Go Into The Story Interview: Lindsay Michel

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for her script Caravan.

Lindsay Michel wrote the screenplay Caravan which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Lindsay about her creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Scott: Lindsay, congratulations on making the 2022 Black List. I guess that’s the second time for you.

Lindsay Michel: Yes, 2021 as well.

Scott: Probably doesn’t get old for you.

Lindsay: No, not yet at least.

[laughter]

Scott: Let’s start off with some background and how you got into writing. You’re from the Philadelphia area.

Lindsay: Yeah, I’m from the Philly suburbs, a town called Malvern.

Scott: How did you develop an interest in screenwriting?

Lindsay: I was raised on a steady diet of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” from a young age. My dad is a huge movie buff. Action movies in particular have always been my bread and butter. Growing up I just watched anything I could get my hands on, in the action space. I have always had a love of genre films.

Scott: Were you always interested in writing?

Lindsay: Always. I wanted to do everything when I was little. I wanted to be an archaeologist because of Indiana Jones, and I wanted to be a linguist because of Daniel Jackson from “Stargate,” I wanted to be an FBI agent because of one million FBI movies.

Writing is a very cool way to get to do everything, to spend six months doing a deep dive into what’s it like to be a saturation diver or something, to learn about these professions and these worlds that you wouldn’t get to experience, if you chose one thing to do for the rest of your life.

Scott: When you went to college, what were your areas of focus?

Lindsay: I went to college just for screenwriting.

Scott: Where did you go to school?

Lindsay: I went to Drexel in Philly. They have a great little screenwriting program.

Scott: How did you go from Drexel to then getting representation in Hollywood?

Lindsay: I owe it to the Black List website. I rewrote my senior project over the summer after I graduated and put it up on the website to try and get some attention from producers, I guess. Kate…

Scott: That’s Kate Sharp at Bellevue?

Lindsay: Yes, Kate Sharp. She read it and contacted me and was interested in representing me as a female writer in the genre space, so I just got really lucky early on, I guess.

Scott: How great is that? You didn’t have to move to L.A. and do the whole intern to assistant to writer’s assistant path

Lindsay: Yeah, I never did the PA jobs or the scuttle butt work that I think a lot of people used to have to do. That’s what’s great about the Black List site, that you can put your work out there for people who are already looking for it, that you don’t have to go out in the world and force someone to read.

Scott: Before we get to “Caravan,” I’d like to touch on your 2021 Black List script called “Sandpiper.”

“Follows Viola Crier, a master thief who signs onto a last‑minute job aside a man‑made time loop. As the number of loops increases, the job starts to spiral out of control.”

Can you talk a little bit about that script?

Lindsay: Yeah. It was a fun script to write. My manager had come to me and said that she wanted to do a female-led heist movie.

I’d had in my head the idea to do a heist movie inside a time loop, but I was daunted by the number of moving parts that were going to come into play, trying to write something like that. But it felt like the right time to attempt it and it ended up being a really cool script.

I wanted to write a movie with an almost fully female cast that wasn’t about the fact that the heist crew were women. I feel like a lot of heist movies or action movies where the whole cast is female, it’s treated as a gimmick, where the fact that they are women has to come into play in the plot, as opposed to just, these are the best people for the job. That was my philosophy going into writing it.

Scott: So like you say, you’re drawn to genre writing.

Lindsay: Yes, definitely. I write pretty much action and sci-fi. “Caravan” was actually the first horror script that I wrote. I’m new to the horror genre.

Scott: I think it definitely qualifies as a horror script.

[laughter]

Scott: Your manager Kate, do you think she found you particularly intriguing as a potential client because you’re a female writing in genres that are typically associated with male writers?

Lindsay: Yeah, I think she had been looking for female action writers because there’s not a ton of us. I guess that’s what she was basing her search on when she found me.

Scott: Well, good for you. I’m a proponent of blowing open the status quo and Hollywood’s conventional wisdom which my friend Franklin Leonard often says is more about convention than wisdom.

