Go Into The Story Interview: Sean Robert Daniels

Sean Robert Daniels’ original screenplay “Killers” is a taut, finely crafted thriller that won him a 2012 Nicholl fellowship. For those of you toiling away on spec scripts outside the United States, Sean can be an inspiration for you as he lives 10,364 air miles away from Los Angeles, all the way in Centurion, South Africa.

Here is my 2012 interview with Sean in its entirety.

Scott Myers: Let’s start off with this. Is it true your father named you after Sean Connery because he’s a big fan of James Bond?

Sean Robert Daniel: It is true. He was a big James Bond fan. I never really asked why he decided, but I think he was that big a fan. Sean Connery always seems to be in adventurous movies. Maybe he was hoping that I would lead a similar type of life.

Scott: It sounds like in some ways you may have done that as you’ve been to every continent on the earth, including Antarctica where supposedly you were on an island surrounded by penguins.

Sean: [laughs] What happened there was this: my Dad was turning fifty, all of us in the family had managed to get through our various travels to all six of the other continents, so he decided for his 50th he was going to take us all down to Antarctica.

Truly, it’s one of those things that you should plan one day to do. You have to leave from a town called Ushuaia on the very bottom edge of the world. It’s quite a very unusual town. I’d love to go back and spend more time there.

The whole town is very much in constant twilight because it’s so far south. We were there in the middle of summer, and it was snowing and twilight. Very unusual. You’re surrounded by the phrase, “the end of the world,” the entire time, partly because it’s the Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, but also because it is the southernmost city in the world. There’s an apocalyptic feel to the place, which is very appealing.

You leave from there, and it takes about a day and a half for the ship to get to Antarctica. Every day you do two or three excursions out to the mainland or the islands. On the one island, it was breeding season. We were surrounded by 100,000 breeding penguins. It was quite cool. You’re not allowed to approach the penguins, but if the penguins come to you, that’s OK.

Scott: Being a writer all of your travels must have fed your imagination, your curiosity, your ideas for stories.

Sean: Very much so. The thing is, it was the desire and the wanting to be a writer which made me want to travel. I started doing my serious traveling after I finished studying. I realized in my final year that as much as I knew South Africa, Australia, and a little bit of England, the rest of the world ‑‑ America, Europe, Asia, South America ‑‑ were just places that I’d only ever seen in movies or read about. I felt that if I really wanted to be a writer and write stories that weren’t entirely located out of imagination or just about South Africa and Australia, that I would actually have to go and see the world.

The first big trip, I took a whole year off. I went round Europe. I went round Western Europe for about three months doing the classical things. I would go to a major city, and I would have a list of five things that I needed to do. Like, in Paris, on the list, I’d have to go to the Eiffel Tower, I’d have to go to the Louvre, et cetera.

When I got to Eastern Europe, I spent about three or four months there. That was just traveling around, taking it as it came. In that sense, I ended up spending about 20 days in Budapest because I enjoyed the city so much. Also, Prague. Krakow in Poland, which was amazing. I didn’t like Romania too much, but that was because someone tried to pickpocket me. Although Transylvania is a place I’d like to visit more, and not just because it was the birthplace of Vlad Dracul, but because the area was steeped in dark and interesting history.

Then I spent awhile in Scotland with my grandfather, and then three months in the States, which was really, really amazing. That was the first time I ever went to LA. I stayed in the backpacker’s just off Hollywood Boulevard, which was a nice location because I could walk around. Being a big fan of the Oscars I did do the Kodak Theater tour. It was pretty cool.

Everywhere I traveled, one of the little things that I would look out for was local knowledge, stories, little mythologies, little legends. As much as I didn’t like the country too much, I found a lot of really interesting stories when I was in Romania. And little local legends.

One of my favorite ones was the idea that if you don’t tell anyone your dreams for seven years, then you can actually see wind. Little gems like that I would pick up and note down.

Scott: One of the things I tell my students is while it’s important to watch movies, read scripts, write, and so forth, it’s equally important to live life. Fill yourself with experiences and sensations to feed your creativity.

Sean: Oh, I can definitely agree with that. I don’t push that too hard when I’m teaching, because at the moment I mainly teach the first‑years. What I try and do is sort of sidle them up to that idea. Usually our year is split into two semesters and two modules in each, and I usually call the last week of each module Zombie Week, because that’s pretty much what my students look like by that stage. What I said to them at the beginning of the year was, how many of you still have hobbies? And [laughs] virtually none of them put their hands up. It was as though that idea of taking time for yourself, taking a moment to read a book, play a game, spend time with your friends, just so that you weren’t completely burnt out by the academics of it had been forgotten. And yet having a hobby, a break from your normal life can be so refreshing. Perhaps even keep you sane. Well, as sane as artists can be.

However, next year I’m going to be teaching screenwriting to the second‑years, and this idea of living life and experiencing life so you can write more about it will come into it.

Scott: You teach at The Open Window. Could you describe what that school is about?

Sean: The full title is, The Open Window School of Visual Communication. The degrees cover drawing, illustration, Internet design and photography. Of course in the Film Department we have film and television, starting next year we have sound design and screenwriting, screen acting, and then also traditional animation, 2‑D, stop‑motion, as well as a very vibrant 3‑D animation program.

