Go Into The Story Interview: c. Craig Patterson

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

c. Craig Patterson wrote the original screenplay “Tah” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with c. Craig about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Here is my complete interview with c. Craig.

Scott: I believe you’re originally from New Orleans. Is that right?

c. Craig: I’m from the 7th Ward of New Orleans. Yes, sir.

Scott: How does someone growing up in New Orleans, wind your way toward the interest in filmmaking?

c. Craig: The 7th Ward is a really kind of ultra‑creative space there. It’s always a lot of music. It’s a lot of people living life and having fun and enjoying the city and enjoying each other.

And so, I had that as a backdrop to my life. My mother is an amazing writer. One of the biggest things that has come out of this entire Nicholl experience, it’s inspired her to want to write again. Especially she’s in the story. She’s the little girl in the story.

Scott: Ada?

c. Craig: Yeah. Ada. My mother is Angela, but I named her Ada in the story. Putting her in the story was a big deal to me. She always pushed me to write and to be as creative as possible.

Scott: How did you get into screenwriting?

c. Craig: Completely accidentally. I always wrote for a living. I was an editor‑in‑chief of a small magazine in Texas.

When I got into school in New York, I had an opportunity to choose a path in life. I truly sat down and thought about like, well, I like to write. What can I do for a living in writing? And I was like, I’ll pretend to be a screenwriter [laughs] and I started taking screenwriting classes.

I’m sitting in a class one day and this other guy (Emil Daubon) was there. He asked, what are you studying? I was like, I’m a screenwriter. And he’s like, me too. I was like, oh, great. And he’s like, yo, there’s a group of us that meets, a group of veterans that meets in a coffee shop after classes, and we learn from the MFA, the MFA student teaches us what he learned.

I was like, oh, that’s great, but I’m not a veteran. He’s like, oh man, it’s three of us, so it’ll be fine. That guy, Jesse Gustafson, as an MFA student, he took the time to teach us screenwriting and from…

Scott: This was Columbia?

c. Craig: This was at Columbia. And, from there I just went with it and I’ll continue to do it until people tell me stop. [laughter]

Scott: They’ve got a great program at Columbia.

c. Craig: They do. Story is always first there. They only cared about the written word of it. That was a different type of experience, but I’m so grateful for it, because they just really drilled it in us is that like, if you know what to make a story about you’ll figure out the how.

Scott: So you also did NYU and USC. How did that work out?

c. Craig: It flows into what we were just talking about. So I was at Columbia and getting fairly frustrated that there were no more practical film classes to take. Every class I had was a screenwriting class. I also took Barnard screenwriting classes.

I had ran out of film classes to take and it was really frustrating because I wanted to learn directing and I was doing a lot of directing outside of school. But I found a loophole that I applied to NYU as a visiting student, as though I was coming from somewhere else.

I was just going to both schools at the same time. I was studying directing at NYU and studying everything else at Columbia. Everything was going fantastic. I was learning so much. I had that opportunity to get that directing experience at NYU.

I eventually got busted when I went and asked about financial aid one day. And Columbia made me choose. They very much were like, decide where you go to school, because I was double enrolled. And apparently you’re not allowed to be double enrolled. At least at the particular program I was in.

I was like, all right, it’s Columbia but what was poetic about it was my final class at USC and my MFA was with one of my good friends from NYU was in that class with me and it was like a beautiful ending.

But, yeah, USC came because I heard Spike Lee say that there is nothing poetic about being a starving artist. I was like, oh well, let me go see how they’re doing things at USC because USC certainly takes a much different approach to how they look at filmmaking and they think about the business component too.

Scott: Yeah, they’re much more in tune with the commercial aspect of it. But I bet it’s good that you got the whole Columbia screenwriting experience, the NYU auteur thing, and then USC and the commercial angle.

c. Craig: [Laughs] Yeah, auteurism, I don’t know anything about that. But I do know they taught me how to point a camera in a direction. They taught me how to take the lens cap off and make sure that I’m filming something.

Scott: Well, you must have figured it out, because there’s this short film I was reading about called “Fathead.”

c. Craig: Oh, my goodness.

Scott: That has received quite a reception there. Could you maybe talk to us about that film?

c. Craig: Yeah, it’s a story about these awesome kids who all live in a junkyard. There’s no parents around, and kids tend to break into factions. In that particular world, they broke into the Ragamuffins and the Dums. The Ragamuffins run the junkyard. They’re the rough and tumble kids and the Dums are the kids that believe more in the freedom of doing what you want to do.