Let’s talk about your 2022 Black List script “Caravan” and I have to say, I’m excited to discuss with you because I have a background studying theology. Your script has a kind of Old Testament feel to it, a bigger than life story with spectacle thrown in for good measure. So let me ask, do you come from a religious background?

Lindsay: I went to catholic school.

Scott: I might have guessed. Let’s jump into this. Here’s a plot summary of “Caravan”:

“During the Tang Dynasty, a young Persian woman joins a Silk Road Caravan to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance but must fight for survival when her fellow travelers realize there’s a shape‑shifting demon hiding in their midst.”

What was the original, the kernel of an idea that started this whole thing?

Lindsay: When I’m coming up with ideas, I’m always thinking what movie would I like to watch, and what would excite me to go see in the theater. I’m obviously a huge fan of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and I’ve always thought historical settings are just inherently very terrifying, even without the horror element.

I’ve wanted to do a horror movie in a historical setting and I just had that idea to do “The Thing” in a Silk Road Caravan and that was the initial kernel of an idea that I was working with.

Scott: What drew you to the Silk Road environment?

Lindsay: It’s an interesting nexus where you get all of these cultures coming together. Where a lot of historical films you’re working with one culture or one person, whereas the Silk Road is this mish‑mosh of identities and faiths.

You get these conflicts just based on who people are, where they come from, and how that influences their reactions that you wouldn’t necessarily get if the movie was set on a British sailing ship or something like that.

Also, I liked the juxtaposition of, you’re trapped, you can’t leave the caravan, but you’re in this wide‑open space, so it feels like you should be able to run away. It’s almost a bottle movie, but it’s not actually in a bottle. I thought that was a neat way to approach it.

Scott: The story is set in seventh century in China, right? How much did you know about that region and era before starting the project?

Lindsay: Beyond what they teach you about the Silk Road in middle school, I didn’t really know anything going into it. I hunkered down and read a bunch of books.

Scott: You must like research.

Lindsay: I do. I really do. Especially historical research, and I don’t get to do it very often, since college.

Scott: I’m imagining the conversation you had with Kate at Bellevue. “Hey, I want to write this story, set in the seventh century in China. It’s a horror thing.” How did that conversation go?

Lindsay: I was surprised that she responded to the idea and that she was interested in jumping into it with me. We knew from the get‑go that it wasn’t going to be something that we were going to end up in a bidding war over. [laughs]

She thought it would be a really cool horror sample to just break into a genre that I hadn’t written anything in before, and show the range of what I can do. Because “Sandpiper” is very much this sleek, futuristic, almost bloodless action movie that’s very commercial. “Caravan” is the exact opposite of a lot of that.

Scott: I guess if you put on the manager‑producer hat, it’s like, “Okay, Lindsay’s going to write something that’s going to show her range, break her into the horror genre. But as important, this story is something she’s passionate about. So I’m going to just say, “Yeah, go for it.”

Lindsay: It does help that it’s just people in the desert with camels. The camels are the biggest line item.

Scott: And there is “Cocaine Bear,” so maybe a camel spinoff.

[laughter]

Scott: Okay, as we launch into the story, I want to read one of my favorite writing quotes because based on what transpires in “Caravan,” I think you will relate to it.

Janet Fitch said, “The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, then we torture them. The more we love them and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.” Reactions?

Lindsay: Totally. You want to know what hurts your character, and that tells you what you have to put them through in order to force them to grow as a character. You want to see someone broken completely down to the point where you don’t think they’re going to get back up again, because then, when they do, it’s just that much more moving as an audience member.

With Nasreen, obviously, the thing that hurts her is the loss of her father and the fact that her last words to him were these horrible words. She carries so much guilt over and she wishes she could take back and she knows she can’t.

She has to confront that part of her past in a very literal way, where the demon has stolen her father’s face. If she gives into this guilt and refuses to fight, then she dies herself, so she has to accept that this is something she’s never going to be able to fix.

Scott: Because you layer on one thing after another. Just putting this protagonist through hell and back. It’s quite impressive.

Let’s talk about Nasreen, your protagonist. How did that character emerge?

