leaves, they’re trying to read the market. They’re trying to see, “What can I put out there that’s going to be sellable, that’s going to be timely?”

Allison and I came to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to have your pulse on that because it seems that no one really does have their pulse on it, or it’s impossible to figure out. We started writing things that we thought mattered to us. We were entering a very strange time in our nation’s history, and the mood was ominous.

We sensed certain things in the zeitgeist, and we wanted to capture the types of feelings and the types of conversations that people around us were having. We wanted to craft stories relevant to what people around us were talking about and feeling.

We stopped worrying about what the market wanted and started writing things that we thought were urgent, that had meaning to us, and that we had a deep connection to. That felt better.

Allison: “American Refugee” was the first script we wrote where we thought, “We want to write this because it would be interesting to write,” not because, “Oh, I think it can sell,” or “I know a friend we can give it to who might like it who works for so and so.” It wasn’t any of that. It was just, “Let’s write this story.”

When you were asking about how we got to thrillers, originally, I was a little turned off with thrillers because, to me, when I heard the word thriller, I would think of something like James Bond or some character who knows all the answers, knows exactly what to do when they’re in a really drastic situation.

Once I realized you can write a thriller about a family, a teacher, or everyday people, I realized those are the kinds of thrillers I’m drawn to because, when you’re watching them, you worry more for that character, and you can feel as much on the edge of your seat as you would if you were watching a CIA operative or someone really skilled.

Scott: Let’s talk about “American Refugee” because it’s interesting what you just said. I’ve been a screenwriter for over 30 years and I know a lot of screenwriters. When they’re asked, “What should I write?” almost invariably professional writers will say, “Write something you’re passionate about. Don’t pay attention to the market.”

That’s the default mode, and it exhibited itself with your script, “American Refugee,” which did win the Nicholl Award in 2018.

Here’s how it was described at the Nicholl ceremony, the plot. “With missiles raining down on American cities and the nation under martial law, a rural family has no choice but to seek shelter in a neighbor’s bomb shelter where the danger inside is potentially greater than the danger outside.”

This is right around the time, 2015, when you first started thinking about this, and we know what happened in 2016 with the election there. You’re very sensitive to the zeitgeist, but there’s also, it looks like from my research, some specific aspects of your respective backgrounds that fed into the emergence of the story.

For example, Allison, you have a sister and brother‑in‑law who live on a farm in rural Oregon. Is that correct?

Allison: Yeah. They had just bought 40 acres outside of Portland. They were learning to raise chickens and grow vegetables and be sustainable, do all these things that they hadn’t grown up doing. There was that learning curve there. I was thinking about them being surrounded by countryside, among people with a particular perspective. Where they live is very rural. Most people there have lived there for generations, but my sister and brother-in-law have really taken to the community and love their neighbors, so it’s not at all like in American Refugee [laughs].

That took a leap of faith on their part. It got us thinking about a family in a rural setting who weren’t from there, who weren’t equipped. I think there is that idea that if things became bad in America, if there was martial law or if it felt dangerous in any way, you would seek refuge in the countryside.

We were thinking about a family, a family that’s not equipped to rural living.

Scott: A fish out of water dynamic you can exploit.

Allison: Yeah.

Scott: Nicolas, if I’m not mistaken, I read somewhere you had some grandparents or something that had to flee from Europe during the communist era or something. Is that right?

Nicolas: My grandparents and my mother were born in Czechoslovakia when it was still called Czechoslovakia. My grandparents had already lived through the German occupation during the war. Along came the Soviets at the end of that decade, and my grandparents saw the writing on the wall.

They saw authoritarianism on the horizon, and they hired a smuggler to get them out of there.

Allison: Which could be a movie in itself, their story.

Nicolas: Yeah. They eventually made their way to the United States. My grandparents were very patriotic about it. They loved America. And the America they encountered was the place of refuge for people the world over who were seeking asylum or a better life.

That had been true about America throughout my whole childhood, as long as I can remember, until recently, when it began to feel like cracks were forming in the edifice. The nationalism, the gun violence, the massive wealth gap, the huge ideological divide, the hostility toward immigrants — all of it suggesting that America might no longer be that place of refuge.

