Go Into The Story Interview: Harris McCabe

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Harris McCabe wrote the original screenplay “Nat Cady’s Boys” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Harris about his creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Here is my complete interview with Harris.

Scott Myers: Congratulations, Harris, on winning the 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.

Harris McCabe: Thank you.

Scott: Let’s start at the beginning, see how the journey led up to this. I know that at some point, you got an MFA from USC, but let’s start back even further than that. Where did you grow up and how did you develop an interest in film and TV?

Harris: I moved around a lot when I was a kid. I was an army brat. I was born in Hawaii and lived in Texas for many years, but I spent most of my childhood and went to high school in central Connecticut.

When I got out of high school, I tried college for a little bit and it didn’t take. Bounced around and ended up in New Haven, living there, and at some point, was like, “I should go back and get my degree.”

So I went back to school at Southern Connecticut State University. I ended up graduating from there when I was about 30. Finally had two bachelor’s degrees and was like, “Now I’m ready to start my real life.” This was 2008. Just in time for the recession.

I could not even get called back for job interviews. [laughs] I was working as a landscaper, blowing leaves. I was doing some unlicensed contracting work like carpentry and electrical, stuff like that.

Eventually I was working at a sail loft, repairing and delivering sails for boats, and making pretty close to minimum wage all across the board, barely enough to cover my rent and my bar tab.

This was actually something that I mentioned in my Nicholl speech. What happened was in my few years of that, I was in this comfortable rut where I felt good, but really wasn’t going anywhere. Life had really stagnated. Then one day I got a letter from myself that I had written five years earlier. Didn’t even recognize it, recognized the handwriting, but didn’t remember writing it at all.

It basically told me, “Hey, you’re probably working some crappy job you hate, you’re probably spending too much time at the bar. You want to do other things, you want to make movies, but you don’t know where to start and you’re embarrassed because you think it’s crazy.”

I didn’t know anybody who worked in the entertainment industry. I knew I loved movies, but I didn’t know where to begin pursuing that dream and didn’t think it was even something that you could pursue, coming from where I was from.

Then I got this letter. It was sobering. I was like, “Oh, my God. I knew that I was going to be stuck here five years ago and I did nothing to stop it. I got to make some changes.”

Being me and not a more proactive person, I went and applied to all the most selective film schools in the country [laughs] and assumed that that was going to be it and I wouldn’t get into any of them. I could say, “I did the best I could,” and settle back into my rut, but I ended up getting in. I think I got waitlisted at NYU and got into USC.

So I moved across the country, and went to grad school at USC, and got out of there in 2015.

Scott: What was your area of concentration at SC?

Harris: I was in the Film and Television Production program, which is the biggest one, the general program. I wrote my way out. You have to do a thesis project to graduate, so I wrote a script. But they encourage you to do a little of everything while you’re there. I concentrated mostly on writing, and editing. And directing as much as I could. It’s hard to get directing projects at USC. They’re very limited.

Scott: Very limited, yeah. You’d always been a fan of movies, is that right?

Harris: Mmhmm.

Scott: I was an Air Force brat. One of the reasons why I became a movie fan was when you’re living in places like Minot, North Dakota, like I did for four years, the government subsidizes your entertainment. I could go to movies for…Back in the day, it was ridiculous. [inaudible] date myself, but it was really cheap. [laughs]

They had a movie theater on the base, and so I would just go see movies all the time.

Harris: A lot of it for me was that while I am very sociable when I’m around people, I’m an introvert. I like those activities that you can do alone.

Being able to read a book or watch a movie by myself was my escape from socialization. It was a good excuse to say, “I’m going to tune out for a little while and focus on this.”

It’s so interesting to get a glimpse into some other world that you’ve never seen before if it’s a fictional one or somebody else’s life. It’s always fascinating to look at other people’s journeys and other people’s lives and look at it from the outside. I don’t know if it’s an escape or opening up your imagination and your horizons a little bit.

Scott: Absolutely. That’s one of the beauties of story. You can go to another world, another dimension, and explore another subculture. Maybe talk to us about Lunacy Productions. Is this your own production company? I knew you produced at least three movies that I found on IMDb. Maybe talk about that journey.

Harris: Lunacy Productions is the production company of one of my professor’s at USC, Stu Pollard, who I had interned with. He’s a former USC graduate who had made a couple movies when he got out of school and had produced many more since then, and he wanted to get back into that small scale indie production game.

When I interned with him, I’d read a lot of scripts that he had been working on with different writers. I heard a lot in school that I was giving really valuable notes and that that was a skill that I had, and Stu really liked my notes as well.

Even before I started working for him, he had me talking to his writers, sharing my feedback, and game-planning how they could proceed with rewrites. When I graduated, he said, “Hey, I’m going to start this production company up again. I’m going to take a shot at this. I want to make a few indie films and see if I can get any momentum going.

“I want you to head my development team since you’re already doing that job.” It was good. It was like cutting the line a little bit. Usually, to be a creative producer, you have to also do the bullshit producer producing, which I have no stomach for and learned very little about in school — intentionally because I did not want to know how to make a budget or be a line producer.

What was interesting, though, was in that experience, I got to be the creative mind behind these projects that were in development. When a script was an orphan or was abandoned, I got to do a rewrite, my own pass on it, which taught me a lot.

Rewriting other people’s material was really…You can learn a lot that way. Also, I was reading all the scripts that came in. We were a small company. I’d read the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was just reading a ton of scripts some of which were great, a lot of which were terrible. You learn a lot of what not to do reading bad scripts.

Then we actually got some things into production. A rom-com called “Plus One.” A thriller called “Rust Creek” that I’m very proud of. I really had a little hand in every part of making that. I also learned a lot of the actual physical production, the budgeting and everything. The contracts and all that stuff that I didn’t think I wanted to know about.

When I was exposed to it, I realized it’s pretty valuable. The more you can know about all aspects of filmmaking, the better writer you’re going to be. I’ll tell you, having the experience of working with actors as a director or with working with other people’s footage as an editor probably taught me as much about screenwriting as anything else I’ve done.

Having that experience of being on set and seeing how a movie’s produced on a lower budget, and then also having the exposure to occasionally be able to visit friends and be on the set of bigger budget movies really opened my mind up to the practicalities of how these scripts work and are implemented, are actually created on the next level.