Lindsay: I sort of developed her as I went on. I always knew that I wanted to have a female protagonist. Then as I was looking into the Silk Road, the Tang Dynasty and the specific frontier town of Dunhuang, it was a question of what sort of people could’ve been living there around this time.

That’s how Nasreen sprung up, as a member of a Persian caravan who’d been traveling with her father, and sort of ended up stranded here when he went out on a trip without her and never came back.

I developed her around this central wound of the loss of her father. Then I started to look at how such a huge loss influenced her development as a person, and how has that turned her into the character that we meet in Act 1.

Scott: I’ve been studying Carl Jung for well over a decade, how his theories align with the story-crafting process. So here’s another quote, one from Jung:

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”

If Nasreen’s got to deal with this issue of her father, then at its core, the journey she takes has that as its psychological foundation, fair to say?

Lindsay: Absolutely. We all know that character is supposed to inform plot and not the other way around.

If you’re looking at a satisfying character arc and you’re trying to build a movie that feels like you’re going through a complete journey, my belief is that your protagonist has to have this wound that they’re trying to heal and the plot becomes a natural reflection of that, if you’re doing it right.

I think taking what’s going on with the character internally and trying to reflect that out in a horror movie — into the monster, into these harrowing sequences that your characters are going through — is a good way to bring the audience into the internal journey.

Scott: Sure. That whole idea of the shadow, which Jung talks about. Quote: “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes.”

If Nasreen hadn’t gone on this journey, she never would’ve resolved the emotional wound she has related to her father. Does that resonate with you?

Lindsay: Yes, definitely. It’s sort of a purge, like lancing a boil. Also, for “Caravan,” there’s the actual physical question of the journey, too. Nasreen’s been stuck in this town waiting for her father for years and years, and in order to get past it she has to literally leave, to go away from civilization, into the desert, to emerge on the other side.

Which is sort of like the pastoral drama, right, where you have to leave the city and go into the woods and figure yourself out and then come back to the city and you’ve become whole again. The woods violently solve your problems for you.

Scott: And a big part of that process is Nasreen confronting a literal demon. Another Jung quote: “It’s a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism.” You can see why that concept sprang to mind as I was reading your script.

Lindsay: That’s a very Jekyll and Hyde quote. [laughs] “Caravan” is about a demon, but it’s also about what people will do to each other when this sort of paranoia sets in. It’s about the demonic danger but also the inherent human danger of not being able to trust anyone and not knowing who’s who.

Scott: You mentioned “The Thing” and that paranoia dynamic. What about “The Exorcist,” did that movie ever enter into your story development process?

Lindsay: Not really. I tried to avoid Catholicism as an influence, but I’m not sure how much I succeeded. Obviously, Christianity is in there a little bit because I have two Byzantines, one of whom is a monk, and I did want there to be this touchstone of one religion we’re familiar with in the modern era.

I wasn’t thinking Catholic for the demon, because I think we’ve seen that so much before. It’s so familiar to the audience, and I wanted this demon to be a little bit more alien and a little bit more other‑worldly, so it fit in the time period and the setting.

But probably unconsciously I was being influenced by “The Exorcist” and other movies like it, because they’re so much a part of the language of horror.

Scott: Let’s dig more deeply in your story’s characters. Nasreen, the protagonist. We know she had this experience with her father who left. She said hurtful words to him. She’s living with that guilt. How else would you describe her character at the beginning of the story?

Lindsay: She’s very distrustful of other people. She’s very alone, despite the fact that she’s been in this one town for eight years. She’s scrappy and resourceful. She’s taking care of herself and looking out for herself and not interested in getting involved with other people, almost like a drifter, but she’s not drifting.

I wanted to her to feel like she fit with the monster, and the monster is fueled basically by distrust. So Nasreen is already an inherently very distrustful person.

Scott: She is ten months behind her rent.

Lindsay: Yes. She is ten months behind on her rent.

I just wanted to show her as existing in a way that we haven’t seen women in the year 600 on‑screen before, where she’s working in a roofing crew and getting into altercations with the innkeeper and having to throw elbows at people and survive by the skin of her teeth.

Scott: There’s one moment where someone says, “Couldn’t you be doing something else?” She’s like “What? Spreading my legs?”