Scott: This is in South Africa?

Sean: Yes, this is in a town called Centurion, which is between our capital Pretoria and one of the major cities, Johannesburg.

Scott: Before teaching, you were a film student in Australia, is that right?

Sean: Yes. What happened was ‑‑ I’m sure we’ll come back to this later ‑‑ but in about 2008, 2009, I was broke after the stock market crash, yes, 2009, and I was desperate for a job. I think sometimes what you realize when you’re fully qualified for film is that that doesn’t really get you many jobs. There were a lot of things I didn’t want to do, and when I was looking through the advertisements for people who needed anything in film, there was a job as a teacher. And I honestly took it out of a sense of desperation, but in that very first lesson that I taught, I thoroughly enjoyed it and realized that this was something I could easily do and enjoy.

And so, I taught at this small film school that only operated on weekends as kind of workshops for people. I actually used to live next to the Open Window campus, and then they moved campuses, and I always felt like I should’ve gone and asked them if they had a place for me. Only after they moved did I try. Pluto Panoussis, the head of the department, I literally just phoned him up and told him who I was and what I’d done. And he said, you know what? You sound like someone who we could have a place for. I started with just giving small workshops, again, on the weekends, lighting, acting, directing.

One of my favorite workshops that I used to give was basically troubleshooting. We would sit and they would talk about their scripts and talk about their approach to filming their script and I would ask them questions like, have you thought of filming it like this? Have you considered this aspect of the story? How are you going to present this? We’d spend the whole day really getting into their approach.

Then I started teaching the short courses in Final Cut and also film making. This year was the first year that they actually started offering film as a subject from first year and I was given the first years to teach.

cott: You made a full length feature film yourself, wrote and directed it. What is the story behind that?

Sean: Sure. Actually, what I was going to say, and I’ll get to the ins and outs of that in a second, what I like to tell my students is I’ve screwed up so many times that I can tell them how not to screw up. The film is a classic example. What happened was, in the long version of the story, I wrote the script as part of my Honors thesis when I was studying in Australia. The first draft of that was a mammoth 190 pages.

Scott: There you go.

Sean: Yeah. All written in Word, as well. It was all self-formatted, which was a joy. When I handed it in for my thesis, I had managed to winnow it down to about 163 pages or something like that. The story is about three 20‑somethings, post graduates, going through the quarter life crisis. I wanted to write a film — what I’ve always felt is that age group of your mid to late 20’s when you’ve graduated and you’re in the working world and you’re in that awkward phase between almost becoming a proper adult the way we understand an adult these days. I felt that there are very few films out there that examine that age group. Usually that age group is mainly the cast of horrors or the Transformers. It’s not really examined too dramatically. I wrote this film and then after I finished it I read it and wasn’t happy with how it turned out. You see, Australia is a country that has very little wrong with it. It’s very stable. It’s very easy to earn a good living over there. In the end, when I read the script, it felt like it was just three middle class people whining.

Then I went on the trip round the world and I realized that it would be a far, far better film if I set it back in South Africa where being middle class carries a huge amount of issues around it. We still have many racial issues in the country and all sorts of other things. Suddenly, they were no longer just three middle class people whining. It was actual genuine problems that were a part of their lives.

I came back to South Africa and I spent a while re‑writing the screenplay to fit the country. I hadn’t actually lived in South Africa in my 20s so I had to spend some time getting used to it again and, of course, changing the dialogue and speech patterns that fit more how the locals speak.

Once it was done I sent it off to a number of production houses but no one picked it up. In fact, I got a rejection letter the very day we started shooting.

Scott: Irony.

Sean: Which I replied very gracefully with thank you very much, now I have to go on set, but thanks. I raised money on the stock market to get the film funded and I was very open and honest with all the cast and crew right from the start in saying in order to make this film there’s no way I can pay any of you. The only way we’re going to get this film made is purely by good will and the graces, which was actually quite surprising. I sent the script off to all the various casting agencies in the country and said right from the start that I don’t think your actors are going to get paid for this. In fact, they’re almost certainly not going to and they’re going to work very long hours, but they’ll be the lead roles. I ended up casting for almost two weeks, seeing people constantly.

I was very lucky. Typically, as you might expect, after casting for two weeks and it’s the very last people that walked through the doors that ended up getting the roles. We shot for about 18 days and I think the total cast and crew was around 15, 16 people. We shot in about three different states because it was a roadtrip movie.

Scott: That’s quite an undertaking, 18 days and traveling as opposed to one location.

Sean: What I said to the crew and cast was it’s a seven hour drive from point A to B. That’s our rest period. After all, only one of you has to drive. The others can take a nap.

Scott: Guerilla filmmaking at its best.

Sean: It was a lot of fun. It’s easier to look at the hardships now. I still remember it was some ridiculous thing about we paid a 50 percent deposit on the sound equipment and then we were seven hours away from Johannesburg and the guy who owned the equipment suddenly wanted full payment. The sound recordist who was working for him refused to record until we went and paid. I’m in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and I’ve somehow got to get this transfer in. I had to drive an hour from then set to get to a bank and try and get the transfer going in the middle of the shoot.

Scott: That’s great. That’s the kind of stuff that steels you for the business, if you can survive.