It would be very difficult to write a great screenplay without that experience on set. For people who are outside of Hollywood, you’re fighting an uphill battle there. It’s an added challenge for you, because you get so much insight into how the crew uses the script when you’re actually on set and see the movie get made.

Scott: You were writing when you were a director of development there and then you’ve continued to write. Has that been your primary area of focus in the last few years?

Harris: Yeah. When I was working at Lunacy, I was trying to write my own feature scripts and get some experience. I had written two scripts while I was in school and wrote a couple more after. I was hearing a lot of praise. I looked back and reread them recently. They weren’t very good.

I think they was just good compared to other people who were learning how to write, and in retrospect, they’re pretty embarrassing. I knew that I was getting better. I knew that I was developing the craft, and that the more I wrote, the better I was.

I did get into a situation at Lunacy where so many of the production responsibilities of being at that company were taking up a lot of my time. I was also doing these uncredited rewrites on little things here and there. Passes on scripts for friends that had said, “Hey, I got this script that my buddy wrote. We agree that it’s not ready. We want somebody to take a chop at it and see if they can improve it.”

I realized at one point that…It was actually during the pandemic when none of us had social lives. I was thrilled to be at Lunacy because we were still developing projects and we were still trying to get ready for when restrictions lifted so we could potentially try to get something into production. But I had this realization that it had been three years since I’d done any significant work on anything original of my own. I’d just been working on other people’s projects, either doing rewrites myself or developing scripts with writers that were doing their own rewrites.

And I loved that. One of the most rewarding things was working with new writers and trying to tell them what I’d been learning as a fairly new writer myself, and getting into a room with them and brainstorming. When we found writers that were good collaborators and were open to notes, it was the best part of the job, was getting in there and being like, “OK, we’ve got problems. How do we fix them?” But I wasn’t doing any of my own writing, and that was frustrating.

I was hiking Runyon Canyon every Saturday with a friend of mine — that was our get out of the house, get some exercise, socialize a little bit during lockdown — and I had heard somewhere, I think from a filmmaker at a Q&A at the Austin Film Festival, about her big breakthrough coming when she started trying to write a script a month. I thought, “That seems like a fun challenge.” We had all this free time. After I clocked out for the day, I had nothing to do with myself. It was like, “Well, I could make myself a drink and watch some TV,” but I wanted that motivation of, “I need to get some work done.” So my hiking buddy and I decided to hold each other accountable and try to write a feature a month for a year.

We made it, I think, about 10 months. I wrote seven features and three pilots. I’ll be honest, only one of the pilots was okay, two of the features were good, and the rest of them were varying degrees of total failure.

Some of them were like, “Bury this and never think about it again.” Some of them were like, “I did everything wrong, but I think this still has potential. If I do a page one rewrite, I think I can maybe get a better draft of this.”

But the first two I wrote were the two that were gestating in my head the longest. They were the ones that I was most excited about, that I’d been thinking about, that had been on my to-do list for years.

They came out really good. They were the best two first drafts that I’d ever written. The first one was “Nat Cady’s Boys.” That was where that script came from.

Scott: That’s a perfect segue.

McCabe: You’re welcome.

Scott: I’d like to talk about the script. Fresh off reading it, so it’s right there in my mind. Terrific read. Here’s a logline just for folks to consider, “Two young boys seek bloody vengeance on the posse that hung their outlaw father in 1882 Wyoming.”

You’d been cogitating about this for a while. What was the original inspiration? Can you remember way back when you got that into your mind?

Harris: I don’t remember when it was, but it was many years ago. I had this image of these two little boys looming over somebody much bigger than them and deciding to beat him to death. I don’t know where the visual came from, but I had this very distinct image in my head, and I thought, “Oh, what can I do with that?”

So I came up with this idea of the misdirect of the Clint Eastwood-style, lone rider cowboy getting lulled into a false sense of security by these two little boys and then ambushed. I wrote the scene out. It was three pages long. And it was more or less exactly like it is in the script. I haven’t changed that a lot since the time I wrote it out.

I didn’t know what to do with it because I didn’t have a story. This almost never happens. Usually, when I come up with a script idea, it’s because there’s an interesting character, or there’s an interesting scenario, or best of all, there’s an interesting character in an interesting scenario, and I have this idea that I want to explore.

This was just its own little thing. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I literally just put it on my big pile of ideas. It sat there for years. Every once in a while, I would pick it up and be like, “Who could these kids be? Why would they be killing this guy?”

Eventually, over time, I fleshed out a very barebones treatment. These kids are seeking revenge. Who would kids seek revenge on? Well, probably somebody who hurt one of their parents. Their mother? It’d be more interesting if it was their father. It would be more interesting still if they had a conflicted relationship with him. Oh, OK, now I’ve got something. That’s when I got excited about it. Up until then, it was just ideas that I was kicking around.

The theme that I was exploring was this idea of, as you get to a certain age you start to realize that the people who raised you weren’t necessarily right about everything. That your parents were flawed people just like everyone else, and that maybe not everything they taught you was true.

You start to develop your own more nuanced worldview based on how you were raised, but also based on the experiences you have growing up, the other people that come into your life, and the other mentors you have. It’s something I felt really strongly about, I was excited about writing it, and it’s also a very universal thing that we all go through.

Then it all clicked into place what the story was going to be. Still, it probably sat there for another year before I decided to do the script a month thing, and then it was the first thing in my mind.

Because as excited as I was to write it, the producer in me said: “Children, horses, gunfights, period piece…”

Scott: Well, at least it’s in a really marketable genre like a Western that everyone’s clamoring for.

[laughter]

McCabe: I thought, “There’s no way this will ever get made.” The idea of doing it in a month was like, “OK, I can get this out of my system in a month and then I never have to think about it again. If it turns out OK, it’ll be a good writing sample.”

I never would’ve written it for any other reason because I didn’t think it was a very sellable product.

Scott: You had passion for it.

McCabe: I did. That’s an important lesson, too. I’ve definitely tried to write things that I thought were marketable that I wasn’t passionate about, and those were a lot of the scripts that I got to the end and was like, “This is crap and I will never see this again.”

“Nat Cady’s Boys” I was excited about. Technically, I went a little over. I think I wrote the first draft in five weeks. It is a long script, so I give myself a break there. It was one of the easiest first drafts I’ve ever written and one of the ones that when I got to the end, I was like, “This is already in pretty good shape. It’s pretty strong.”