Lindsay: That’s what we would expect if this were a blockbuster in the year 2005. That’s how we would meet Nasreen, she’d be working in a brothel. I wanted her to do something other than that.

Scott: She has an instrument her father gave her, an ocarina. Can we talk about that?

Lindsay: Basically it’s a representation of all her pain and her attachment to her father and the emotions surrounding that.

When I’m writing I try to think, “Can I come up with an object that represents what the protagonist is going through?” Their relationship to this object becomes one more way to drive home the different stages of their journey.

I think the ocarina is like a cheat, but hopefully, it works emotionally.

Scott: A talisman, an object with symbolic meaning.

Lindsay: Totally.

Scott: So Nasreen, she’s stuck in this situation. She’s in this town and waiting for her father for eight years. Then Simon and Michael show up. Could you talk a bit about those two characters?

Lindsay: They’re actually based on real Byzantine monks who, during the Tang Dynasty, stole silkworms from China and smuggled them to the Byzantine Empire. They wanted to develop a silk farm of their own in Byzantium, so that Byzantium would not have to trade with China in order to get silk, because it was this wildly expensive commodity that no one else had, that China had a total monopoly on.

I found that story while researching and it really stuck with me, so I wanted to incorporate it in some way, and that’s how Simon and Michael came about. Simon was also partially inspired by Marco Polo, who lived in the 1500s, so not quite [laughs] Tang Dynasty, but in spirit…

Scott: Michael is an actual priest, right?

Lindsay: Yeah, Michael is a monk.

Scott: A monk.

Lindsay: It’s monks who would’ve been traveling and proselytizing at this time. They were probably some of the most well‑traveled people in the 600s because they were trying to convert people to Christianity, so they would go out to these “heathen” kingdoms, these pagan kingdoms to try and spread the word of God.

In this instance, it serves as a neat cover for Michael to sneak into the Tang Dynasty and steal silk worms. Simon is along to keep him from getting killed, as a sort of 7th century travel guide. When we meet them, they’re very close, almost brothers, and they trust each other implicitly because they’ve been traveling together for half a decade just on this one journey.

Scott: There’s a bamboo cane.

Lindsay: Yes, they smuggle the silk worms in a hollow bamboo cane.

Scott: Silk. Is there anything more than just the fact that it’s an interesting narrative device or is there some metaphorical something going on for you there with it?

Lindsay: Not so much metaphorical. What I wanted was to create this sense of distrust in the caravan already, before the demon arrives and starts doing its demon things. So the silk worms were a way to do that — Li-Peng, who’s a Tang official, is already tearing the group apart looking for thieves, making people look at each other suspiciously, when the action really starts.

Scott: From a historical standpoint, China was really protective of silkworms?

Lindsay: Oh yeah, it was illegal to export them. They would search travelers. They had Silk Road checkpoints. When you were leaving China, they would make sure you didn’t have any contraband on you and, of course, charge you taxes and shake you down a little bit. Silk worms were like, the exclusive property of the ruling dynasty.

Also, they’re extremely hard to keep alive. They’re very, very finicky in terms of their environs and how warm and humid they like it. Probably these silkworms would have died crossing the desert in “Caravan.” I left that part out. Either way, very tricky to get your hands on a silk worm.

Scott: Right there, there’s an object lesson that historical truth and emotional truth, and at some point, you got to be able to diverge from facts to tell the story you need to tell.

Lindsay: I’m a believer that if the audience knows you’re lying, you should tell the truth, but if it’s something that they’re not going to know about, you can do whatever you like.

Scott: You’ve got Michael and Simon. Of course, Simon, actually, at first I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be a romance subplot,” but Simon’s character evolves more into a surrogate father type figure, right?

Lindsay: Yeah, I had intended him to be, for Nasreen, a stand‑in for her dad because thematically, of course, she’s going through all of this stuff with her father. So I wanted Simon there as someone she could talk to and get at that emotional pain out loud.

Of course, through the writing process, he got his own ideas about what he should be saying and doing.