Sean: Definitely. The thing is, as well, that wasn’t the end of it because after the shoot, what I did was we took six months off after the shoot because I just felt that if we started editing and we looked at the footage all we would do is see what we didn’t do and what we got wrong. Whereas, I felt if we gave ourselves at least six months, when we came back to the footage we would look at it and appreciate what we had actually done. That turned out to be true. The downside of that was that the stock market crash came so I was kind of wiped out. Literally, I ended up living in and working at a backpackers for a while, basically getting room and board. That was the only way I could survive until I got my first teaching job. It took me a while to get back on my feet before I could even go back and attempt to look at post production.

Then beginning of last year (2011), just as I’m kind of getting back on my feet and we’d had a good cut of the film, one of the actors died. He was in his mid 30’s and had a heart attack. Then this year (2012) in March, my lead actor committed suicide. It was a dual tragedy. The first tragedy being, of course, he had committed suicide and that was a friend dying. The second tragedy to it was, with regards to the film, we’d been planning on looping a fair number of the scenes and pretty much all the scenes in the film contained three actors in the same room.

Now that he’s dead, we can’t do any looping.

Scott: You’re still in post, then? Not a finished product?

Sean: Not at this point. What’s been a nice, odd little spinoff of the Nicholl is I’ve had a few people in production houses in South Africa who I’ve chatted to go OK, show us your cut and let’s see what we can help with when it comes to the sound. Ironically, I met the one through one of my students. His dad actually owns one of the two Dolby studios in South Africa.

Scott: Good luck on that.

Scott: Let’s talk about your script “Killers” which won the Nicholl screenwriting competition. How did you come up with the idea and why did you think it was a strong enough story concept, one worth working on?

Sean: After I’d done the 190 page behemoth, I was thinking of doing something a little bit differently. I wanted to do a story like Robert Altman’s “Shortcuts”, an ensemble piece, lots of characters. Each of the characters would be involved in a murder in some ways. Either someone would have to kill someone out of a crime of passion, someone would be planning to kill someone, and then there would be someone who was paid to kill. I didn’t end up liking that script but I liked the character of the Hitwoman so she stuck with me. Then I constantly asked myself that question of who would be the last person that she would kill? It came to me that it should be her mother and the whole topic of euthanasia came up in Killers. I guess it came to me a lot and speaks to me because when my aunt was about 19 she had a car accident that left her basically a quadriplegic the rest of her life.

I guess one of the uncomfortable questions that was never openly asked but was always around was would she have had a better life if she hadn’t survived the crash? That very much drove into that.

Scott: It’s really the emotional, even philosophical core of the story. The protagonist, who is a hired assassin and, therefore, has a certain attitude toward death on a professional level, is confronted on a personal level with this request on the part of her mother in terms of her own physical state.

Sean: Yeah. It’s something I’m always fascinated about. As a writer, two of the things that fascinate me a lot about people is people’s let’s go with spiritual beliefs or theological beliefs as well as their sexuality. With rare cases, you don’t wear your religion openly outside or your theology openly on the outside. The same with your sexuality. These are two parts of you that are relatively hidden from the naked eye but guide and dictate a huge amount of your choices in life. I’m sure you would have picked it up in “Killers” but one of the little things I was trying to do there in the discussion is it’s only the Hitwoman and the Priest who actually believe in a higher power. Everyone else is kind of atheistic except those two characters. There was that little irony attached to it.

It’s something that I am fascinated about, that idea of if you have someone, for example, that’s extremely evil what would cause them to do a moment of good? Just as you say, what would cause this Woman, for whom killing isn’t that important, to refuse to do it? In essence, the first attempt at writing “Killers” my initial goal was to actually have the Woman and the Mother reconcile, but every time I tried to write that version of the script it just felt false and it fought me until I realized that they hated each other too much.

Scott: I don’t know if you’re much of a fan of Carl Jung at all, but this idea of a shadow that is repressed aspects of the psyche. I could see what you’re saying in terms of your protagonist, that it would have been a false ending had she not been confronted to go through with this thing all the way because, really, what her destiny is, in terms of her psyche, is to confront the opposite of what she does. She’s a hired killer. What is a situation here where she would be called upon to do something on a personal level with her mother? There’s almost an inevitability or destiny to that, don’t you think?

Sean: I completely agree. It’s one of those ‑‑ fate has an unnerving manner of bringing these moments of confrontation into your life and this was hers. It seems to echo in real life, as well. Your hubris catches up with you.

Scott: The protagonist is a female. At the time you made that choice, I’m sure you’re aware that males dominate roles in genre movies. Had you been influenced by projects like Salt, Hanna, or even The Hunger Games, or did the character just came to you as a female assassin?

Sean: When the character first came about in my mind, none of those movies had even been conceived. I actually haven’t seen Hanna or the The Hunger Games. I’ve only seen Salt, which I wasn’t a big fan of. I think, actually, for me, it’s one of those things. I have a fascination with women. I realize that I’m saying this with my girlfriend in the kitchen, listening to us as we chat. I find women fascinating. They think differently to men and there is an enigma to them. I always found a lot of the times, when I was writing, that I would ask myself would the dynamics of a scene be different if instead of two men there was a man and a woman or how would this scene read differently if this person was a woman instead of a man.