Allison and I began asking, “At what point do those cracks become fissures and then a collapse? At what point would one have to flee as my grandparents did? When does that time come? And if it comes, would we be prepared for such a situation?” The two of us came to a resounding no on that answer, that we probably would not be prepared.

What we wanted to do was create a story where we had two families, each on either side of this pretty serious ideological divide that we’re seeing in America now. We wanted to have these two families have to depend on each other, work it out and move forward together, or die, and we saw this as a microcosm of the dilemma that America as a whole is facing.

That’s where we were coming from.

Scott: Let’s talk about these two families. We meet the Morgan family, Greg Morgan and his wife and children. They light the center of the story. They’re the ones who’ve moved out there. The year’s 2023, and things are tenuous in the world. Let’s talk about these family members. Maybe could you give us a description of who Greg Morgan is?

Allison: We had Greg being a college professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, which we just thought was relevant to the story.

Scott: That’s an actual program at Cal, isn’t it?

Nicolas: Yes, I think it’s called Global Studies now.

Allison: Yeah. Then we developed this backstory, which you don’t really see too much of in the script. It’s there a little bit. About a year earlier, Greg had an affair, which, along with what was happening in the country, sparked the family’s move just to start over and start afresh. He’s teaching online, guest lecturing. His wife is an OBGYN, but she’s recently retired from her practice. She has conflicting feelings about that. She both hates and misses her work.

Scott: Greg is black and she’s white.

Nicolas: Yes.

Scott: Maybe let’s unpack a little bit those writerly instincts that, as you’re developing this backstory, in terms of the interracial composition of the marriage and providing that tension that he’d had an affair with a graduate student, how did those emerge? Where did they come along in the process? Were they pretty early on or did that just…?

Allison: The whole backstory with the affair was a later draft addition. We had written a very early draft, which we did submit to the Nicholl a couple years before, in 2016. It was a semi‑finalist, I think.

In that earlier draft, Greg was a video editor. They were from L.A., and he had done editing in L.A. Then they moved somewhere rural. There was no affair. He was a bit of a man-child. That’s where their relationship tension came from. He hadn’t really done anything wrong.

When we got notes back from readers… As you can imagine, if you’re down in a bunker with people in a small space, tensions are heightened because of the close quarters. There are quite a few scenes where Greg and Helen are arguing. But it just felt like, “Where is this animosity coming from?” It felt forced.

Then we realized, if they came down into that bunker with baggage, it would make it a lot more interesting than just their personalities getting on each other’s nerves.

Scott: He was more of a, as you just said, man‑child and you…

Allison: That’s probably not the right term to use [laughs].

Scott: Yeah, but he evolved into something that provides a similar length of arc for his character. He became this academic, which is book learning, which is the opposite of what you need in a survivalist type of a mode.

Allison: Exactly.

Nicolas: Right. That was a specific choice, to enhance that aspect of it, because some people spend their whole lives preparing, learning skills that are useful in a broken society. Other people, like us, we spent most of our education acquiring skills that are really only useful in a functioning democracy.

A guy like Greg, with his academic background, lives in his own head a little bit. Winter in fact calls him out on that. That was a specific choice to emphasize the tension that would arise from somebody without the necessary skills.

Scott: They have two children, Zoe and Kai. We’ll talk about them in just a sec, but Kai, who’s 11, you use him, in voiceover narration, as a device throughout. He says in voiceover narration, “But my dad, I always wished he could be the alpha,” which, in a way, presages his arc, isn’t it? He’s got to get in touch with his alpha male over time in order to help the family.

Allison: Right.

Scott: Let’s talk about these two kids. Zoe, 15, sister. You describe her in the script as mature beyond her years. Kai, who’s really, in many respects, not only just narrator, but he has a unique perspective on the world there. He’s got some medical and psychological issues, I guess you’d say. Maybe you could describe both of the kids for us.

Allison: We imagined Kai was a child with autism.

Nicolas: Yes, and nonverbal. We wanted him to be the, as you say, the voiceover narrator, but, more importantly, the conscience of the story. This character who didn’t have a voice, a literal voice… We wanted to give him a voice.