Scott: That goes back to that Jung observation: “it happens outside as fate.” All of the characters emerge in your process, you’re doing it creatively and they’re bubbling up, but they all serve Nasreen’s journey.

Lindsay: I think there’s some ‑‑ I forget where I read it ‑‑ quote about screenwriting, where you take your protagonist and break them down into pieces, and then all the other characters should be reflections of one of these pieces.

If they’re working through guilt, there’s one character who’s overcome with guilt. If they think they’re a terrible person, there’s a character who is the exact person they’re scared of becoming or something like that. Obviously, you can’t do that with every character all the time, but it’s a good jumping‑off point, I think.

Scott: Let’s talk about a couple of other characters. Kadir and Divash. Could you talk about those two because they have a different role than Simon and Michael?

Lindsay: Yeah. I feel like, in these sorts of movies there’s always one character whose perspective you trust, outside of the protagonist. I wanted to build a character that Nasreen could trust with Kadir. He is the expert, he knows what’s going on.

I think of it like — this is a completely different genre, but when you have FBI movies where they’re hunting a serial killer, there’s always a bunch of dumb FBI agents who don’t know what they’re doing but think they’re really smart. Then there’s one guy who really can see the truth about what’s going on. I think of him as that expert agent.

Scott: Divash?

Lindsay: Divash is obviously, he is… [laughs] yeah, he’s the flaky navigator who’s ripping people off and leaving them for dead. He’s squirrelly and snaky.

Scott: Trickster.

Lindsay: Yeah, he’s the trickster character, for sure. There’s not a whole lot to him. He’s very fearful, he’s very greedy, he’s doing stuff for himself. I guess maybe Nasreen sees a little bit of herself in him, where she’s only interested in taking care of herself, and Divash is clearly only interested in taking care of himself.

She knows that he had something to do with her father and she’s trying to get to the bottom of that. He’s there to serve a plot purpose. Not too deep of a character, for sure.

Scott: No, that’s quite common for trickster characters because they are driven by their own ego needs. They’ll align themselves with anybody that they figure is going to benefit them and they’ll also oppose anybody that they figure is going to get in their way. They aren’t terribly deep, but they do serve an important function in testing the will of the protagonist.

Lindsay: Yes.

Scott: By the end of Act 1, Simon and Michael want to go and get the silkworms out. Nasreen needs to leave, pragmatically, but then, spiritually or fatalistically she needs to leave in order to deal with her father. They go off on this journey into the desert.

Was that early on in your thought process that this was going to basically be like a road picture?

Lindsay: Yeah, for sure. I like plots that start from point A and go to point B. It’s just all one direction, it’s very satisfying to me.

I didn’t want there to be any way they could turn back, feasibly. So it’s just this straight trudge through the desert, where if they stop they’ll die of thirst before they reach the next oasis, so they have to figure out what’s going on and try to stay alive while on the move.

The Taklamakan Desert is this huge dune sea in Western China, and at this time people had to either go underneath it or above it and pretty much no one went through.

I liked the idea of, “We’re trying to do something that no one’s done before and hopefully not dying in the process.” The journey itself is already dangerous.

Scott: Now that’s interesting because on a physical sense, you’ve got this pretty substantial obstacle, nobody’s gone through the desert straight through. There’s a mythic, religious stuff around ‑‑ it’s considered to be spiritually dangerous, too. Where did that idea come from? Was that something you got out of research, or was that something that just emerged in your writing?

Lindsay: I don’t think it came up in research. Time in the desert, forty days in the desert for instance, has this automatically spiritual connotation, where you’re stuck there, really going through it, and having this physical as well as spiritual suffering. I think in a lot of religions physical and spiritual suffering — and deliverance — go hand in hand.

It felt natural to attach the two, to build up a spiritual foreboding and a supernatural foreboding as well as this natural foreboding of the fact that we’re going to be trying to cross this insane natural obstacle.

Also, I didn’t want the demon to just come out of nowhere. Obviously, you never want the genre to surprise your reader.

Scott: It sets it up. It recalls the Israelites forty years in the wilderness as they escaped from Egypt. It recalls Jesus and the Gospels, where he has forty days in the wilderness and is tempted by Satan three times.