Scott: You mentioned this theme about children coming to understand that their parents are flawed. They’re not necessarily these demagogues that maybe we think they are when we’re two, three years old.

That really plays throughout whole script at a larger level. It’s a very morally complicated universe. It’s pretty nuanced. This is that. It reminds you of “True Grit” in a way because of the going after, the revenge, and that sort of thing.

That was a pretty pure thing. Her father was an innocent guy who got whacked by somebody, and she’s going after him. This is not that. Could you maybe unpack a bit for us? These two brothers, talk about their personalities. They both go on that are together for most of the movie parallel journeys, but they each have their own arc, you could say.

Maybe could you talk about Heck, Cady was 12, and Cole Cady was eight. Give me your impression of where they begin their journey.

Harris: I have two younger brothers. That is another thing that I felt like I could write with some authority on, that relationship, both the good and the bad because I had two younger brothers who both looked up to me in a lot of ways. But there was also a lot of antagonism. We were very different personalities and we’re individuals who didn’t get along a lot. These two brothers, in my mind, the backstory for them was they were raised largely by their mother.

Their father wasn’t around, and when he was, it was a mixed blessing because they idolized him being this larger-than-life outlaw guy. He taught them how to shoot, he taught them how to hunt, and he taught them different things, but then he was also a little abusive, he was also a live wire, and he also was not very present.

So Heck’s father figure was his not-present father, and Cole’s father figure was in a lot of ways, Heck, who could do no wrong in his eyes. Heck is being taught a lot of things by his dad, like when somebody kills your family member, you get revenge. That’s something that…

Scott: Principles. He says principles.

Harris: Yeah, these are the principles that he’s been taught, and he takes them unquestioningly. Cole is a little more…He’s following Heck no matter what because this is his hero, his big brother is his idol. But at the same time, he is a little more skeptical.

I don’t want to say he’s softhearted because I don’t think it’s that. I think he’s a little more pragmatic, and he wants to know why. He’s asking that question. Heck is just accepting, “Why is because that’s the thing we do. That’s how we were raised.” Cole wants to know the reasons and he wants things to make sense.

As I was writing, I was getting really nerdy into breaking down the worldviews and the personal philosophies of both the boys and everyone they come into contact with. They get a lot of conflicting input.

As they go on their journey, they start to see that, especially when they kill the homesteader in front of his family, even Heck starts to recognize, “Yeah, maybe we’re doing something that’s bad, too,” but he still thinks on principle, “We have to do it.”

Whereas Cole is starting to realize, “We’re the bad guys in these scenarios,” and push back on him more and more, like, “Hey, we can still get out of this.” Then that becomes a source of conflict.

Cole isn’t strong enough to really oppose his brother. He would never split with him, but he’s going to push back more and more as they see more of the world. They both start to question what they’re doing.

I always wanted the brothers to split up, but my original plan was to have Cole end up getting kidnapped by the marshal and Heck ending up with a bandit gang. My original theory was that it was going to be his father’s old gang, but that felt a little too neat.

I also wanted something even bigger than his father. I wanted a real boogeyman. Then it occurred to me that it would be more powerful if they switch places, if their worldviews got flipped on their heads and Cole ended up with a darker experience, and Heck ended up seeing the light.

I had this idea that the marshal could show Heck how you can have duty and responsibility, but still have your own integrity and morality within that. That just because you should do something, doesn’t mean it’s always the right thing to do.

The marshal is very much beholden to his obligations, and he should arrest Heck. At the same time, he recognizes that Heck is a victim himself, and not beyond rehabilitation, so he’s going to make an exception to his rule for this kid.

Meanwhile, Cole, who is very pragmatic, meets Kinderman, who is this figure that is so pragmatic that he’s drummed life down to “eat or be eaten.” Cole is haunted by this, and it changes his view of the world. It forever scars him. Even though he doesn’t become Kinderman, this definitely impacts how he views the world and how he views what his moral obligation is to anyone.

Scott: You’ve got these two…They’re almost like surrogate father figures in a way to each of them. We’ll get into that in just a bit. I want to talk a bit more about chronologically through the story, some of the choices you made.

First of all, the structure of the story is very solid. It’s pretty conventional. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just it feels like a movie. They have that incident that you talked about where they killed the guy in front of his wife and the kids. That’s basically the end of Act One.

Then along the way, they end up at this trading post, and being helped there. They actually are given a choice. She says, “You can stay here,” which I thought was a great call on your part to actually physicalize that, but then fate intervenes and they decided to keep going off. Then they’re split up at the end of Act Two, is basically the all is lost.

Structurally, let’s talk a bit about that. Was that always in the way? You may have changed the dynamics of who was going to get split up with or whatever, but did you always have that kind of flow, or was that something that emerged over rewriting the script?

Harris: No. The script is a little unique in that because we were starting our script a month thing and I didn’t have as much time to prepare as I usually do. I didn’t do a very specific outline. Normally, up until now, every script I’d written had been outlined meticulously with a pretty conventional act structure.

I would break down each scene that I was going to write, and write what each scene was and what its purpose was. I was so afraid of getting lost because I have a few abandoned screenplays where I got stuck at some point and I don’t know where to go next and just gave up. The one thing that I’ve learned is you’ve got to keep writing and get through that draft.

With this one, it was the vaguest outline I’d ever done. I knew where I wanted to start, I knew where I wanted to end, and I knew a few scenes along the way. I had a backbone of what I wanted it to be, but I was pretty much just playing it by ear.

The nature of the script lent itself to that, in that the story is literally a journey and there were going to be vignettes and there were going to be characters that came in and out of their lives, but it was mostly just going to be tracking these boy. I was reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy to get in the mindset. I reread the “Outer Dark” and “Child of God,” which are both journey stories and have these vignettes. Also, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” was a huge reference point for me, which is another one where these guys are progressing through a world and encountering different people along the way.

I couldn’t have done this in an earlier script though. When you’re starting out it’s very helpful to have a carefully planned structure, be it “Save the Cat!” or Syd Field, or whatever. Find some training wheels. Eventually, you internalize it enough that you get the freedom to make your own decisions and surprise yourself along the way, which is something I did in Nat Cady’s Boys, and something I’ve had a good experience with on a couple of things I’ve written since then.