Quite often I find I might start an idea with a male protagonist and I find I get more interested when I change it to a woman.

Scott: You have a wonderful moment at the very end of the script where the protagonist intersects with an old woman and they have a conversation about clouds, and a story about children in the clouds. It feels like a very female driven moment, very intuitive and evocative, so I’m curious where you came up with that idea.

Sean: That is actually a conversation, something that is a rare thing in my writing, that is almost, verbatim, a conversation I had with an old woman on a plane. I was flying from South Africa to Botswana and that moment, the last part about the children in the clouds, happened to me. It was this lovely old Dutch lady. That conversation, as I said, is almost word for word. The thing is, in the original draft of “Killers,” the first draft was only 70 pages long. Then the Nicholl script was 80 pages. The current draft is now 103. Initially, it just ended with the woman sitting alone in the airplane. I just knew that there was something missing from the script and that conversation that happened to me just rolled around in my head. I sat down and I wrote it.

I’m never entirely sure what it means but I know it fits and I think, for me, it lends itself to this idea of innocence, that somehow innocence still exists. The Old Woman that sits next to her can sit and talk about this magical innocence of childhood which, in many ways, has been robbed from the woman.

Scott: In the script, no one has a proper name. It’s Woman, Doctor, Mother. What was the inspiration behind that choice?

Sean: I used to write for theater before I started writing films and when I wrote stage plays the very first thing I would do is come up with the play build. Captain Jack Donkey, a 70 year old Lieutenant, et cetera, et cetera. I would write those and have my characters’ names and biographies well thought out before I started to write the script. With film, I wrote more intuitively and a number of my scripts will actually start where it is just man, woman, child, dentist until the name comes naturally. With “Killers,” one of the things that I really wanted to do was to have readers, and eventually, I guess, an audience, take the characters for purely who they are. I found that if I named the woman, if I gave her the name Chloe, then the name Chloe would bring all sorts of connotations to whoever was watching the film.

They might be married to a Chloe. They might have had a sister called Chloe. It brings the aspects of the Chloes throughout their life to this woman.

I wanted the audience to just treat her for who she was. By leaving the characters unnamed they, I think in a way, become a purer version of who they are.

In the same manner of speaking, it’s the same type of reason why the reason the Woman and the Mother hate each other is never fully defined. Because I felt that if I pinpointed a reason then half the audience would sit there and go, “That is a perfectly justifiable reason,” and the other half would go, “No, that’s not good enough.” Then you’ve lost half the audience.

Scott: You also kind of demythologize it. It’s like one of the powers of the Hannibal Lecter character in The Silence of the Lambs. We know that he is a psychopath, that he’s a cannibal, but we don’t really know why. That mystery adds to the mythology of the character, the power of Hannibal Lecter.

Sean: Oh, I agree. I think what someone said…There’s a skill to lying. If you’re going to lie, you give short answers so that the person you’re lying to fills the story in their own way. If you give too many details then they can start picking holes in what you’re saying.

Scott: Let’s get to the juicy part here where you found out you won the Nicholl.

Sean: Well, first of all, what happened was ‑‑ as you know, these days we don’t really sit with a script in your drawer, but it was sitting on my hard drive and had been doing so since about the middle of last year, and I had no real idea what to do with it. And then I’d forgotten about the Nicholl until I saw a tweet from IMDB that the closing date was coming up. So I went, ah, I remember this competition. But foolishly, when I was in my final year of high school I looked at the Nicholl and thought, hey, you know what? I’m studying film next year, I should enter, I’ll be more than qualified to write for this in a year [laughs] . And that didn’t turn out quite the way I expected.

So yes, I checked the rules and saw that I still hadn’t earned the $5,000, and my script was original and in English. So then, I don’t know why I was dithering or prevaricating about entering, but I went back to the school where I’m teaching. And every now and again they rent out a hall for business function, and the business function that was on on this particular day was themed Oscar Night. So I walked onto the campus, and the whole place was filled with Oscars, and I just went, well, I’ll take the hint. So I borrowed my friend’s credit card and entered.

And then, to be honest, I think part of why I entered was just a little bit of verification, if that’s the right word. I really just wanted to get through to the quarterfinals, just to say that it’s good enough to get that far. So, when I got through to the quarterfinals, I was happy, I was kind of content.

When I got through to the semifinals, for the first time I got a little bit of nervousness, because now suddenly I was closer to a real goal. While I was on a photographic camp with my students, and from looking on the Facebook page I knew that that week that I was on the photographic camp we would hear if we made it through to the finals. And equally, that you would get a phone call if you made it through and you would get an email if you hadn’t.

So, I was avoiding my phone because I was very much enjoying just being a semifinalist and didn’t want the journey to end. And then we were sitting up quite late, actually, about midnight drinking and playing cards with the students when I checked my phone and I saw that I had an email. And my girlfriend was sitting across the table from me, and she could see my face. My face kind of fell.

And then I opened up the email, and the first lines were, Dear Sean, we’ve been trying to phone you all day, we just can’t seem to get the number right. And I don’t think I finished the email [laughs] , I just went woo‑hoo! And then I was shaking for about an hour at least, and then I phoned Greg and Joan at the Nicholl and thanked them. I don’t know what their first impression must’ve been, because I was like, something along the lines, if I say something stupid it’s because I’m drunk. [laughter] But you’ve kind of sobered me up right now [laughs] .