Around the time we were writing early drafts, I remember hearing a radio interview with a man who had a nonverbal son with autism. If I recall, the man had good reason to believe that his son had this rich, incredibly thoughtful interior life that he just wasn’t able to articulate verbally.

Listening to this father talk about his child was very moving. We thought it was a beautiful idea to allow a character like this to be heard, and we wanted to incorporate it into a story about a contemporary American family. That was the thinking there.

Scott: It also contributes to the challenges that they face, not only in their daily lives, but once the proverbial shit hits the fan, they’ve got to deal with that aspect of living with Kai.

Allison: Right.

Nicolas: Right, and from Winter’s point of view, he almost looks at Kai as a liability. We were repulsed by that idea and thought that it was a very compelling thing for an antagonist to do. We wanted to give Kai some role to play in his family’s redemption or success in navigating this very perilous situation.

Scott: Was the voiceover narration that choice? There’s a conventional wisdom which, in my experience in Hollywood, is really more of a convention than wisdom. [laughs] The conventional wisdom is that voiceover narration represents “flabby writing,” the Robert McKee character says in “Adaptation.”

Did the choice to use voiceover narration arise mostly out of wanting to access Kai’s inner world as opposed to we feel like we need a narrative voiceover narration to stitch the story together, or something?

Nicolas: The former.

Allison: Yeah. Honestly, it was just a sudden choice. When we were sitting down, doing page one of the script, we’re like, “Let’s try this.” It just came out. It was something we were trying on page one. We liked it, and we kept going with it throughout the script.

Nicolas: Kai is commenting. He’s establishing a perspective.

We agree with that idea about voiceover generally, but we thought that in this case, it was an original enough and emotionally engaging enough reason to include it. Interestingly, at least one reader suggested to us that we should consider dropping it.

Allison and I took that into account. We talked about it a lot and ultimately decided, “No, this is really essential to the story of this family and of Greg’s journey as well.”

Scott: First of all, I think it’s plenty fine. It’s a terrific narrative device that’s been used successfully in movie after movie after movie. It’s just that when it’s used poorly, when it’s describing something that we already see on screen. What you all did was you provide an access point to this really unique perspective, this boy, and his interior life.

I think you do a quite lovely and a quite wonderful job of it in the script.

Nicolas: Thank you.

Scott: We have this economic collapse that precipitates this deconstruction of the social order. That forces this Morgan family to reach out to these neighbors, who are headed up by this guy, Winter. I guess nowadays they’re called preppers, right?

Allison: Yeah.

Scott: Let’s talk about Winter and that family. You got these two families that live side by side. Winter, his wife, Amber. There’s some others there. Could you maybe describe that family circumstance?

Allison: Yeah. Winter, we imagine he’d be a veteran of the Afghanistan war who’s come back home. He has a unique perspective on government and trusting government. He’s been prepping all these years and he put together this bunker for himself and his girlfriend, who’s pregnant, and his son Matthew.

We did a lot of drafts of this script. In some of the earlier drafts, he’s gone through a whole evolution. He was pretty awful in some earlier drafts. The current draft now, we really like where he landed, where his character landed.

Nicolas: We really wanted to be fair to his perspective. We didn’t want him to be a right‑wing stereotype. We wanted the people who would identify with him to get behind him and be like, “This is our guy.”

Allison: Yeah. I even identify with him sometimes in this script.

Nicolas: I do, too.

Allison: This family, they are freeloaders off of all of the prepping he did.

Nicolas: Off of his hard work.

Allison: There’s a line in the script where he says to Helen, “While you guys were buying wine club memberships, we were clipping coupons for canned food, which you’re now eating.” I relate to that, because we’re not prepping.

[laughter]

Nicolas: We would be relying on somebody who did.

Allison: Yeah. We didn’t want to make him just a 100 percent evil, bad‑guy character. He is that somewhat, but we wanted audiences to empathize with him a little bit.

Scott: That’s that key word ‑‑ empathy.

Nicolas: Yeah.