When I’ve outlined too meticulously and felt like I had some fealty to that, sometimes there wasn’t an opportunity to be surprising. When I’m writing and I think, “Well, obviously, this needs to be the next scene.” That’s probably not a good thing because you shouldn’t be doing the obvious thing all the time.

With this script, I didn’t always know what the next scene was. I just knew I would get to a point and I’d be like, “Well, it feels like we’re breaking into Act Two, so I need a big moment. I need them to come out of this in a different place,” then I would write a scene that fit the bill.

I wrote a few scenes that I looked back on later, and was like, “No, that’s not working. Let’s get rid of that.” I think originally, the homesteader scene was going to be them finding a posse hanging a guy, much like the scene with Dodd later.

They were going to have an argument about whether or not they should save him, and then save him and he was going to journey with them. I wrote the scene and it was fine. It wasn’t the greatest scene, but it was a good action scene. When I got to the end of it, I was like, “This feels too early.”

I just knew that it was not the right time for them to have this guy riding with them because we didn’t even know them yet. Then I’d had the other idea of them going to the homesteader and having to pretend to be somebody else and leave their guns outside. That became the next scene.

Before then, it had never occurred to me for Heck to get injured. But I was always trying to put them in a difficult position for them. One thing I have learned is a lot of people tend to be too nice to their characters, and I was one of them.

Now I am constantly trying to put them in a position where I don’t know how they’re going to get out of it because I want to challenge them, and challenge myself, to figure out how to resolve their problems. That was one of those things where in the writing of the scene, I was like, “Well, he probably gets a shot off and Heck probably gets some birdshot in the hand.”

I never intended for Heck to lose his hand. That wasn’t in the original outline, and even after he was shot I still intended for him to recover. I’m pretty squeamish about dismemberment. Not a big fan. Grosses me out every time it’s in a movie. I really didn’t want him to lose his hand.

And when I realized how uncomfortable and complicated it was for me, I was like, “Yeah. You’re going to have to cut his hand off. That’s the thing you don’t want to do and it’s really going to be inconvenient. But just do it. Don’t write the bad version and have to go back and fix it. You know you’re going to need to do this. Just do it and work from there.”

Again, this came out really well as a first draft, but a lot of it was having made a lot of mistakes on previous scripts of being too nice to characters or being too rigid in my going down a road that I know isn’t working. I was able to course-correct in the moment a lot in this script, which was good. A sign of growth.

Scott: Once you were willing to give up the protecting aspect of it, it’s like that great quote from that writer who says, “As a writer, we’re sadists and masochists with our characters.” You got to put them in this…That you were trafficking with the characters. That interaction with them is what was fueling the decisions you were making. Is that a fair assessment?

Harris: Absolutely. If you write good characters and you understand your characters, they can surprise you.

If you really understand your characters and you’ve written compelling characters, who they are will inform so much of how you write them. They’ll tell you the answer. They will make decisions that if you’re doing an outline and it’s all abstract, you might not have come up with.

As you write and you understand the character better, you’re starting to get that they’re going to make decisions that you never would have expected. If you have the ability to go with the flow, sometimes that’s where the most interesting, best parts of the script come from. It certainly was the case in this one.

Scott: These guys, these boys, their father got strung up. They have found out who was responsible for it. These fellows by the name of Moss Clark, Ole Sorensen, Abbott, Marshal Hoyer, and then Joe Breen, who we meet in the opening incident. You think, “Oh, that’s just a throwaway thing.” Nope. [laughs] That was actually one of the guys, as we find out later.

That was another thing I was really impressed with, was the way you teased out things. We don’t know exactly why these boys are doing what they’re doing, but then we learn a bit more about the father. Then we learn more of the complexity of the father through these reading newspaper clippings and hearing people talk about his father.

I really appreciated the way that you were teasing that out. Was that intentional or were you just feeling your way through that? What’s your exposition?

Harris: That was very intentional. I’ve been in a lot of meetings where the note to a writer is, “We need to know more. We need more background. We need more information because I was lost here.”

It’s not a bad note because a lot of times, if somebody’s lost, there’s a reason, and the writing needs to fix that. But you don’t want to lay all your cards on the table upfront. People have to discover things.

You have to let your readers learn, discover, feel, and be able to pat themselves on the back when they figure something out. They feel like they’re solving a mystery. You have to leave those little breadcrumbs and hint at stuff.

What you can’t do is have them feel like they’re confused about something that they shouldn’t be confused about. You’ve got to be very judicious at what information you sprinkle out there.

Like that scene where they’re seeing their uncle and they’re trying to get information on these men that they’re hunting, and they name a bunch of guys. I was very worried about that because I’m just throwing out these weird names.

I would understand if a reader was like, “Wait, wait, am I supposed to remember all these guys? This is too much. I’m getting confused. I don’t like this,” which is why I threw it out there and then got on with the story because I didn’t want to dwell on it. I didn’t want to make a big thing about it.

I just wanted to be like, “We’re establishing this. Remember it, or don’t remember it, but it’ll come into play later.”

I wanted people to feel like we had forward momentum, that and that I was providing explanations soon enough that people felt like they could trust me to give them the information they needed at any given time, which is the biggest thing.

Once you gain people’s trust that you’re not screwing up and withholding something from them that they need to know, then they’re invested in being careful readers and getting that enjoyment of piecing the things together.

Scott: Remember that Billy Wilder quote? I think he says, “Don’t give them two plus two equals four, give them two plus two.” The audience will appreciate.

Harris: They’ll thank you for that.

Scott: They’ll thank you for it. I thought that it’s an interesting point because you do throw these names out. Of course, when you’re reading a…You’ve done this. When you’re reading a script, you’re assembling the roster of characters. When someone just throws these names out, you’re like, “OK. What am I supposed to do with that?”

I thought that worked there because there’s such a clarity of emotional focus on the part of the boys, particularly Heck, on what they’re doing. I got that.

This just says to me, “All right, now I got that forward momentum you’re talking about. They’re going to go after these guys. I’m trusting now. This writer has already gotten me into this world, really done a great job in giving us a sense of the place.”

That’s going to be the forward-moving momentum to be taking these guys out. Then you do some nice little twists and turns where you cut away to…I think it’s Clark and Sorensen with the Dodd character.