Scott: So funny!

Sean: And it was amazing. I mean, if you draw a line from that day, before that day I had my own little path, which was a very patient, slow‑moving, almost glacial‑moving path to being a screenwriter and being a part of Hollywood and the film industry. And then you get announced as a finalist, and it changes. Suddenly I was getting emails and a massive amount of phone calls from agents to managers wanting to chat and find out whoever I was, and the courting season began, which was very flattering. And then, what was also wonderful was my friends and family were very supportive, and my students were ecstatic. I think that for them, like a lot of us, when you go and you’re studying film, you have the dream of Hollywood and you have the dream of making movies and TV. But especially in a country like South Africa, it feels very, very far away. So I think for my students the fact that this happened to me makes their dream seem all the more realistic.

Scott: With the growing internationalization of the American film market combined with how small the world is nowadays given the reach of technology and communication, I would think people in international locations will be inspired by your story.

Sean: Well, at the very least, that’s something I hope happens. In South Africa, in this year’s Nicholl, only nine people entered. Only 17 people entered from the entire African continent.

Scott: Wow.

Sean: And to me, one of the things I did almost as soon as I got back from the Nicholl week was I asked Greg Beal to send my email to the other entrants from South Africa. And I think last week or the week before I actually had breakfast with all the ones that were in this part of the world, because I really want to kind of…From what I’ve experienced, there’s a huge lack of community with screenwriters in South Africa, and it’s something that riding this wave I hope to kind of stir up a little more.

Scott: Did you sign with a manager or an agent?

Sean: I did, I signed with Josh Goldenberg of Kaplan/Perrone. I took a little bit of a risk, not with him, I couldn’t be happier, but because initially I’d been getting advice that I should wait until I was actually in Los Angeles and meeting all these people who wanted to speak with me. But my feeling was that it’s a month’s salary to fly out to Los Angeles, so for me it made more sense to take a risk and sign with someone before I flew over for the Nicholl week, so that my week would be spent with A, the activities in the Nicholl week, and then B, my manager would organize meetings for me. And that’s how it turned out. What I was really happy with was, when I signed with Josh we spent a week working on a new draft of Killers. Because obviously, as you can imagine, in that first week I would’ve sent my script out to a couple people so that they could see it, and then of course it gets everywhere.

I mean, within a day or two I think our scripts had popped up on the tracking board. And then there was the small thing where a script shadow had a copy of our scripts and was trying to pass it around. That was a bit of an ill taste, I have to admit. So, Josh’s idea was that if we could get a fresh draft, a new one, then when he sent the script around it wouldn’t be something that everyone had read, it’d be something new.

And I will admit, there was a small nervousness. When you do a script about a hit woman and there’s no gun fights in the whole film, I was worried for a moment that he would want me to maybe push it in a different direction. But he was great, he was actually pushing in the completely opposite direction, kind of, do you need these lines? Can you say it with less? Can it be darker? You can explore more.

And things like, he asked my reasoning for that final scene that you liked. And I said to him at the time, and I still struggle with exactly knowing what it meant, and his response was, well, you like the scene, you know how it fits, and that’s what’s important. So, I’d say in that last week we had quite a number of phone calls, and I added in about 20‑odd pages into the script.

Scott: What’s the status with it now? Are you going out with it?

Sean: Yeah, it’s going out. It’s out now. Josh’s been exhausting himself over the past week sending it out to people.

Scott: An exciting time for you.

Sean: It is. Last week I said to [my girlfriend] Kate, “I don’t want to get too excited because I don’t want to raise hopes and then…” Because, you know, it’s a fishing expedition. You’re going to get 99 percent of the people saying “No,” and all you’re hoping for is the one person to say “Yes.” But as Kate pointed out to me, what I should be excited about and what I am excited about is that my script is in Hollywood and people are reading it. That is an amazing feeling.

Scott: In your acceptance speech, you said “writing is both terrifying and magical.” What did you mean by that?

Sean: The terror and magic walk hand in hand because the whole time what you’re doing is you’re creating non‑existent worlds, non‑existent people and hoping that once it gets out of your mind and onto paper and other people are reading it that they respond to it even remotely the same way that you do, that they treat these people as real. They treat these worlds that you create as real and are moved to either laugh or cry or be horrified. And so, the great joy of it comes from when you’re doing it. For me, when I’m writing, I’ve tried many times to do various writing techniques, drawing outlines and using cue cards. And for me, the only way that I find I can really work with writing is to just write. I imagine as I’m writing that I’m a person in the scene watching it as it’s going on, and my subconscious takes a very strong hold of me. Especially in the early drafts, I have very little control over what’s happening. I take the control more in the rewriting.

And letting your subconscious loose is to me something that is both magical and terrifying. It’s that other thing as well as that, I think Neil Gaiman said a number of times, he makes a living telling stories and he’s just waiting for the day someone comes along to tell him to get a real job.

And there is something to that, you know. I really believe that storytellers in whatever medium are amongst the most important people in the world, because it’s through stories that we understand history, that we understand how we’re supposed to think, how we’re supposed to live. It comments on how we live and what we think. And yet, it seems in a way so frivolous, because it’s just you sitting in front of a computer making your fingers move.

