Go Into The Story Interview: Spencer Harvey and Lloyd Harvey

My conversation with the Australian-based brother and sister writing duo who won the 2016 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.

Spencer and Lloyd Harvey wrote the original screenplay “Photo Booth” which won a 2016 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with the pair about their background as writers and filmmakers, and their award-winning screenplay.

Scott Myers: You’re a brother and sister writing and directing team. You have your own video company, Harvey House Productions. You’ve made award‑winning short films. I saw “Sorry Baby,” which I thought was great. Now your script, “Photo Booth” is a 2016 Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting winner and just recently, you’ve gotten back from LA, where you celebrated that achievement. Basically, things are going pretty well for you at this point.

Lloyd Harvey: I really think it’s been an interesting year. It really has been.

Spencer Harvey: Highs and lows, but we certainly are grateful for this high point.

Scott: Let’s jump back and learn more about how you got here. You’re working together as a brother and sister team, especially on creative projects where every scene, you have dozens of choices you can make. I’ve worked with writing partners before. Did you always get along when you were young, or is this something which has evolved over time?

Lloyd: We’ve been pretty good sharers for a good long while now. Even starting up our video business together, we learned to work together, share and collaborate…

Spencer: Our 10‑year anniversary is this year actually. It’s just the two of us who work here so we were wondering if we should throw ourselves a 10‑year party anniversary party? [laughs]

Lloyd: Would we invite anyone else?

Spencer: I think we’ve thought of this too late. We could take ourselves out for a nice dinner. But we digress. To your question; we’ve always been good sharers, even as kids. We used to live upstairs from our parents’ art gallery. They worked long, long hours and we would entertain each other.

Lloyd: They were a husband‑and‑wife business partnership, which we learned from, in terms of the do’s and don’ts of business from an early age, what really works particularly in a partnership, and what can be worked on.

That was a big lesson for us. It also showed us from an early age that collaboration can be key and you can really achieve a lot when you find someone that you have a synchronicity with.

Scott: You just have the two of you as far as siblings go?

Spencer: Yes.

Lloyd: No extra brothers or sisters.

Scott: I did find that your father and your mother, Trevor and Skii, they are directors of the Harvey Gallery. That goes a long way in explaining the setting of your script “Photo Booth”, which is in the art world. Did growing up in and around art like that, did that directly influence your path in the filmmaking? If so, how?

Spencer: Almost unconsciously, I’d have to say yes, but we didn’t realize it until much later. I think the obvious influence is that it opened our minds to visual storytelling, paintings, photographs…

Lloyd: Especially photography, we actually started out as photographers when we opened our production company. Our first collaboration was as photographers.

Spencer: So clearly we’re very much inspired by the visual arts. We realized, I think, very quickly that artists come in all different shapes and sizes too. I think that was a nice bonus, coming from that art world understanding.

We knew immediately that we could be our own type of artist, that everyone has their own path. In a lot of ways, I think being around artists, being around art helped us want to be artists ourselves.

Lloyd: I also think it helped us understand that it’s a business too. I think that was interesting from an early age, to see art as a viable career.

I think for us, we saw the dos and the don’ts and the pros and cons of the art world up close and personal. Yeah, maybe it helped us open our mind to the possibility of what that would be for us.

Scott: One thing’s certainly clear. When you read your script, you really do think visually. It has a very cinematic feel to it. Dozens of moments where it really feels like you’ve got this nice combination of writer and director, writer and cinematographer, going on. Does that feel natural to you when you’re writing that way?

Spencer: Absolutely. You obviously know and most writers do know, that screenwriting is writing for a visual medium. I think that is such a gift that as writers we get to receive, because for us, it’s not just our words that are going to be telling the whole story.

We’ve got this entire palate of other people’s skills ‑‑ cinematographers, composers, the actors themselves that are going to bring so much more to it. We always feel that if we can allow for as much of that collaboration as possible on the page, then we open up our door to the possibilities. It can only infuse the story with so much more richness.

Scott: Lloyd, I believe you’ve studied filmmaking.

Lloyd: I did. I did a film degree at the University of Technology Sydney. It’s a Media Arts and Production degree, which was one of our premiere film degrees available at the time in Australia.

We got to do a lot of practical work, touching film, feeding cameras, and being forced to shoot and explore in areas that probably wouldn’t have been our first choice. Forcing us to know all the facets of filmmaking.

Scott: More of a production‑based type of a program.

Lloyd: It definitely was. It was technically a communications degree, so we had that part of it too, but it was very hands‑on with film.

Scott: Spencer, as I understand it, you’ve taken some writing courses.

Spencer: Yes. I went to law school and finished a Law and Psychology degree, but I was writing for myself, for my own joy. I did a playwriting course at NIDA, which is our National Institute of Dramatic Arts. I was a part of their Playwrights Studio.