They’re like the little Charlie Browns of that world. They get overrun pretty quickly. And there’s only two of them left is Fathead and her little brother, Tudaloo. Once Tudaloo gets kidnapped by the Ragamuffins, it’s the classic story of one versus many.

This little girl goes and takes on this entire group of kids to get her brother back. And it’s kind of a love letter to my older sister. Many times she’s gotten me out of trouble. And Fathead was the nickname my grandfather gave my mother as a kid.

Scott: This is a film you did in conjunction with Amazon and Epic Games’ UnReal Engine. Talk about a bit about that.

c. Craig: A couple of weeks before graduation, I got an amazing phone call telling me I was a finalist for the Innovation and Technology Grant. It’s put on by the Entertainment Technology Center that was started at the behest of George Lucas nearly started 35 years ago.

They were responsible for the standardization of digital cinema and cloud-based storage for film. The thing that they were studying that particular year was LED‑wall technology. They asked if I had a film that I would love to make that no one else would pay for?

And I was like, yeah, absolutely I do. I pitched them Fathead and we were lucky enough to be selected. I’m immensely grateful to the ETC and to that entire team for making that happen.

Scott: Quite a few awards for that film. NACCP Image Award for Outstanding Short Film Live Action, winning the Cannes Film Festival Best Student Short Award, Premier Emerging Filmmaking Showcase, Finalist American Black Film Festival, HBO Short Film Award. Wow. That must have been something else?

c. Craig: Really, and The American Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival, like that was, I had to be the most surprised person in all of France.

It was an amazing experience to have. Obviously every filmmaker dreams of being in that town and stepping on the stage and having something recognized, especially because that crew, it was close to 400 people that worked on that film. They gave every bit of imagination and heart into that. So, that was a thing. That was a win for all of us, for sure.

Scott: Is that movie on Amazon?

c. Craig: No, we’re still on the festival circuit.

Scott: OK, still on festival circuit. Now, you’re doing all this, which is amazing. And then there’s a Nicholl sitting over here somewhere in your mind like I need to write a script for them. How did that work? What were you thinking about the Nicholl?

c. Craig: I thought I had applied to the Nicholl three times. I actually applied four times and with three different scripts. The first time was in undergrad. It was my first script I ever wrote, and it finished in top 10 percent.

The next year, I switched scripts. I did a different script, and it went to top 20 percent, so I went down. I was like, oh, no. And then I submitted a draft of “Tah” in 2022 and it didn’t place at all. I went back and we thought about what were the important moments of these women’s lives? We worked at about 70 percent. I wasn’t going to submit because you start to feel like, those certain things are…

You’re going to have to go a different route. Certain things are not going to happen. I turned it in on the last day. On the last day on a humbug, I was just like, all right, let me just send it off. And I went to work and I’ve been working on the animation with a lot of the same people. It’s with Paramount, Epic Games, and Amazon MGM. And so I didn’t have to fear and think about it. Then when that came up, especially because of what the story was, it made it even more special.

The story was about, you know…those particular women, I tell stories because of “Tah.” Like “Tah” was everything to me growing up. Out of all stories that it could have been, I’m glad it was this one. And I got the final call for it while I was in New Orleans. It just so happened to me I was at home when it happened.

Scott: Well, it’s such a wonderful script. The logline:

“The black sheep of the family comes back home to live with the most difficult matriarch in New Orleans.”

Let’s start off here. Before Page One, you have this quote, “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard.” From Zora Neale Hurston.” I’d never heard of her. I went and looked her up. Wow. What an interesting person she is. Maybe you can talk a little bit about this. This is something people should know about.

c. Craig: Yeah. Zora Neale Hurston is one of my mother’s favorite authors. I knew that I wanted to start it. It was going to be between her and Flannery O’Connor. I knew that.

Tah had that same type of contrarian spirit. This was a woman that had a hard life. Now I know it’s hard, it’s not like having an emu farm, but it was a rough life. One of the big things that was a goal of mine, because I knew I wanted to write this story before I wrote any other story, but I never felt like I was going to be good enough to do it. Because if I screwed up with it, that would mean that these women who I care about very much, their story might be lost.

With Zora, I knew that quote for many years of my life and I never thought about it in terms of anything I was going to do. I just so happened to just write it as the first thing on there. I didn’t look back, but it it’s…it was the outlook of no matter what Tah, for her personally, she just kept going.