Harris: Yep.

Scott: All of a sudden, you shift the point of view. There’s a couple of times when you switch point of view. I was curious about the decision making part of the process there for you in that.

Harris: I know I heard this advice within the last few years. It might have been Craig Mazin and John August talking on their “Scriptnotes” podcast about that, like, “Your number one obligation is just to be interesting.”

It’s something we take for granted a little, or at least I do, when I’m writing, is that sometimes you have exposition that you have to get out there, you have some plot that you’re trying to follow. Sometimes it can feel perfunctory because as a writer, I’m treating it as perfunctory.

I’m like, “I have to get here. I have to have them do this. I have to get this information across.” I’m not concerned with, “Am I holding the reader’s attention? Is this scene actually, in and of itself, as an isolated thing, interesting?”

I was trying to make sure that every scene I was writing was interesting. What I found was sometimes because I was so focused on the boys and their journey, I was having trouble.

Every time I wanted to give them time to breathe and they couldn’t be in the middle of something of great interest, I would think, “Oh, God, how can I make this interesting?”

I wouldn’t call it a copout, but I made a very deliberate decision to sometimes just pulled the rug out from under the audience. Introduce new characters that they don’t know. Have that moment of them going, “Wait, what? Who are these guys?”

If you write a good scene, they’ll continue to read the scene out of curiosity, but I wanted them to be a little disoriented and think, “Wait, what is going on here?” Then as long as I answered that question soon enough, I would be OK.

I think of the pot boilers like Dan Brown, or even before him, James M. Cain. You end the chapter on a cliffhanger. Then a lot of times, you go to a whole other plot line. People want to know what happens next, but you make them wait. “No, you got to read this chapter.” Then that one’s going to end in a cliffhanger, and then we’ll circle back to that earlier thing.

I was trying to end on the cliffhanger, “What’s going to happen with the boys?” and then cut to something unrelated. “Here’s something to just keep you on your toes, make sure you’re paying attention. We’ll get back to the boys in a second, and then we’ll tie the two things together.”

If I do it right, I’ll land the plane and you won’t hate me for totally diverting you for a minute.

Scott: What’s so great about it is you’re teasing the reader in a fun way because you’re planting all these questions. Then you switch over here to this storyline. At that point, again, we’re trusting you. You’ve established that trust level with the reader. I know that eventually, these guys are going to come back into the story. It’ll be interesting to see where that happens.

Also too, you’ve got that going on with the fundamental existential question of the story is, “What’s going to happen with these boys?” If they do in point of fact achieve their goal, their want, particularly Heck, whacking the guys who killed their father, well, wait a minute. Are they going to get away with it? Are they going to get caught?

That plays out underneath, along with all this other stuff that you set into motion, “Here’s a cliffhanger. I’m not going to answer it right now. I’m going to take you away for five pages.” I’m assuming that was a pretty intentional thing on your part too, to have that stuff playing out underneath.

Harris: It was intentional. I’ll tell you what was a happy accident, though. The original scene that I wrote with Dodd and his captors didn’t mention Kinderman at all, because I hadn’t come up with the Kinderman idea yet. I was still in the mindset that it was going to be Nat Cady’s old gang.

When I realized that I wanted this larger-than-life, almost supernatural character, I was like, “Well, I can’t just throw him in at the end.” Then I realized whatever bullshit Dodd was talking about, I’m sure it was a fine scene, but I went back and I was like, “Oh, you know what? I’ll have Dodd be the gateway into Kinderman, to tease him a little bit. Build him up before we actually meet him.”

As long as I plant him with Dodd and then I plant him again with Lenny at the trading post, then it won’t be coming out of nowhere that he’s in this area.

Scott: Dodd’s spinning this yarn about this Kinderman guy as a way to deflect the attention so that he’s trying to get loose. It’s not like he’s just doing it. It doesn’t come across as writer’s convenience, like, “Oh, OK, the writer just wants to introduce.”

Kinderman, let’s talk about this character because he’s like a Keyser Soze type of the usual suspects. Then by the end, when you meet him, actually, with his crew, you’re like, “Wait a minute, this guy’s like Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.

What was the inspiration for this character?

Harris: It was definitely a little bit of Kurtz. It was definitely a little bit of the judge from “Blood Meridian,” again, with the Cormac McCarthy thing. I wanted this representation of the worst version of…I didn’t want him to be evil.

I just wanted him to be the worst version of man regressing to his most animalistic…

Scott: Primal.

Harris: Exactly. He himself isn’t an animal, but he makes animals of all the people who follow him. He’s this almost religious figure for these men who go with him and become like beasts again.

I wanted that to be like, “What can I really put Cole through that would change his worldview and so jade him to the world that he becomes like his father, that he becomes a bad man?” It was this perspective of the worst of humanity.

How can you go back and think that there’s anything worth saving then if you’ve done that? Even though we know that somewhere in him is this little boy who is smart and who’s got a good heart, he can’t ever really be that again.

Once he’s had this experience with Kinderman and his gang, it’s poisoned him. Even his brother can’t save him, although he’s going to try now because he’s had his own conversion.

Scott: It’s almost like DNA. It’s like Luke Skywalker, he’s not a moisture farmer. He’s a Jedi Knight. He’s got the DNA. Michael Corleone is not…His father wants him to be a politician or a lawyer, but he’s not. He’s a mafia don.

The story this is my take on it, and I’d be curious to hear your reaction to this. They do split up, which I thought was a terrific choice. You mentioned that you inverted this. That Cole doesn’t go off with the Marshal Hoyer who is like a surrogate father figure eventually in a way to Heck.

Harris: Because that would be easy.

Scott: That would be easy.

Harris: That would just be reinforcing his own feelings.

Scott: Now, you take Cole and send him off with this really bizarre group of cannibals, essentially, living in this mystical black caves mythological thing. There, he gets in touch…He doesn’t become the guy that he becomes out of nowhere. It’s like that’s inside of him already. It’s DNA. It’s his father’s DNA.

Also, we’ve seen a couple of times in the story where he shows off some real craft. He’s crafty, probably like his father. On the one hand, you’ve got that going on, where he even says at some point, “I can’t go back. There’s no way I can go back.”

Whereas it feels like with Heck, that’s more of an intellectual thing. That’s more of a moral code. He doesn’t have the DNA to be a killer per se. I think he’s more the principle of it. Was that a fair assessment?