Scott: I don’t know if you’re a fan of Joseph Campbell, but his attitude was that storytellers are the people that keep the myths alive which help define our cultures and our individual existences. And so, I couldn’t agree with you more that…

Sean: If we were talking with the video camera on I would just turn it a little and you would see “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” on my bookshelf.

Scott: OK, some craft questions. How do you come up with story ideas?

Sean: I come up with ideas in a variety of ways. A lot of it comes from reading. I’ll be reading a short story or, and Gene Wolfe, one of my favorite authors, said it very well in the introduction to one of his books. He said, “Often a lot of his stories come from how he would have loved to have done something different in another story.” And I don’t mean it in terms of, like, “Oh, OK, your character did this. I’ll make him do that,” but I can’t help but think the subconscious goes on about different ideas.

Like, just a completely random one, but I was reading a short story about a world where there was sentient technology and somehow couches that could think would accidentally meld with fridges and create all sorts of wonderful technological creatures. And then my idea was, what if a girl and her vibrator started talking to each other and they fell in love?

You know, that kind of random process. And equally, I love trolling the Internet with things like StumbleUpon. I love looking at websites that tell you old jobs like, chicken sexing and things like that. And it’s the wonderful thing about playing the “what if” game, what if a chicken sexer fell in love?

Scott: OK, so let’s say you come up with a strong idea. What is your prep writing process like?

Sean Robert Daniels: OK. Well, I think a lot. I mean, I really think about an idea a lot. I don’t immediately rush out and start writing. I let it play in my head for as long as I can. I imagine that when I’m driving to work, I think about it. I play scenes out. I start watching the movie in my head. And I start poking holes into the story. Would this work? Have I thought about this? You know, start imagining the characters. It’s very cerebral at the start.

I’ve never been someone who likes research simply because, for me, that would be the best way of not actually ever finishing a script. I’m very prone to procrastination in that sense.

My father and I were talking years ago about writing a film about the Boer War and the concentration camps. And he said he would like to do a little bit of research before we started writing it and it’s six years later and he’s still researching.

So, when I’m writing, I like to research second. Steven King said this amazing thing in his book on writing. Don’t write what you know. Write what you believe is true. So I kind of run with that. I write what feels right. And in the middle of the script I’ll do something like in dialogue or in the action lines, insert researched point here, or insert jargon there. And then I just move on.

For me, the important thing, the very important thing about discovering the story and the characters is getting that first draft done.

Scott: From what I understand, the only time you’ve ever written an outline is when your computer was stolen. All your stories, gone. And before you called the police, you had to jot down an outline for “Killers”.

Sean: Exactly, yeah. That was the only time. When I was studying at university and we had to write outlines, I’d write the script first and do the outline to it.

Scott: That being the case, your first draft is basically where you discover your characters and you story.

Sean: Very much so. I’ll give you an indication. Just quickly, did you read the 102 or the 80 page [of “Killers”]?

Scott: 80 page.

Sean: OK. This will give you an indication. One of the notes that I got from Josh was he felt the relationship between the priest and the woman was a little too easy. She came into the chapel a little too easily, which I agreed. I thought that there could have been a bit more tension at the start of that. He said to me, “Can she accidentally get into the church, into the hospital chapel?” I thought about this and I was like OK. I could do the easy way of that would be to have her just walk in accidentally, but then I didn’t like that. In essence, I sat down and I had the scene in front of me and then mentally it was as if I was standing across the hallway from her watching and going what are you going to do next? How am I going to get you into this room? I can watch you walk past, I can watch you choose to go in, but that’s not what we want.

Then in my head I look around the hospital room and I see I’m in a hospital and I saw this nurse pushing a gurney with a patient fountaining blood down the hallway. I thought, perfect. I wrote that she pushes the gurney past the woman, the blood is spraying everywhere, so the woman steps backwards into the church. She’s just trying to get out of the way.

It’s really that fly on the wall being in the scene and watching it and it happens a lot with my dialogue in that the conversation starts and I only feel the most tenuous hold on what’s going on, at least in the first draft.

Scott: What I’m hearing you say is that in terms of character development, just focusing on that, it’s really about immersing yourself in that story universe, putting yourself there so that you can really, in a way, experience them in that context?

Sean: Very much so, yes. I do a similar thing when I’m directing. Once I give a script to an actor, I tell them that you need to know the character better than I do. When we’re rehearsing, I don’t give them any directing at the start. I let them basically do what they want and then I see if they like it. If I like what they’re doing, I add it into the overall goal of the film. If I don’t, then I make adjustments. I have the same approach as I’m writing.

Scott: I was going to say, that initial approach when you’re directing with the actors, let them take a first crack at it, that’s almost like that’s first draft and then you adjust as you go along?

Sean: Very much so, yeah. One of the things that made me, I think, a better writer and a quicker writer was being very comfortable with the idea of writing crap in that getting that first draft down almost no matter what. If the scene was terrible, if the characters were not entirely comfortable in their skins I would just push past it to the point where I typed fade to black. Once we had it all down then I could almost do a debrief with the characters. I see you’re not particularly comfortable in this scene. Let’s look at why you’re not comfortable. Is it because there’s not enough motivation for what you’re doing or have we missed the motivation or is this actually going against your character?