I mean, that woman in real life, every dream imaginable that she had went away — every single one. And what do you do in life when your dreams go away? And there’s another day after that and another day, another day. The goal I had for the story was to give her a happier ending than she actually had.

Scott: Actually, now that you’re saying that and I’m thinking of the script, it shines even a richer light on it. So let’s talk about this script. Tah was a real character?

c. Craig: Yeah. It’s written about my great‑aunt, my great‑grandmother, and my mother.

Scott: OK. I mean, because when you read the script, the characters are so vivid and the story world is so lived in. I just figured that these had to have been.

c. Craig: Yeah. I ran through that house as a child. Those are all very real places.

Scott: The house with the two sides?

c. Craig: Mm‑hmm.

Scott: All right, let’s dig into this a little bit, and we can help people make sense of this. Let’s talk about the character, Tah.

c. Craig: Yes.

Scott: How would you describe this figure? You’ve already hinted at a little bit about what the journey is. But at the beginning of the story, she’s in a pretty positive place.

c. Craig: Yeah. Before Tah got to Nan’s house, man, Tah…The way my great‑grandmother used to talk about Tah was like, oh, she was a “finger popper.” In Tah’s young life, Tah always liked to be in a club. She drank whiskey. She smoked cigarettes.

I mean, my family is painfully Catholic. So, Tah was like, hell on wheels to them. She was managing a bar, a nightclub, and you couldn’t tell her anything because that was her life. She was self‑sustaining. She didn’t need your help.

On the opposite side of that, she could even be helpful to you. She could put a couple of dollars in your pocket. So when the situation turned, it was really, really tough for her. Because now, everything I had to say to you before that you weren’t listening to, you have to listen to.

Scott: Your articulation of this character in the script, are these stories that you were hearing about her…

c. Craig: Oh absolutely, yeah, like 80 percent of them yeah for sure.

Scott: 80 percent. OK. You said this finger popping thing, the way she’s introduced, she’s bopping out of a bingo hall in 1969. It says: “The cadence of Tah’s walk doesn’t sound like a loser. As a matter of fact it’s almost a strut, the neighborhood is her kingdom a black working‑class mecca. She owns it.”

c. Craig: Yeah.

Scott: People are like, hey, I’ll be at the club tonight. You better be there.

c. Craig: And she loved it. Her whole life, she was a loved person. In the story, I wanted her to feel like a woman that people looked up to in a certain space. If you were part of her world, she was a big deal. But it wasn’t hers to have. It was given to her by Moses.

Scott: She’s married to this guy, Moses. Now, that was a funny way of introducing him. The script says: “Moses Gash, 50, a 7th word Billy Dee Williams.” And my mind immediately went to those malt liquor ads that Billy Dee Williams did way back. Yeah, right?

c. Craig: Exactly, yeah.

Scott: Tah’s husband. OK, so, this guy existed?

c. Craig: Yeah, and that wasn’t his name. But yeah, he was a real person for sure.

Scott: And he had a little wandering eye kind of thing going on.

c. Craig: Yeah, he definitely didn’t think of marriages as closed as one would think of marriage to be. It’s more of a suggestion than a rule of law. At least that, because I didn’t have the privilege of knowing him, but that was the family mythos around him, for sure.

Scott: But he owned a club?

c. Craig: Yeah.

Scott: And this club is The Young Friends Club.

c. Craig: Yeah, that’s it. It’s still there. It’s still in the neighborhood.

Scott: Tah had a tenuous situation. She didn’t realize it at first. At least it was presented in the script. She’s in this club, she’s got this friend I think Fish is the name. This club that people come to, she’s got money, the club’s doing great, but she doesn’t own it.

c. Craig: No. She’s not aware of her lack of ownership in it. She’s thinking partnership and that is not the reality of it.

Scott: No, that’s not Moses. Before we get to the big breakdown I do want to talk about the fact that you’ve got these several themes in the script that are woven through like a fugue in a way, like music is one of them. So when you go to the club, you’re seeing Professor Long here who actually existed. And then you’ve got little characters like Zoot, who’s an alcoholic neighborhood trombone player.

c. Craig: Real man.