Harris: Yeah, Cole seems uniquely suited to survival. I think they’re both clever, they both have elements of their father in them, but they’re not the same person. They aren’t. No two brothers are exactly alike.

We don’t meet their mother, we don’t hear too much about her, but they’ve got a little of her in them too. They both could be redeemable. If Cole hadn’t gone through that, he probably would have been a good man. If Heck hadn’t gone through what he went through, maybe he could have been a bad man.

They were both shaped by their experiences. As much as Cole wasn’t ever going to be a pacifist, Heck really wasn’t meant to be a barber. [laughs] They end up fighting their nature in a way because they’re both actually good. I wanted to make it clear that they weren’t superheroes. I wanted to show them being vulnerable a few times and having things not work out the right way.

I wrote a couple of scenes that I took out, like the original scene where they interrupt a hanging. I had another one where they come across a very pious religious woman who asks them to escort her somewhere and then wants to adopt them. They have to escape from her because she’s got a screw loose.

If it didn’t connect with my theme enough, I cut all those scenes out. The one that I left was them getting assaulted by the guys at the ford and losing the rifle, because I wanted to show them screwing up somewhere early.

I wanted to show that this wasn’t in the bag. That they didn’t have the plot armor of typical main characters, and that they could make mistakes and they could end up in trouble.

Everything they did ended up guiding them to these places, but had they lived a different life, they could have ended up very different results. Like you said, they’re good at this. They have these skills. Cole is very clever and can be very ruthless. Heck has this inner morality that he’s fighting for the whole first half of the script.

They ended up in the right place for them, but it wasn’t inevitable. There were other ways they could have gone. That’s the whole idea. That we are shaped by who we are, but we are also shaped by the experience we have and the people we meet along the way, and who ends up mentoring us and who ends up raising us.

Scott: It’s not just predestination. It’s not necessarily inevitable. In fact, you raised that point when the woman, Lenny, is that her name?

Harris: Mmhmm.

Scott: Offers them, “If you get rid of this revenge thing, you can hang out here.” That’s an option. Then later on, we see that replicated when Heck has an opportunity to kill Hoyer. And Hoyer has an opportunity to kill the kid, or take him in. They make choices.

Harris: Yep.

Scott: I’m going to talk to you about a couple more writing aspects of this. There’s this great moment in the middle of the story. This is after Lenny said, “You could stay here.” They debate this. As they’re talking about it, you feel like, “You know what, yeah.” Both of them are saying, “This makes sense.”

Then they just happen to stumble into this hanging scene that you were talking about earlier. What is so great about it is that’s a coincidence. As a writer, you go, “OK.” When I first broke into the business back in 1987, somewhere along the line, someone told me, “You only allow one coincidence that benefits you. That’s it, you can’t do anything.”

Harris: I’ve heard that. [laughs]

Scott: What you did was so great because Heck goes, “Wait a minute. The fact that they showed up, the guys that we’re going after just showed up here.” You’re basically saying, “I’m making the coincidence here as acting like fate.” Do you have any thoughts on that?

Harris: Then Cole being smart and pragmatic, immediately pushes back and says, “This isn’t a coincidence. We were looking for these guys. Of course, they’re near where we came to find them.”

It was a little bit of hanging a lampshade on that and calling it out a little bit. Trying to get away with what is a massive coincidence. Right when they’re about to go the straight and narrow, I throw these guys right in their laps, which was obviously a huge writer copout thing.

If you do it well, and you don’t do it often, you can get away with it.

Scott: Yeah. I always call back the Casablanca thing. Of all the lousy gin [laughs] joints in the world, she had to show up here. As long as you can name it.

A couple of other things I want to talk about. The dialogue. I didn’t live in 1882 in Wyoming. I have seen a bunch of movies and I read a bunch of books, but the dialogue feels really authentic to me. You lay in what I’m assuming is authentic jargon from the area, maybe not. Maybe you made it up, but it sure sounds like legitimate.

Could you unpack a little bit how you went about writing the dialogue and researching that, I suppose, too?

Harris: A lot of it is just I’ve watched a lot of Westerns. A lot of this probably is just me aping other movie dialogues. I read a Louis L’Amour book leading up to this. I read some contemporary accounts, news stories and dime novel-type stories, in the research I was doing.

This isn’t based in fact at all, but a lot of Nat Cady was based on a real guy who started off as a strike breaker and ended up making a lot of money working for cattle barons as a sheriff, basically as an outlaw for hire, as a thug with a badge. Then he got strung up by a group of citizens who were sick of his shit.

A lot of these people, Lenny and the other woman at the lodge…

Scott: Jon Jon?

Harris: Yeah, Jon Jon, were based on real people that I had read about, different real people. They were women who had their own entrepreneurships, and I thought that was really interesting.

I was reading a lot of contemporary news accounts or old things I found online that were from closer to the period. And I also did just look up all the jargon I could find. I love reading through dictionaries of slang and stuff like that. I was trying to keep it in that frame of late 1800s to early 1900s, somewhere in that area, but anything I could find from that period.

Sometimes I would love a phrase so much or a slang term that I’d be like, “You got to fit it in somewhere.” [laughs] I would write dialogue just to get to it, just to get it in there.

That’s one of the biggest changes on the second draft, was actually cutting out some things I loved. Just because you have these things that you love so much — these lines, these sequences, these words, or these scenes that work — you love them but they don’t fit, and you just have to say, “I love it, but it’s going to have to go to the boneyard because it doesn’t work.”

A lot of the jargon still made it in though. That authenticity, I think, really sold it.

I’m happy anytime anyone says that they appreciate the dialogue and that it sounded really effective and authentic because I didn’t do what I would consider an exhaustive amount of research, but I was trying to pay attention to that and trying to immerse myself in that way of talking, even if it was like Louis L’Amour, which is somebody from later trying to write in the period.

Scott: You mentioned Cormac McCarthy. I read that note. It has that feel. Actually, also, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the novel of True Grit, but Charles Portis has a similar rope.

Harris: Absolutely. They’re all back here somewhere.

Scott: I was going to say. Yeah, man, you’re a book guy. That’s great. Let’s jump to the Nicholl part of this. You use that maybe as motivation when you’re rewriting this or something. You always assumed that you were going to put it into the Nicholl?