Scott: You’ve got him for the best nemesis character. It’s just like that quote. I don’t know whoever said it, but, “Even bad guys have moms.”

Nicolas: Yeah.

Allison: Right.

Scott: You got to find some sort of relatability in there, and this is a guy that actually was smart enough in many ways to prepare this family for what he perceived to be, as it turns out, an accurate prediction of what was going to happen.

The thing that struck me about him, the first half of Act Two with Winter’s character, after you get over that initial brusqueness, you open up more his worldview and the utilitarian take that he has on life.

In fact, at one point he says, “Basically, Helen’s of value to me because my girlfriend’s pregnant and she’s an OBGYN, and I don’t see it in you other people.” There’s a certain logic to that.

Nicolas: Yes. On top of that, he does protect all the rest of the family members and Greg’s family at a very key moment, including Kai, who he had some ambivalence about.

Scott: In fact, there’s a conversation after some violent intruders show up. I think that’s what you’re talking about, is when Winter…They all bond together, which is a really interesting idea, and a very helpful one in terms of the story to really help cement them together.

There’s a conversation they have afterwards, because Helen had to resort to violence herself. She says, “I’m no stranger to blood, but out there…I felt like someone else,” talking about the incident that just happened. Winter says, “The first time you take a life, it haunts you. The second time, it thrills you. Eventually, it numbs you.”

Then he says, “Maybe it’s like delivering babies. You do it enough, it gets old.” It’s almost like they’re finding common ground or something that they can relate to. Is that a fair assessment of that?

Nicolas: Yeah, it is. It’s finding common ground philosophically, but also laying the groundwork for a plausible intimacy. With Helen, we were deliberately trying to walk that line between, is she really attracted or is she manipulating him? Where is that line? We wanted to keep the audience guessing on that.

Scott: As much as Greg’s got an arc to get in touch with his alpha male, she has her own arc, in that understanding the fact that they need her because of her being an OBGYN, she does manipulate that situation.

She creates this falsehood that Amber, the girlfriend, needs professional care, at least until the baby’s born. That’s going to buy them some time. Later on, she has an argument with Greg. She says, “Without me, we’d still be out there. I’m the one who’s needed here. It’s time you follow my lead for a change.”

How early in the process or along the way were you working with this idea that both of these characters are going to have their own transformation psychologically?

Nicolas: That’s a great question.

Allison: Pretty early on, because we wanted Greg…His character really changed in all the drafts. Throughout all the drafts, we wanted him to feel like he’s, for the first time, really coming out on top.

It’s ironic, because he’s a Peace and Conflict Studies professor, but he never apologizes to his wife. That’s something he just doesn’t do when they get into arguments, is that he’ll discuss things very reasonably, but he’ll never just own up to his mistakes and say he’s sorry.

At the end, when everything is said and done and it’s the end of Act Three, he finally tells Helen he’s sorry. He’s learned how to take a stand, become an alpha male, and protect his family. Especially in our earlier drafts, that’s what we really wanted, was here’s this guy who’s never had to do that.

Now he’s taken a stand and he’s protecting his loved ones, but he also knows how to admit his mistakes. That’s his arc.

Scott: What about hers?

Allison: With her, in the most recent draft where they’ve come into the bunker with baggage, he’s had an affair and she never really forgave him for that.

Being down in the bunker and getting close with Winter, even though it really was to protect her family, she was trying to do the same thing Greg was, but just in her own way, of having this affair with Winter so that, after his baby was born, her family wouldn’t be kicked out.

Still, Helen trying that on and seeing how it felt, even though she was doing it to protect her family, there was a part of her that was attracted to Winter, that liked that he was so masculine and was that alpha male that Greg wasn’t. There was a part of her that liked that.

Then her trying it on, having this affair that, even though the audience isn’t really sure if it’s genuine or not, she got to see how that felt and how terrible it felt, and then understood where Greg was probably coming from.

Nicolas: Yeah, and we knew early on that, from a story perspective, Helen was going to be the driving force in terms of keeping the family there in the bunker. She had this status, she had the one thing Winter needed. She was able to manipulate the situation to keep that family there.