Scott: Real man. So, of course, music in New Orleans is synonymous. But were you consciously trying to weave that in, or that was just part of the background and it had to be?

c. Craig: It was part of the background, but I knew characters like Zoot. He was a real person that was around when I was a kid and my grandmother was really hard on him. He had a crick in his neck and he was the kindest man. I was like, oh, how do I emphasize that? I’ll give him a trombone and let him express himself that way.

But he was always kind. He’d say, “Hey, Miss Antoine. How you doing?” No matter how mean she was to him, he was always super nice. Always had a kind word. Tying him to music felt right.

Scott: I’m just curious, stepping away from the script. What was it like growing up in New Orleans in terms of the musical thing? I mean, people go and visit there, like thousands and thousands of visitors go every year to experience it. But you’re growing up there. What was that like?

c. Craig: It was a big part of my house because one of my sisters is a jazz singer. So, it was it was a huge part of life for us. You just get used to it. It becomes almost intertwined in your everyday life without you recognizing. In high school, I had friends that would practice twirling symbols because in bands — in New Orleans high school band — you aren’t just going to hit the symbols. It’s going to be a whole dance with it. So, you’re going on a corner and you’re seeing people practice twirling symbols and that’s a normal everyday thing. You’re watching people not just practicing music, but practice artistry.

Scott: Now you mentioned this, let’s go back to the script here. Tah walks past a place, an apartment building, and she says, “I want to live there.” She wants to be in that apartment. Now that you told me what you just said about how all these things she wanted, none of them turned out. I mean, that is symbolic of the sort of height of what her desire is, right?

c. Craig: Right, right. Yeah, Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, for the 7th Ward specifically, it’s like special. These homes are gargantuan and beautiful. They’re all Antebellum and over-the-top. If you were living in a little shotgun house, you would absolutely dream of those homes.

I didn’t want her to want something unobtainable. I knew Tah’s whole life she wanted to get out of that house. There was no peace in that house. Esplanade Avenue felt like a really true and honest goal to have for her.

Scott: Yeah. And then you’ve got another theme running through the script: Money. The bingo game represents a lottery. And then the club’s got money. And then once Moses, and they have that big blow‑up, and now she’s out of money, so there’s financial insecurity. Maybe talk a bit about that theme, money that plays throughout the story.

c. Craig: Money in New Orleans and money in this particular story, one of the blessings of the 7th Ward in particular is that it doesn’t take a lot of money to be alive and…as long as you have enough money for the weekend, you’ll be all right. And you live in kind of from celebration to celebration.

Tah’s outlook on it was like, as long as she was good, if she had money to get a little something here and there, it wasn’t like she ever felt like she had to stack money up. Because when is the music going to stop? The music never stops. Like I said, to this day that club is open. It’s not the same type of place, but it’s still there.

I didn’t want it to be overwhelming but she needed just enough to leave. Enough to get the first and last month’s rent to get out. That’s all she needs to do. She doesn’t have to stack up enough money to go and live forever. She just has to get out of this house. And that’s it. Sometimes dreams are very, very practical.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, while she’s in that first stage of the script, it was like the first 40 pages or so. I mean, she’s got this little niece, Ada. That’s your mom, right? Is that what you’re saying?

c. Craig: Yeah.

Scott: A little 14‑year‑old girl. Talk a bit, if you would, about the Ada character at the beginning of the story.

c. Craig: Yeah, that was one of the most difficult parts because there was a lot of children. It wasn’t one kid but I had to make it manageable for the story. Ada is my mom but she’s representative of all the sisters (four in total). They were very good kids. They studied hard. They did the things. They grew up the right way. But, money wasn’t a part of the equation.

So if, Tah could bless you with, like, hey, let’s go to Krauss and go get a blouse or dress or shoes. I mean, that was Christmas in July. That type of thing was very important and it was a highlight of a lot of their stories that they would talk about. Small kindnesses.

The other part of it was, in real life my mom got into Brandeis and she was so proud, so happy. And then the next week she got into Yale, but they had already paid the $50 entrance fee. And they didn’t have another $50. And my mom had never let go that she missed out on Yale for $50. I wanted to make sure she finally got a chance to go to Yale.

It was important to put in there. She loves Brandeis and she’s a huge Brandeis person, but she often thinks about that she was $50 away from something she had worked so hard for.

Scott: Let’s talk about Nan. Because she is a piece of work, man. Unrelentingly tough.

c. Craig: Yeah.