Harris: No. Actually, I’m really dumb, and so are any of your readers out there who are writing scripts and not submitting them to the Nicholl. I’d been writing scripts for years and I don’t think I’d ever submitted one.

Honestly, most of the stuff I’d written probably wouldn’t have gone very far, but I also didn’t think this script would get very far. It’s only the fourth western, I think, that’s ever won?

A lot of times, you have an idea of what a Nicholl script is. It’s usually like a coming-of-age story or a drama, dramedy. The truth is that isn’t the case, especially recently. They’ve been honoring a lot of very weird, sometimes genre scripts.

I like working in genres. I like to be elevated. I like to really think about it and make it something original, but I am comfortable working in genres. Most of what I’ve written have been thrillers. I just assumed that wasn’t what they were interested in.

The year before I won was the first time I entered the Nicholl with the another script I wrote, a thriller, that I wrote in my script a month challenge, which I also thought was really good. I entered that because it was a little farther along.

I just entered it because I was like, “I think this is pretty good. It’s $50. Why not take a shot?” I didn’t know what to do with it otherwise. And it didn’t even make the first cut, but I got really positive feedback from the readers, which was confusing but also encouraging.

Then the next year, I worked on this and had it in a good place and said, “You know what? I know it probably won’t win, but I just want more people to read it.”

Every time it advanced a round, I was incredibly grateful, because like I said, I thought this was a writing sample that would be read by almost nobody. Every time another group of people read it and liked it, that was like its own little victory.

Scott: What was the Nicholl week like for you, that experience?

Harris: It was amazing. The thing that surprised me the most, and the thing that was my favorite part about it was meeting the previous fellows and getting welcomed into the family, and really understanding that it’s a very tight-knit community that is looking out for each other and giving each other advice. Everyone’s at different stages in their career.

Even people who have been in the industry a while may still be trying to get where they want to be. Obviously, the new people have less experience and less exposure, and are trying to figure this all out.

It’s like you got somebody who won last year taking you under their wing. You also got somebody who won 20 years ago offering to give you some advice, take you out to lunch, whatever. That was great.

They offered a lot workshops, which were great. Going to USC, we got a lot of instruction from professionals on how to do things, so some of it was repeated, but even the stuff that I’d heard before, it’s always great to hear it again and get reminded of these pieces of career advice. But also, a lot of it was new information as well.

The worst part was the ceremony because we had to get up and speak in front a room full of people, this huge theater full of people. Most writers are a little bit introverted. I don’t think any us were thrilled about the public speaking. For the record, we all nailed it, but it was definitely…

I think there were a lot of butterflies until we finished giving our speeches and got to sit back down, and then it was smooth sailing.

Scott: Did they do a live reading, too?

Harris: They did. They asked me to pick a couple of scenes. Then reading my script, I realized there weren’t a lot of scenes where characters had a lot of dialogue back and forth.

I can’t remember what the second scene I picked was, but I felt like I only had two options. The one that they chose was my first choice, which was when Heck wakes the martial up in the middle of the night with the axe and thinks he’s going to kill him, and then decides not to.

The actors were phenomenal. They did a great job. Every scene, was great. It was really incredible.

Scott: Did you have representation or do you have representation? What happened on that?

Harris: I did not have representation. I do now. Jill McElroy and Brian Levy from Entertainment 360 are managing me now, which is great. Even as a semifinalist or as a finalist, one of their readers had flagged my script as something they were interested in and was passing it around and proselytizing for me. Then after the fact, some other people might have reached out to them and put in a good word for me.

When I finally met Jill and Brian, I just felt like we had a good connection, which is important for a manager. That’s really good for me.

I had not been aggressively seeking management because I felt like that would happen if I ever wrote anything worthwhile. My attitude has always been just put your head down and write. It’s actually my attitude still. I feel like that’s going to be the challenge now, is, “Get back to it. Put your head down and write. I’ve got to produce more and better stuff and keep improving.”

Scott: I remember my first agent, Dan Halsted, he’s a manager now. He always says, “Don’t worry about it. If you write a great script, we’ll find you.”

Congratulations. I got a few craft questions for you. Just trying to crack open your process a little bit. How do you come up with the story ideas? Are you one of those people who consciously generates them or are you like Aaron Sorkin, you take eight showers a day and the ideas flow, or somewhere in between there? What’s your process?

Harris: I try to write down every idea I have. I have a Google doc where I just write down, “Hey, this could be a movie.” I’m a reader, so it could be an article I’m reading, something I see on the news, something somebody says, or something I overhear when I’m out.

Or like Nat Cady’s Boys. I don’t even know where that idea for the kids came from, but that image popped into my head, I wrote a scene, and then eventually, put together the pieces of what could lead to that scene. That was the worst way to do it because that took years to put that together.

When I see something and I’m like, “That could be an idea,” I never know for sure, but there’s something intriguing about a character, or a scenario, or not as often, but sometimes just a broader concept that is interesting to explore. I always try to write that down as well, what it is specifically that is piquing my interest.

The mistake I used to make was I would write down, “Oh, what if this guy invented a time machine and did blah, blah, blah, blah?” Whatever. Then I would link to whatever article prompted that idea. Then I would forget to write down the part about figuring out why I found it fascinating and what the little spark was that made me think that would be worth writing down. I go back and I look at this idea and I’d be like, “Why did I think that would work?”

Like, “What was I thinking there?” That’s the most important part, is very specifically, “Here’s why I think this is interesting. Here’s what’s fascinating to me about that.” That’s usually the key to unlocking what the bigger picture is and what your North Star is going to be as you write it.

Still, those things take a long time to germinate. What I can’t do is, or I shouldn’t say I can’t, but what’s a much bigger struggle is writing on command. If somebody else tells me, “I want you to write about this and that.” It’s a longer process for me.

It does involve long showers, long drives, thinking about it aggressively and trying to rack my brain to come up with an idea and being totally frustrated, and then clearing my head by doing something else. All of a sudden, the answer pops into my head, but that is much more difficult than the things that just spontaneously attack me from the world and say, “I’m a great idea. Write me down.”

Scott: That’s a skill set that everybody who wants to work in Hollywood needs to have. If you want to go up for an OWA, you get a writing assignment. OK, well, you got to find your way into it. What’s your point of emotional connection to it?