Let’s discuss the eternal flame and this god Ahura Mazda, that scene, I’m assuming that’s historically based.

Lindsay: Yes. The Sogdians, they’re all Zoroastrian, which is obviously an actual religion.

Ahura Mazda is a real Zoroastrian god. The eternal flame is a real representation of Ahura Mazda. Druj, the demon, is inspired by a Zoroastrian demon as well. I say inspired by very loosely, because I wanted to build a demon that fit the script in particular, that fit the desert, and that fit the characters I was working with and the overall tone.

I didn’t want to pluck a Christian demon out of Christian theology or anything. I wanted to concoct something that felt like it fit with the script, and create a weakness for this demon that is difficult for them to exploit.

This demon lives in the desert, so it sort of follows that it doesn’t like water, that it’s vulnerable to water. Our caravan doesn’t have water. Water is a scarce commodity, so even when they get some, they have to choose between dying of dehydration or dying of being ripped apart by this demon. There’s a scarcity there that was interesting to play with.

Scott: It tracks in the common perception of a demon’s possession.

Lindsay: Possession, but also it’s eating you. It can wear your face, so it’s a gnarly twist on possession where it’s not just a ghost inhabiting your body. You’re dead. You’re not going to come back from this.

Scott: Did you know from the get‑go this was going to be a horror genre?

Lindsay: Yeah. Pretty much. A lot of my inspiration was horror movies — “The Thing,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” even “Pitch Black” in a way, which is one of my favorites.

Also weirdly, the TV show “The Terror.” I don’t know if you’ve seen the first season of “The Terror.” That’s one of my favorite seasons of television ever. I definitely took that idea of being trapped with a group of people, somewhere where walking out spells certain death. Something is hunting you, people are turning on each other. There’s this paranoia that’s setting in, attached with a scarcity of resources and the dread of the landscape around you. This completely punishing, unforgiving landscape.

Scott: Did you know how violent it was going to be?

Lindsay: What scares me, I think, is mostly this hyper‑violent stuff. So going for horror, I wanted to go for what scared me personally. Realism, and terrifying survival situations. The sense that even though the characters are being hunted by something supernatural, they’ve only got the same tools that we would have to respond to it.

Survival movies scare me. “127 Hours,” “Arctic,” which is a movie where Mads Mikkelsen gets hunted by a polar bear, that sort of thing — the idea of something harrowing happening to you, and you’re all alone, so you have to do something about it. You can’t just sit there and die. It’s the stark horror of what you have to do to survive that I was trying to reflect, if that makes sense.

Scott: It does. Campbell talks about the outer journey is really about the inner journey. He says the outer journey is “incidental” to the inner journey. For Nasreen, it’s like all that physical torture that she goes through, including this really gut‑wrenching ending. It’s all about dealing with that inner guilt. So at the very end, when she walks off on her own, you feel like, “Yeah, she’s gone through what she’s needed to go through.”

Lindsay: I feel like when you have a concept like a demon that eats people, you have to push it all the way. Otherwise, your readers are going to feel like they’re getting cheated. I didn’t want to pull any punches or anything.

Scott: Did you enjoy writing that? Because they’re really graphic, in a good way. Very visceral.

Lindsay: I do. I enjoy torturing my characters. Maybe you were right at the beginning. There’s a little bit of sadism in “Caravan.”

Scott: For all the spectacle, it’s a really compelling script to read. And it proves once again, you can have great stories with three-act structure. In “Caravan,” by the end of Act 1, they’re off on the road. Pretty soon, within 10, 15 pages, you’re into the horror thing. End of Act 2, she’s left alone, basically, to die, All Is Lost. Then Act 3, leading to the Final Struggle.

Lindsay: I’m a big proponent of three‑act structure. My favorite thing about writing genre films is that they fit together really neatly, like puzzles, if you’re plotting them correctly. Definitely a huge structure nerd.

Scott: It’s a terrific script. You make the Black List, you already did it in 2021. Maybe a little bit old hat for you, but what was it like knowing that this script made the 2022 Black List?