We knew early on that she was going to probably have to take on that mantle, and so the decision to have Helen come to that conclusion in that line you read about how “It’s my turn to…”

Scott: “To lead.”

Nicolas: “…to lead, for a change.” We knew that point was going to have to be reached, so we were trying to set it up knowing that the switch was going to be flipped, so we were trying to lay the groundwork for that. That was pretty early.

Allison: Yeah. We wanted it where Greg was the one wanting them to go into the bunker, and Helen wasn’t. Then we knew, at some point while they were down there, it would switch, and Greg would want to get them out and Helen would want to stay.

Nicolas: Right.

Scott: It’s a fascinating job of what you did there, because there are a lot of switches, twists and turns, and ticking clocks ‑‑ the pregnancy, the impending birth, and then Winter’s threat, that once the baby’s…they have to leave the compound. In some respects, isn’t this story about connection, community, looking at the other, that sort of thing?

Nicolas: We ultimately saw this as a story of two families who have to depend on each other, or it’s over for everybody. We were just looking, as we spoke of earlier, at these families as a microcosm for the deep divide that we’re seeing in our country.

We just wanted to put these characters in that situation and see how it would play out. We knew, ultimately, that it wasn’t going to be one person’s ideology triumphing over the other. It was going to be this unusual melding of ideas, skills, learning experiences, and all the messy stuff that happens when there’s major disagreement on the process of enduring together.

We had that in mind, and that’s what we were shooting for.

Scott: What about the Nicholl experience? Could you talk a bit about that?

Nicolas: It’s amazing.

Allison: Yeah, it’s a whirlwind. You get a whole week in L.A.

Scott: Were you staying in Ventura or did you just spend the week in L.A.?

Nicolas: We spent the week in L.A. It was logistically challenging with two children. We had, thankfully, my parents and Allison’s parents who came down from Portland to help out with the children, which was great.

The Nicholl experience is wonderful. First of all, it’s called the Academy Nicholl Fellowship, and it really is a fellowship in that the people who won it before you are there for you when you win. During the week, some of them come and give seminars. They attend lunches, an alumni dinner. You get to listen to their perspectives and their advice.

You get to ask them all kinds of practical questions, general questions. You get to know this group of people. It’s like graduating from a school where everybody’s a writer, everybody has the same interest as you, and they’re all looking out for you.

And like school, there are reunions and people staying in touch. It’s wonderful, in that sense, the fellowship and the mentorship. You also get a close-up view of the work the Academy is quietly doing on behalf of motion pictures, from their film preservation archive to their script library, and you come away with great respect for the organization.

We’re thrilled to be part of this tradition now and part of a long line of writers who have gone before and done well in that competition.

Scott: Did you have representation? You’re at Paradigm and Gotham Group now. Did you have representation before you won the Nicholl, or no?

Allison: No. As soon as the finalists are announced, you get all kinds of emails. It’s so fun because, before, you’re emailing people and not hearing back. Now suddenly you’re getting emails from people without being asked.

We signed with them before the Nicholl week, a few weeks after the finalists were announced.

Scott: So, Mike Rich was right. You break into the business by winning the Nicholl.

[laughter]

Nicolas: All you need to do is just win the Nicholl.

Scott: Simple.

Nicolas: Simple.

Scott: Congratulations on that and your script. I’d like to ask if you’ve got time for a few craft questions here. Being parents of a two‑ and six‑year‑old, that must be challenging. How do you find time, structure your lives so that you have time to write?

Allison: Before we had kids, we’d want these perfect chunks of time set aside for writing. We’d want to have all the items checked off our to-do list and the house perfectly cleaned before sitting down at the computer. Now, I find myself writing in total chaos on a notebook while the kids are watching a show or playing and there are toys everywhere.

Nicolas: Or writing in the car as it’s parked in the driveway with the kids asleep in the back seat.

Allison: Right. The first draft of American Refugee, we wrote most of it because our son, at the time, wanted me to be in his room while he fell asleep at night. It would take a couple hours. I would just use my iPhone as a flashlight, sit in the rocking chair in his room with a notebook, handwriting the pages.