Let’s talk about this rewriting process. You were a little different with this particular script in that you didn’t do a lot of prep work on it, but you rewrote it. How many rewrites? What was that process like?

Harris: I rewrote it once, which is…I know that sounds crazy, but this is the exception, not the rule. I rewrote it once. Honestly, I think the original script was even longer than 126 pages, making an unproducible script even less producible. [laughs]

A lot of it was just addition by subtraction of finding the vignettes that weren’t working as well, of getting rid of some things that I really liked that just didn’t fit.

Then fleshing out some of the connective tissue, making sure that the scenes that I kept, that that theme of mentorship and worldviews being challenged and expanded was present in all of it, but never showing too much.

Then it was just a lot of detail work of cleaning up the dialogue. I like to think I have a tendency to underwrite dialogue and have characters say less, but then I reread one of my scripts and I’m like, “Oh, my God. Just have everyone speak their subtext all the time, idiot.”

I was going back through and reducing the amount of explanation that I was giving or the amount of exposition that a character was giving in his dialogue, and finding more nuanced ways to say some of those things.

The Dodd scene where he escapes had to be reworked in terms of the story that he was telling. There were some issues with how he escaped, which was similar, but I don’t think I nailed the action the first time through. I came up with a better way of describing that moment.

There were a few other action scenes that I felt like they just weren’t enough. Some of the stuff that happens in the woods when the martial grabs Heck and escapes back to the lodge, I think that scene originally played out in a more confusing way.

Normally, when I finish a script, my first step is to look at the structure and make sure the scaffolding makes sense. If it doesn’t, I tweak that in a way, and then rewrite the outline with that change in mind. Then look at the scenes that are or aren’t working and correct them, or characters that maybe aren’t working, maybe relationships that need to be re-envisioned.

Then I usually do a page-one blank page rewrite based on the new outline. And I always finish that one, that second draft thinking, “Oh, I wrote a much better version. I don’t even need to look at that first one again.”

Then I go back and look at the first one and realize that many of the scenes were much better in the first one. But usually, the script as a whole is better in the second pass. Then it’s about marrying those two.

I’ve had scripts that I did six drafts of before I felt like it was strong. I’ve definitely had rewrites of other writers’ scripts where I think I’m even more reluctant to make big changes at first. I have to have a couple of passes where I want to respect the original writer and what they were doing.

There’s usually a reason, because people like a lot of what’s in the original script. Nobody asks for a rewrite of a script that’s terrible. So I’ll do some first passes that are very tentative, and then start to realize that I’ve got to take some big swings to fix some of the bigger problems.

There was a particular script that I was working at with Lunacy that is in a really good place now. I loved it. I loved the original writer’s draft. It was one of the reasons I went to work for that company, was because I thought the original draft was so strong.

She did many revisions that were trying to satisfy what we needed to fix, and then she had to move on. Then I did a bunch of revisions. Honestly, it took years and many, many revisions. Usually, by that time, you give up hope that it’ll ever be what you want it to be.

I think we’ve got it to a really good place now, but usually, the revision process is long and arduous. Not for this one. Hopefully, this is a sign that I’m such a good writer that I’ll get a really good first draft every time. But subsequently, I’ve written some bad first drafts [laughs] that I’m not excited about.

[laughter]

Scott: How about theme? You mentioned mentorship and sharing of different worldviews as a theme that was quite prominent in this. Is that something you discover along the way or are you one of those writers who frontload the process? You need to find the theme in order to move forward with it.

Harris: This is probably the biggest thing I learned from both how easy Nat Cady’s Boys came out and also the reaction to it, was that I’ve always heard you have to write to theme. For me, my way in is usually the character.

Because I love thrillers, I usually have to see the plot first and have a really good understanding of where I want the plot to go and then what character is going to be in it.

I’m trying to change my mindset a lot because it was very easy to know what was a right or wrong decision and what I needed to do in each scene when I had such a precise understanding of the theme.

When I started Nat Cady’s Boys, I knew exactly what I was going for thematically. It was very specific. I always try to have a theme before I start writing a script, but a lot of times, the theme is vague or the theme is a couple of themes because I just haven’t figured it out yet.

I can’t remember who said it, so I’m not going to be able to attribute it to them, but somebody said, “If you’re not writing about one thing, you’re writing about nothing.”

At least as far as theme goes, I don’t know if it’s always the case, but it definitely helps if you’ve got one very specific theme in mind and everything you’re doing in the script is…Not everything in the script has to necessarily revolve directly around it, but I think everything in the script has to be keeping that in mind.

Every scene you write, you have to have that in the back of your head, and whether or not it’s doing what you need it to do there.

Eventually, I will have to write another script where I don’t have a good handle on the theme. I’m currently doing rewrites where I definitely had a vague theme the first time and now I’m trying to get more precise and have the rewrite revolve around one theme.

It’s very challenging, but it’s also very rewarding because I think it’s better for you as a writer to have that North Star in mind.

Also, especially if you have a theme that’s somewhat universal, which most are, it’s going to be better for the reader. It’s going to impact them in a better way. Even if it is a stupid genre thing about little murderous cowboy children seeking revenge, it’s going to have that greater purpose that’s hitting people emotionally in a different place if it’s something they understand.

Scott: One last question. What’s the single best piece of advice you would give to someone who is an aspiring screenwriter?

Harris: This is going to sound dumb. Just write. Write, write, write. You can’t be a writer if you don’t write. I know a lot of people, myself included, the whole time I’m in my twenties, hanging out at the bar, looking at shitty movies on TV going, “I could write this crap. I can’t believe they’re giving away money in Hollywood to these bums.”

The truth is I couldn’t. I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about because I didn’t do it. It’s very easy to imagine being a writer. It’s harder to get up every day and write.

You might be right. You might be supertalented. You might be very smart, but you’re never going to improve to the point where it matters unless your hands are on the keyboard all the time.

Also, when you start writing, don’t stop till you’re done. The mistake that I made a lot of times early on was getting stuck. Write through being stuck. Get to page 90 or whatever. Just get to the end, and then maybe go back and try to figure out where you went wrong. If necessary, write the whole thing again.

If you never finish that first draft, it’s dead. It’s just going to vanish. It’s going to disappear. If it’s got any potential at all, you owe it to yourself to keep writing till you get through it.

Harris is repped by Entertainment 360.

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