Lindsay: It was exciting. It was surprising. I didn’t expect it because “Caravan” went out to producers in like March. I figured people would have forgotten about it. It was nice to know that it had made an impression and that people still remembered it come December. It’s always very validating.

Scott: Did that result in any more general meetings?

Lindsay: Yeah, I got more meetings with production companies focused in horror and people interested in the horror space, which I had not gotten before. Again, a lot of that was back when it originally went out. By the time the Black List came out, I’d already met a lot of the people who were interested, but there was a second wave.

Scott: When I broke in, I wrote “K‑9,” which was a cop and a dog movie and I got pitched every animal project in Hollywood. To redefine yourself, you can do that as a screenwriter, that’s what I tell my students. You can just, “Oh, when I want to write horror, I’m going to write a horror script,” and if it succeeds on the page, boom, guess what? You’re a horror writer.

Lindsay: I’m worried I’m going to get pigeonholed as the desert girl because “Sandpiper” is also in a desert.

Scott: The desert. That’s exactly right. You’ll be on the Desert List.

Lindsay: Maybe I’ll get called for Dune Five or something.

[laughter]

Scott: I’d like to ask you a few craft questions, if I may. First, how do you come up with story concepts?

Lindsay: It’s mostly again, what is cool to me and what would I be excited to watch, and what do I wish were already a movie. [laughs] Then you have to test concepts to make sure that they have legs and that they can work in 120‑page screenplay.

I’ve got a lot of throwaway concepts that are never going to go anywhere because they sound cool in a log line, but they can’t be spun out. I’m also very lucky that I can sort of talk with my team to see what’s commercial and what people are looking for. “Caravan” is an outlier, where no one’s looking for it, but I wrote it anyways.

I’m also a big fan of genre mashups. If I find two genres that haven’t been mashed before, it’s very exciting to try and crack that.

Scott: You say you’re a structure person, a three‑act structure. How do you go about breaking story?

Lindsay: I sit with it for weeks and weeks and write a ton of notes. I think you have to write in every direction and accept that not everything that you come up with is going to make it into the script and that not everything needs to make it into the script, and there are certain pieces that are going to work to put the puzzle together.

Scott: How about characters? How do you develop the characters?

Lindsay: It’s very difficult for me to figure out which characters fit in which script, so I end up discarding a lot of characters. The number one thing is that your protagonist has to fit with the tone of the movie and with the plot.

They have to be the right person to go on the right journey. Like you can’t take Ferris Bueller and put him in “Star Wars,” it’s not going to work. You have to be aware of the movie you’re trying to make.

The protagonist is the easy part, and then you have to figure out who to put them with along the way to help them on their journey. If you can develop an antagonist that’s a reflection of what they’re going through and that they have a deep connection to, that’s super helpful in terms of driving the script along.

Scott: That’s exactly right. If you can have a nemesis or an antagonist character who’s the physicalization of what the protagonist fears the most or their shadow, then you got a psychological connection, right?

Lindsay: Right. In genre movies, action movies, we root for the protagonist and we want them to vanquish the antagonist, and it feels more satisfying when they do, if they have this personal connection to them.

Obviously, the dumb example is Darth Vader because it’s this journey that is not just about beating the villain, but reconciling the pain that the villain has caused you and moving past it. The antagonist is super important.

Scott: It’s like on Dagobah, I guess it is when Luke goes into that weird hyper thing…

Lindsay: The Cave of Fear. He’s worried that he’s going to turn into his dad.

Scott: His own fate. I got to say, Ferris Bueller and Star Wars, I want to see that movie.

[laughter]

Lindsay: It’s like a different “Space Balls.”

Scott: Exactly. [laughs] Your dialogue is so great. The characters all had such interesting worldviews. Is that something that you feel intuitively or is that something that you consciously spend time on? How does that work for you?

Lindsay: I spend time on it. I tend to write very clunky dialogue at first. I put down what they need to be saying and what information they need to be getting across, and then I’ll go back and make it sound like something a human being would say.

Scott: Do you think about theme that much? I know some writers, they start with theme. Most writers I know say they find the themes as they go along in the process. How about you?