Scott: It gets worse as she goes along. It’s not like there’s no moments of merciful relief. Well, there actually is a little moment there with the trombone guy, but let’s talk about this character in the script and then whatever you want to bring to bear in terms of like the real life.

c. Craig: That was one of the notes I had gotten from Sundance the year before, they were like, “Oh my God, she’s like, she’s the worst.” And it broke my heart because in real life she just had no gauge, but there was no malice either. What she’s saying is honest, and she’s telling you what it is. You just don’t like how she’s telling it to you.

She doesn’t have the ability to ease off the gas. This is a woman who lived a rough life. This is a tough existence. You see what has become of her husband. Nan is on Tah’s case because of the choices that Tah makes. Nan is just like, why are you doing this to yourself? But she’s just harsh about it because there’s no need to be subtle. Subtlety gets you in a really bad space.

Scott: Yeah, she does speak the truth. It’s like she’s got no manifold.

c. Craig: Right. Yes, 100 percent.

Scott: So the big twist, and this is one of those stories where you say, well, why, you step outside the story universe and you say, OK, this story is the Protagonist has to go home. And you think about that generically, well, the reason they have to go home is because they have stuff they need to deal with that they thought they tried to escape. No, they’ve got to go home.

And so she does. She’s literally living in this house that’s been divided into two parts. And there’s her mom over there with the refrigerator combination lock… you can’t get the food. Now is that, was that true?

c. Craig: Yeah. They had a very interesting relationship, I mean, it was war. It was loving war and I wanted it to feel…I’m a huge, huge fan of Joel and Ethan Coen. I thought that their sensibilities in my family’s world would be right. It’s just, these larger than life, ridiculous choices of disdain. What does disdain look like through the Coens‑esque universe?

Those little things were just things that we chuckle about as a family. I thought that it would make a lot of sense if you put more comedy into it than just like, woe‑is‑me‑ism with it.

Scott: I want to talk to you about this dynamic. This is very interesting that you’re saying you wanted to do something where you looked at this character, Tah character, and wanted her to have a different outcome. Because, your typical story of what I call the Unity Arc, where they start off where they got to go in a positive way.

This ends up at a place where I feel she is actually more positive, but it’s one thing after another that there’s money that’s lost there’s a her mother becomes even more mean‑spirited she has to move back on all these things one thing after another so that is more reflective of the real life experience how did you then adapt that into the script knowing where you were going to go at the end?

c. Craig: Yeah because I was there at the end of Tah’s life. It was quite a sad space. She was always like a firecracker to the end, but, nothing had worked out in a way that one would be like, this life is a fantastic one. Like, it wasn’t that. It was a real…

Scott: It’s not George Bailey and It’s a Wonderful Life.

c. Craig: No, no, and she earned that. She earned that and that was a hard-working woman who brought joy. I wanted to try to capture that.

Scott: In real life, did Tah work with the Catholic Church?

c. Craig: Oh, yeah.

Scott: Was that part of it? OK. Because in the script, she’s desperate for money. I thought this was another thing, because you have food, obviously, as a whole thing here. One of the little, it’s like a screenwriter note. Like, OK, you want to provide these markers to suggest character development.

At the beginning, basically, all she’s good at is red beans and rice. And then she gets this gig at the Catholic Church as their cook. And she’s terrible. And then you cut the three years later and she’s making all these great food items and everything. Let’s talk a bit about the role of Father Frank, a mentor figure. How would you describe him in the script?

c. Craig: In the script, he’s a culmination of the priest that raised me and the one who hired Tah. I’m pretty sure Father Frank is the only White character in the movie. It was important to me to have the presence of a kind priest in the story because in that neighborhood priests were a huge component of our universe. And it was the kindness of this human that had a huge effect on my life. And I wanted to make sure that his comedic spirit was present in it too. Whenever he was in there, he was playing the straight man of it, you know.

Scott: He has these little moments like he has this quote when he’s like eating the vanilla wafer, you know. He says: “Sometimes knowing what you want is more important than knowing better.” One of my favorite moments in the script, Tah stood in about 10 pages earlier, I think, where she, her nephew, I think James, is getting baptized, in the church. And then later on, she’s alone. And there’s a wonderful little moment here.

It’s like four or five pages from the end of the script. Tah dips a cup into the now full sink. So she’s getting a cup. She’s about to take a sip, but stops herself. Instead, Tah turns her back to the sink before leaning backward and whispers some words to herself. She pours the water over her forehead. It washes over her, her eyes open as it flows. And then you bolded. Her head lifts, period. Baptized, period.

c. Craig: That was the first scene I thought I had for the movie.