I began to think, “Hey, there is time in my day if I just take out the time I’m surfing Facebook or something and actually just try writing instead.” Page by page, you can get stuff done.

Nicolas: Nowadays, one of us will watch the kids while the other writes. Then the next day, we’ll just switch roles and go about it that way.

Allison: Yeah. Having a partner, obviously that makes it much easier.

Scott: How do you come up with story ideas? Is it something you’re conscious about? You’re like, “OK, I’m going to come up with ideas,” or do they just hit you, do you look for news articles or what? What are the sources of your ideas?

Nicolas: All of the above.

Allison: Yeah.

Nicolas: A lot of times, something will strike one of us. I’ll shout it over the shower curtain, “Hey, what do you think?” [laughs]

Allison: In the end, it always starts with a character.

Nicolas: Definitely starts with a character. It’s like, “It would be interesting to write about this type of person.” Also, as we were saying before, something that is relevant in the zeitgeist that’s in the conversations people close to us are having, trying to connect with the things people are talking about or that matter to us, whether it’s a news event or a national trend or something else.

Just trying to get our finger on the pulse, and if there’s a character who’s compelling and who can be the way into a story like that, we’ll talk about it and maybe start sketching it out.

Scott: That’s interesting you say that. I’m featuring on my blog…By the way, are you familiar with my blog, “Go Into The Story,” at all or no?

Allison: Yeah, we’ve taken a look at it. It’s great.

Nicolas: Yeah. We love the interviews you’ve done with all the Nicholl fellows…They’re great.

Scott: And now you’re going to be on the archives. In fact, I’m currently reprising a series I did in 2012 on a book that was co‑written in 1920 by Anita Loos who was one of the most famous screenwriters of her era, she and her husband John Emerson.

Today’s article was talking about story concepts, and a quote from the book: “Find your story on an original truth of universal interest.” It sounds like that’s what you’re saying, find something people can be interested in, the zeitgeist, that conversation. Does that seem accurate?

Allison: Yeah.

Nicolas: Exactly. Yeah, that’s really nailing it. Then find a compelling character who lives in that world or who can really experience that world or speak to that world.

Scott: Let’s talk about characters here. How do you go about developing them? Are there any specific, I don’t know, tips or tools that you use when you unpack the character?

Allison: Yeah, there’s a screenwriting book we’ve had for years that has a list of character questions. It’s like 20 questions. It seems so silly when you’re doing it. It asks questions like, “What kind of grades did your character get in high school?” All of these questions, and we fill them out for every character. By the end, it feels like you have a living, breathing person in front of you. That list of questions has been great.

I also got a tip to write quickly and not outline. We used to do a lot of outlining, days and weeks of outlining before starting. What we found is that that makes for more of a plot‑driven movie than a character‑driven movie. We scaled back on some of the outlining because now we trust more in our rewriting skills.

We feel like, “You know what? We have a general sense of the major plot points in this. We don’t need to spell out every detail. Let’s just try doing a first draft,” and we’ll always do those character questions first.

It feels a little more organic, and it feels like the characters are speaking in the page versus I have to get this character to address all these bullet points from this outline in this scene.

Scott: When you’re writing scenes, do you take a similar approach where you’re feeling your way through the scene, or do you sit down before you write a scene and you have certain things you know it needs to accomplish, or both? [laughs]

Allison: We do them both. With “American Refugee,” when we were doing the first draft, we didn’t have any kind of real ending in mind. We were just writing. Our ending changed several times in several drafts. Earlier in our writing career I would have been a lot more nervous to start a script without knowing exactly how it’s all going to end.

Now, I feel like it’s better to start drafts sooner, but it’s also working as a team. I trust in our rewriting process better than if it were just me writing [laughs]. I feel like that’s the area of screenwriting I get most anxious about, is the rewriting process. If I were doing that alone, I might feel like, “Oh, gosh I better get this right the first time.”

Now, I don’t have that same fear. I know that we can always change it.

Nicolas: It also makes for a more exciting writing experience. You leave certain things unplanned because then it does leave a little wiggle room for the characters in a particular situation to take you, as the writer, to places that you hadn’t plotted out in advance.