Scott: I have the same philosophy. There’s that saying: Seeing is believing. What about believing is seeing? What if you believe those characters actually exist, that story universe actually exists? Treat them as human beings, as sentient entities. By doing that, they come alive in your imagination and inform your process. Is that something similar to what your experience is?

Sean: Very much so. I’ll give you a perfect example of this. I didn’t know until I wrote it that the client had hired the woman.

Scott: That’s a big twist.

Sean: I think it’s a big twist because it was a twist to me.

Scott: What about dialogue? Do you think writers are born with the ability to write good dialogue or is that something you can learn?

Sean: From what I’ve experienced with my students I can safely say that it is a skill that can be developed. I think the first thing you have to do is listen to other people. A lot. And not just when you are part of the conversation. If I’m at a party I like sitting back and listening to people talk. What fascinates me is something actually Kate and I were talking about since we hung up. An extension of the thing I like about writing women is that if you have the same conversation between two men and you put the exact same lines now between a man and a woman, they talk to each other differently. I love the power relationships of conversations and the history that comes with every conversation, that wonderful subtext.

I like playing the games. Body language is also vital to me. A few years ago we were at a club for New Years Eve and I was a little boastful because I was drunk and I said we can stand on the balcony and I’ll point out to you who is going to hook up with who just based on their body language. I was pretty successful.

Scott: Listening and observing, right?

Sean: Exactly. As you know, you don’t write “she’s happy,” you write “she raises a small smile.” You have to have that ear. You have to tune yourself into listening not to what people are saying precisely but how they’re saying it. As you can see in “Killers,” the woman talks very differently to whoever she’s talking to.

Scott: That’s her job description, that’s her personality for that job.

Sean: That was something I spent a lot of time crossing, I think the most fun dialogue I had writing in that whole script was the conversations between her and her colleagues. Creating that kind of looping dialogue where you’re asking a question and answering a question and asking the third question every time you talk.

Scott: And there’s her back story that we’re sort of privy to that’s playing in the background.

Sean: One of my biggest bugbears with writing is exposition. It’s something that I try and avoid as much as possible. I remember listening to something, I was listening to the commentary on “Constantine,” and I remember them saying that one thing they tried very hard in “Constantine” was, if “Constantine” was in the room with people who knew his world, they didn’t have to talk about his world.

Scott: You get these awkward moments in movies where you know the only reason the exposition is there is because the writer has to get it across to the reader and it feels unauthentic, because it’s not something that would naturally be there in case of the characters.

Sean: I think one of the first things I try to hammer into my students is get rid of the exposition. I think audiences are so smart at being able to fill in the gaps in history and understanding that you don’t need exposition 99 percent of the time.

When I was there in the Nicholl Week, one of the best things about it was spending time with the other finalists. We were really lucky in that seven of us were from out of town and six of us were put up in the same hotel, so we got to spend a lot of time together. I remember one of the things I said to everyone was that one of the best ways that everyone could improve their writing was to spend some time editing films.

Scott: I tell people one of my favorite screenwriting books is “In the Blink of an Eye” by famed film editor Walter Murch.

Sean: Oh, I love Walter Murch.

Scott: It’s a terrific read to look at it from a screenwriting perspective.

Sean: Once you’ve edited a number of films you realize that this whole scene is going to get cut out.

Scott: Yeah, because the viewer can make that connection.

Sean: When I’m rewriting, around not the second draft, but round about the third draft, I start reading it as an editor. I imagine that the script is actually thrown to me as a film now and I’m assembling it as an edit.

That’s how I, sometimes in the case of “Killers”, it was the exact opposite of “Ordinary Lives.” “Ordinary Lives” was constantly cut, cut, cut, cut, whereas with “Killers” it was a case of‑”I need more air here. I need more breath. I need more moments. I need it to be longer.”

Scott: In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you said about “Killers” that quote, “The story is about what happens to people who don’t have the support of family and the damage that can do to you.” When and how did you hit on that theme? How did that influence the writing the story?

Sean: Well, I think, you know, I have to say that I’ve always felt that my family has supported me, so it wasn’t written out of that. But, you know, my parents divorced when I was young and there were moments when obviously they had to take more care of themselves, necessarily, than the children. I mean, they’re wonderful parents, but they’re still human. Some of those moments are amongst the most hurtful that you have to live through. I think I’m very lucky that I’m only, whatever screw‑ups and hang ups I have, I can channel into writing.

I don’t really drag them into other forms of life. And so, to me, I think actually it’s a common theme in a lot of my writing is the absence of family so I can imagine that kind of forced orphan mentality you get when you have to survive purely by yourself.

The thing is, in my view of the world, being by yourself and surviving at the exclusion of others, is dangerous is perhaps too strong a word, but it’s along that line. I mean, you don’t get too many people, you know, it’s always the lone gunman.

If you look at, even that tragedy that occurred in Aurora, I mean, that guy, I can’t remember his name, but if he was, I think, surrounded by a more loving, even just more of a family environment, whether it’s friends or family, he would have probably been driven to less of what he did.