Scott: Really? Well, unpack that for me.

c. Craig: For some reason it was the first thing I thought of for the film. I knew that’s where I wanted to go. Because later on in Tah’s life, she became a Eucharistic minister.

Scott: Really?

c. Craig: Yeah, yeah. That was her baptism, her new calling in life was to become a Eucharistic minister. I wanted to make sure that was in there but that was the first thing I had.

Scott: Wow, because it’s a very moving moment. Of course baptism represents theologically, new life, born again, and so, she is in a way at the end. I don’t want to give away the ending about the dispensation of some money that she comes into. But I love the ending. I just thought the ending was great because you could see, “Oh, it could go this way, it could go that way.” Did you always have that in mind, that ending?

c. Craig: Yeah, it was. When we talk about the alternate endings and alternate universes, and it was like if Tah had had the money, this is what she would have done with it. Knowing that woman, knowing those women, all of them, if the money was there this is how it would have gone.

Scott: One last thing I want to talk to you about. Your script, dialogue, reminded me of one of my favorite playwrights is August Wilson.

c. Craig: Oh, my gosh.

Scott: And I’ve seen almost all of his Century Cycle.

c. Craig: OK.

Scott: But “The Piano Lesson” is my favorite of them. But I just, literally a week ago, for my birthday, my family said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to go see “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” It’s at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. And we saw it.

c. Craig: What a beautiful birthday.

Scott: Yeah, the whole family, my wife, my two kids. August Wilson, I was reading the script. I was going, “Oh, my God, this is like, it has a feel. The characters are so real. The dialogue is so, has a sense of authenticity, everything about it.”

I don’t know. I just, I assumed you were a fan.

c. Craig: Of course, of course. Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be ever able to thank you for what you just said to me. That’s the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me. It’s about to make me tear up, to be honest with you. That man and his words are a huge influence in my life. So thank you for that.

Scott: You’re a director. And somebody, somewhere is going to pay money. You want to direct this thing, right?

c. Craig: Absolutely, yeah.

Scott: Well, it absolutely deserves to get made because it’s just a wonderful film. All right. I got some craft questions for you.

c. Craig: Let’s do it.

Scott: Evidently you’re coming up with all these ideas and submitting the Nicholl and whatnot. Doing these short films and animation and all these projects. How do you come up with story ideas?

c. Craig: I have an overactive imagination, like my walls are all dry erase walls. It’s like all these scribblings and I swear it’s not, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

But, it’s a ton of stuff, so I sit in my office all day long and if something crosses my mind and it crosses my mind a second time, by the time it crosses my mind a third time, I feel like it has a little bit of staying power. I’ll start to write on the wall about it.

The big jump is when it makes it from the wall to index cards. Once it makes the index cards, it’s like, oh, that’s a thing. Now we’re doing a thing. There’s lots of things that have come and gone on the wall. But once it makes it off the wall, there’s something poetic about being off the wall.

Scott: With the card thing, was that something you learned at Columbia or NYU?

c. Craig: USC.

Scott: That sounds like USC.

c. Craig: It has been really useful to me. The Columbia outlook on it was just like you write the story beginning to end. You do your outlines and all, but I had Paul Foley at USC and he had an outlook on what happens if you write your first act and then you write the middle of the film and then you write the end of the film.

You just jump and just write the midpoint, write the end. And when I tell you, oh my God, I was like, I was such a stickler for how I was taught to write. I was like, no, that’s absolutely sacrilegious. How could you do that? And it was amazing.

I’ve done it since. The other thing that, that he suggested that I do all the time was before I start writing, you write down 90 things that you know about the characters in the story. The first 20 are the easiest things in the world.

Then from 20 to 50 is a bit of a struggle. 50 to 90 is insane. But by the time you get to 90 things that you know about this story, oh, the pages just start moving. Because you’ve taken the time to think about what you would consider the most mundane thing on earth about them. But you have it. You have it to build off of when you know that about them now.

Scott: Yeah, it’d be like, well, you knew this probably from real life in terms of Tah, but the fact she smoked Kool cigarettes.

c. Craig: Absolutely.

Scott: That means something. That’s menthols. That’s different than Camels or Marlboros, right?

c. Craig: Right. And I knew that like Papa. In reality he was in the Knights of Peter Claver, but I was in love with Teddy from “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

I was like, oh, I’m going to take my great grandfather. Hopefully he forgives me. And I’m going to meld him with this this character that I love so much. One who is not exactly on the same wavelength as the rest of us. But there’s something special about him. The fact that, he’s always in uniform and he’s always together in that space, but that came from that process of writing those 90 things.