Leaving some of that breathing space is important to the spontaneity and also the freshness of the writing, and it makes for a more enjoyable process.

Allison: Yeah. It feels tedious to sit down and write out pages of a screenplay from this lengthy outline, but we’ve done it.

Nicolas: We’ve done it.

Scott: You’re talking about the rewrite process. How many drafts of “American Refugee” do you think…I know you submitted it to the Nicholl at least twice. How many drafts do you think you wrote, if you had to estimate, of that script?

Nicolas: At least six.

Scott: Six drafts. What is your rewriting process? How do you go about doing that?

Allison: One of the things ‑‑ and I’m sure all screenwriters do this because there’s a page limit — we’re always trying to trim down everything.

Nicolas: Allison loves attacking the blank page. She does a lot of that. I do a lot of rewriting. It’s true what she says.

A lot of it is trying to be concise, economy of effort, economy of space, getting in and out of scenes more quickly, looking at pacing and giving the story breathing space when it’s required. Looking at those types of things and tightening it up so that it’s a quick and enjoyable read.

Then making sure it’s the product we want. If it isn’t, then we keep at it.

Allison: Having a partnership is really helpful for notes because, if we get notes back, it’s easier to work through them with a partner because you don’t feel quite so defensive. [laughs] If it’s 100 percent your own writing, all of it, and you get a note back to change something, that’s a little harder…At least that’s how I felt before I started writing with Nick.

I felt notes were difficult, but now, together, we sit and we talk. Like, “OK, what did this person mean?” Of course, we might feel defensive for a few minutes while we’re talking it out, but we talk it out together. Notes from readers are helpful, anyone who’s willing to read your script.

It’s always great when people say they like it, but if they can tell you something that bothered them or they weren’t so sure about, and, if you get that note more than once, you know that’s an issue. For example, with American Refugee, one was with Helen and Winter’s relationship.

Nicolas: Some people weren’t buying it in terms of the intimacy. We had to rework that.

Allison: Rework that a lot.

Nicolas: All of this really points to having readers whose opinions you trust. In our case, it’s each other primarily. Being a partnership, especially a married partnership, we have a very thick skin now about criticism. Accepting honest criticism is a learned skill.

We’ve been at it enough in both our writing lives and our personal lives where any idea thrown forward is in service of trying to make a better story. At this point, we don’t care whose idea it was so long as it’s good [laughs] or so long as it helps the story. All of these elements go into rewriting.

Allison: My rewriting is, “Hey, Nick, rewrite this please.”

[laughter]

Scott: That’s your rewriting. Division of labor. One last question, and I’m sure you’re going to be asked this now that you’re in the business. What advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Nicolas: Oh, man, if we knew that answer we would have…

Scott: Apart from, “Win the Nicholl.” [laughs]

Nicolas: Yeah, right. Win the Nicholl.

Allison: Contests are helpful. We’ve always done contests, and sometimes a script will get to a semi or finalist round in one contest, and it won’t even get past the first round in another. Obviously, doing more than one is helpful.

Nicolas: Yeah, and with contests I would also recommend signing up for the notes.

Allison: Sign up for the notes for sure.

Nicolas: The more people who are reading it, reflecting on it, and sharing their thoughts, the better. In terms of everything else, I believe that all of those things that we were talking about, writing from a place that matters to you, writing what you know — all of those things about writing are true, at least for us. Be bold. Take risks with your writing.

Don’t try to anticipate what the market wants, just write the things that matter to you. Read all the screenwriting books. Take what you can from them.

Allison: Just go ahead and start a first draft. That was our big thing before, until the last few years. We wouldn’t want to start a first draft until we had thought everything out and the idea was perfectly cemented in our heads. Then we’d imagine a nice long weekend set aside to do it when there weren’t a lot of other things going on in our lives.

But it’s never going to be that perfect time, and you’re never going to have all the answers for the story. Even if it’s a busy weekend, and you only have 45 minutes during your lunch hour or something, just try scribbling out a scene and keep doing that every day. Before you know it, you’ll have a first draft.

Nicolas: Get your hands dirty. Nobody’s going to read a blank page.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winners since 2012, go here.