And so, in terms of the script, honestly, I kept asking myself why is everyone in this story so damaged? And it just struck me that, well, family, you know. The woman, clearly, was a toy to be tugged between the two parents. Then, once her father died and she left home, she left all forms of family. I mean, the doctor himself, there’s no hint of any family relationships in his life either. I think it’s that little thing of, if you don’t have support there’s no one there to tell you you’re going wrong.

Scott: I may have a theory for you, why, in part, the ending, that little denouement moment with the old woman might resonate beyond just what’s happening on the surface of this lovely little story about the clouds. In a way, isn’t this old woman in the airplane kind of a projection, a symbolic physicalization of an ideal version of her mother, or a mother sort of basically saying, “It’s OK.” She’s sort of functioning in that level symbolically in some fashion?

Sean: That is a really lovely idea. I like that. I think you’re right there, actually. I mean, she does come across, thinking about it now, almost grandmotherly. And also, I think, now that you mentioned that, it does hit that it’s the only story in the entire film where the only character who actually had a good relationship with her parents, you know, in her story, her father wants her to have that moment of magic, taking her up in the hot air balloon to see the children in the clouds.

Scott: There you go.

Sean: This is the wonderful thing I love about writing, is that, well maybe it’s my style of writing, but, as I said, I really, a lot of where it comes from is my subconscious. Obviously I try to form a hold on what my subconscious is thinking when I’m doing my rewrites. I’m very comfortable with the fact that I’m not always going to get it myself. As long as I know that it fits, I’m happy with that. But I love what you just said there and I think you’re probably closer to the truth than I’ve come before.

Scott: That’s one of the most wonderful things about movies, how they can work on so many different levels, each of us brings our own life experience to them. Plus the writers and the filmmakers, the actors, all these people involved, have given themselves to the story. As a result, a movie can work in multiple layers and multiple levels.

Sean: I guess that goes back to something I said earlier, in that what I try not to give up, is easy answers, and easy solutions to a scene or a character, because, if you do, that leads the audience into only one point of view.

Scott: What’s your actual writing process like?

Sean: For a long time, sadly, it was in bursts. That’s something that, as of next week, I’m making the change into being more organized. I think the reason it was more in bursts was that it was kind of a reflection of my life, in that I mean, I moved houses a lot between 2009 and last year. Last year was the first time I lived in one place for a year, in the last, sort of, five years. I think being unsettled meant that my writing was unsettled, whereas now I’m very happy and very content. And so, what I plan to do, is, again, a bit of a Gene Wolfe thing, is write in the morning. Get up, exercise, write for a few hours, enjoy the day and maybe do some more in the evening.

I liked, when we had the Nicholl Week, Dan Petrie, Jr., gave this wonderful piece of advice, which was, “set aside a time in the day where you stop, even if you’re in mid‑sentence, so that you don’t exhaust your writing mind. And then when you come to the page the next day, you’ve been thinking about what you should have been finished writing the whole day and you can just jump right back into it.”

But, in terms of other little processes, I like writing at home and I like music playing. Quite often I write in the lounge, you know, pop the laptop on the lap and do it there. I have an office but it almost never gets used for writing. It gets used for editing more than anything else.

Scott: What kind of music do you listen to?

Sean: I think it depends. Like, whenever I’m writing, I gravitate to the soundtracks of Thomas Newman.

Scott: “The Shawshank Redemption” is one of my favorite.

Sean: Absolutely. I love that soundtrack. I have pretty much all his soundtracks, so I play them. I do, a little bit, key it to the mood that I’m writing, but if I’m listening to Radiohead or REM, then I’m so familiar with the lyrics that I don’t stop to listen. I find the lyrics of both those bands very inspirational, so they keep me going.

Scott: Do you have any screenwriting principles that are truly fundamental to you?

Sean: It sounds sort of simple but it’s to just tell a damn good story. That’s all I really want. I mean, I set those challenges but I think that each challenge is to make each story its own sort of unique moment. I don’t really want to write something that people would have experienced before. Because I think I’d like to leave that little stamp, that little corner in at least the history of writing of that, “Ah. Whether or not I liked this particular story of his, it was different”.

Scott: So okay, you’ve won this prestigious Nicholl Fellowship made the jump — literally some 10,000 miles — from South Africa into Hollywood. What advice would you offer to aspiring screenwriters from around the world?

Sean: Well, I’ll answer it in a sort of one and a half type of ways. To anyone reading this who is going to enter the Nicholl, one of the most amazing things about the way the Nicholl is judged is that they don’t…I know some screenwriting competitions take the marketability and the potential for a film to be made as part of the judging criteria, and the Nicholl doesn’t. In the letter Gregg sent out to his readers, I think there’s a line in it somewhere that says, “Imagine that you work for a studio that has an unlimited budget and a guaranteed audience.”

So, if you’re reading a film that you know in your heart could never be made, is the writing still good? Anyone here who wants to enter the Nicholl, I would say write from the deepest depths of your passion and don’t consider, necessarily, if a film could or can’t be made. I think, in this particular day and age, the idea of a film, whether it can or can’t be made, is almost irrelevant with the powers we have in terms of visual effects and things like that.

So, I think it’s to really stick true to yourself. I mean, something I say to my students that, and I know this seems almost like I’m countering what I said a moment ago, but don’t try and be unique. Be yourself, because you and yourself are unique.

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