Scott: So is this the same approach that you would like if you get a writing assignment in OWA, you go in and with that is the same approach that you would do right at one point and or 90 things?

c. Craig: Yeah, it’s my go to thing now, to start anything, because it gives you those small details that when you’re backed up against the wall and you’re trying to figure out how to make somebody feel more real what you know things to pull from to go to.

Scott: So how do you get to those 90 things? You can’t just, they don’t pull them out of midair. Do you have like specific character development exercises, interviews, free scenes, stream of consciousness? What do you do to get the characters to come to life?

c. Craig: First, you write their history. I had the great fortune of working with the incomparable Miss Ruth E. Carter. She asked me once to give her a character history and she was like, I want the history, I want to know the hospital they were born in. She’s doing that for costume. She taught me so much about character.

Those types of things are really useful. Like, say for me, I use exclusively Bic pens and the one I’m using, I put orange tape on so I know that don’t pull a new Bic pen until you finish this one. This is the one that we’re using. That’s, that’s specific. We’re in the specificity business.

Scott: There was a novelist, I can’t remember what, but somebody asked him, he said, what do you know enough about your characters? He said, when you know what color socks they like to wear.

c. Craig: Right. Or if the socks match. Like, to me, I love the Einstein thing of, like, life’s too short to take time matching socks.

[laughs]

Scott: Yeah. OK. Dialogue. Got to talk about it. Now, of course, August Wilson has a great story. A student asked him, how do you write such great dialogue? And he said, I don’t. They do.

c. Craig: They do. They do.

Scott: And he would just be walking along on a character he’d written 15 years previously, just pop up in his mind. Is that your experience? Because your dialogue, that’s one of the reasons I’m thinking of August Wilson. When you read your dialogue and your script, it’s just so vibrant and whatnot. How do you do that?

c. Craig: The age‑old thing of making sure everybody sounds different, that they have their own vocabulary, that they have their own cadence. And any script I’m writing, you set them off of, as best you can, real people. Like I’m writing a script on astronauts right now, and they’re all people I know. And so they’re based off of humans I know and how they speak to one another.

I learned really quickly from one of my professors, Loren‑Paul Caplin at Columbia, that humans don’t speak in complete sentences. It’s always…it’s a dance, man. Barnet Kellman at USC speaks about dialogue as tennis. Something that is active.

Scott: So, theme. How do you think about that? Is that something you front load or is that something you discover along the way? How do you approach theme and storytelling?

c. Craig: Very loosely. To avoid the feeling that I know something because, I don’t, I’m like, I’m a guy. I’m just, trying to give a little bit of an outlook. The thing I’ve wanted, I told you that I wanted to complete with this was, give a hard life a happy ending.

Scott: There we go.

c. Craig: And that was it. That was, the guide post. That and find a way to work the red bean story into, because that was such a catalyst. The red bean story is a huge story in the family. So it was like, I had…

Scott: Did the dad actually throw that pot out?

c. Craig: Yes. It was way more chaotic than that. But that was enough to get the point across. In reality, she didn’t have a BB gun. She did it with a broomstick, and nobody bought that she used a broomstick. They were like, how did she beat him with the broomstick? Well, he was drunk. So I had to switch it to a BB gun to make people believe me.

Scott: That’s pretty awesome. The BB thing landed really well. Let me ask you, where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years professionally?

c. Craig: If I’m lucky enough to be in a space where I’m creating things, man, this is a beautiful life. We chose a beautiful vocation. I haven’t been doing this long enough to not feel a s though every second of this is amazing. To have this conversation with you is amazing. I had no plans for any of this. I walked on that campus and started pretending to be a screenwriter. I take it one step at a time. In five years, if I’m still doing things, it would be great.

Scott: Last question, I always ask this. What’s your single best piece of advice to someone who is an aspiring screenwriter, filmmaker?

c. Craig: That’s the easiest question of the day. That Columbia MFA student who I brought up to you, Jesse Gustafson, told me at that table — he told all of us three under his tutelage — he said, this industry belongs to finishers. It’s like anything you’ve ever seen is because somebody finished. So when you start the script, finish the script.

c. Craig is repped by Gotham Group.

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