Lindsay: I think definitely throughout the process, it emerges. I think with genre film, it’s difficult sometimes to say specifically what a theme is. If you’re looking at “Independence Day,” “San Andreas,” these huge crazy movies, it’s mostly about the alien invasion or the earthquake and it’s less about theme or anything like that. Although I love “Independence Day” and it does have some very obvious themes.

That said, I think it’s hard to write a script and just spend time with a script and to not see some central idea emerge. Definitely, throughout the process it comes out, but I don’t come up with a mission statement to begin with.

Scott: How about when you’re writing a scene? Are there specific goals you have in mind?

Lindsay: I try not to make it boring. If you’re sitting in a scene for long enough that you’re wondering when the next one’s going to start, you’ve been there for too long.

I think a good rule of thumb is, I’m sure you’ve heard this, get in late and get out early.

This is less individual scenes, but I think rhythm is very important. If you’ve watched a million movies, you know the pace that they’re supposed to move along at and how long scenes should be, and how they should fit together.

The rhythm of how that works throughout the script is, to me, more important than the individual scenes.

Scott: It’s actually quite evident in your script. “Caravan” is probably 75 percent scene description.

Lindsay: Probably.

Scott: You break it up, one line, two lines, one line, three lines, two lines. Was that a conscious thing? I know some writers think about each paragraph, a scene description as suggestive of a camera shot. They’re not saying camera shot, but that’s how they think about it.

Lindsay: It’s important, especially in action scenes, where you have either a hand‑to‑hand fight — or, in “Caravan,” you’re getting killed horribly by a demon. I generally think of it as a conversation, so each action beat that you’re getting, if it’s a punch or if it’s a kick, should be its own line, because it’s breaking a new line of dialogue.

It’s also important to have a lot of white space, so that it reads quickly, at the pace that the action would be actually happening, if that makes sense.

Scott: Absolutely, there’s all these supposed rules floating around in the online screenwriting universe, like this one: “You can only write what an audience can see and hear.” Yet there’s psychological writing we see in screenplays all the time.

Here’s an example from your script “Caravan.” Nasreen and the Sogdians are staring, shocked. Then in italics in scene description, you wrote: “Where did these guys come from? Who the fuck are they?”

That’s not anything that an audience member could know, but that’s psychological writing, where you’re commenting on the moment or maybe even dipping into the inner life of a character and expressing it. That’s something you’re comfortable with. Maybe you could share some thoughts on what I call psychological writing.

Lindsay: You say it’s not visual, but it is something that’s communicated on screen. Either it’s on the actor’s face, this inner moment that they’re having, or it’s a question that the audience is going to be asking based on the visuals, a moment of confusion that’s being created.

For me, it’s just a succinct way to communicate this very complicated visual information. For instance, if a character is feeling doubt, that’s something that an actor’s going to be able to portray to us, but when I put it on the page it sounds like internal information.

It’s driving the story along, so it’s got to be on the page somehow. I think it’s also a style question. Definitely, in older scripts you don’t see it as much, I’ve noticed. It’s a sign of the times, I guess.

Scott: It makes it more entertaining.

Lindsay: Definitely. I think screenplays are meant to be read, so you have to make it an interesting read as opposed to just dryly describing what’s going to show up on the screen. If you can’t get someone to read the whole thing, they’re never going to buy and make it.

Scott: One last question. What advice do you have for aspiring screenwriters?

Lindsay: In terms of learning the craft, reading and watching as much as you can is really what was helpful to me. If you absorb movie after movie after movie, script after script, you learn the craft without sitting down and reading a textbook.

Just by watching, you get to know three‑act structure. You become very familiar with, again, the rhythm of scenes and how characters are supposed to talk, and how things fit together.

Also, reading scripts, you see how everything looks on the page, the different ways that words are communicated into visuals. I think that’s the most valuable education that you can get in terms of craft.

For breaking in, I don’t know. It’s different for literally everyone. I’ve never talked to two people that had the same story about how they got through the door. But the Black List website worked for me, so give it a go.

For my interviews with dozens of Black List writers, go here.