I can’t even remember the year now, but I did do that. I always feel though, as most writers, particularly ones that live remotely, who aren’t in the hub of screenwriting culture, you learn predominantly from reading.

Scott: I was going to go right into my next question, which was what were some of the resources you used to learn the actual craft of screenwriting?

Spencer: Your blog is a great resource for writers. We are fans…We also have access to podcasts, Scriptnotes, obviously. John and Craig are very popular here in Sydney. But when I’m asked, “What should I do to learn my craft…” I always say, “If you want to write, you need to read.” That’s the main thing for me.

We would read everything we can get our hands on and we found ourselves getting into the habit of reading the “For your consideration” screenplays…

Lloyd: When they would be available for download, yes.

Spencer: …as film releases are often delayed in Australia, we’d often get the script first and then go see the film. That can obviously ruin the movie for you, so we’d pick and choose which ones we did that for. [laughs] But it was always a really interesting exercise to see how that craft was translated.

Scott: It heartens me to hear you say that. As you know from my blog, I keep hammering people to read scripts. I have that little mantra, you know, “Watch movies, read scripts, write pages.” I think people do a pretty good job of watching the movies. If they’re diligent, they’re writing their pages, but the reading scripts part of it, there’s nothing that can possibly replace that if you want to know how to transmit what you see in your head onto the page. Would you agree with that?

Lloyd: 100 percent. Just like language, you learn from listening to the way people talk, and that expands your vocabulary. You learn tricks, tools, and turns of phrases that I think are so important to see on the page.

Spencer: I also think that reading a script in and of itself is a joy. It’s an hour to two hours, depending on how fast you read and you can get a mind’s eye movie experience. You imagine the film and that is such a delight.

A beautifully crafted screenplay, anything the Nolan’s write for instance, is something that I can enjoy in and of itself…I don’t have to see the movie. The way they write is so compelling that I can be content reading the film on paper.

Scott: At the Nicholl ceremony, I saw the video of your presentation there when you spoke. You talked about the scripting process being like a tree or a plant growing, and used that as a metaphor to thank various people that have been participating and supporting you as you’ve grown in your career.

You started with this idea of a story idea as a seed, and how your parents taught you that, “Ideas are worth planting.” I thought that was such a wonderful image, taking that initial seed of the story concept, then tending to it, and digging into the soil of your imagination, and all that. I take it that from just that idea, your parents have been supportive of your creative endeavors.

Spencer: Very much so.

Lloyd: They definitely have, and I think that being champions for the arts themselves, as gallerists, they see how hard artists work and the value in what they do. They had nothing but love and support for us when we chose to venture down this path.

Spencer: Our mother is also a musician and singer/songwriter, so she has always followed her passion.

In fact, when I was doing my law degree, I kept complaining that it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, that “I want to be a writer. I want to be a writer.” My mum is the voice I remember saying, “Well, drop out of Uni. Get a bar job and just write.” I was the one saying, “No, I should finish what I’ve started.” I’ve always thought it was an interesting role reversal.

Scott: Sounds like you’ve got a great familial dynamic. Let’s use that as a segue to get into your script “Photo Booth” because the parents in that story don’t seem to be cut from the same cloth as your parents. There’s a lot of problematic parent‑child relationships and it’s a very deep dive into the theme of being a mother, motherhood. Plot summary ‑‑ this is from The Nicholl ‑‑ for the script “Photo Booth”:

“A successful performance artist decides to adopt the unborn baby from her husband’s one night stand.”

This script is a complex, tightly‑woven drama, with multiple relationships and subplots, characters struggling to find their way in this morally gray story universe. Let me start with a quote from Spencer from an article I found.

Spencer said about this process, “The important part for us was not to judge the choices of our characters, but to allow them to live honestly and fully in the world of the story.” Could you unpack that a bit more, in relation to the process and the approach you took in writing “Photo Booth”?

Spencer: Absolutely. It’s interesting. As soon as you start to give a character life, you have to give them flaws, or you allow them to have flaws rather — and you’ve got to let those flaws be a part of the way in which they communicate and the way in which they see the world.

I think a lot of early mistakes any writer can make with their character is to try and protect them from their flaws and make them insufferably lovable and therefore inherently dishonest or unrelateable.

In “Photo Booth” it was important for us to allow our characters to be seen fully and to allow those flaws to be a part of what enriched them and made them human. Made them like us.

And particularly, when telling a story about motherhood, we felt we had to add to — not just continue the same conversation. There are incredible stories of motherhood, where the mother is a Madonna like figure, where the mother is sanctified, the mother is all‑knowing, the mother is all‑capable, and is always doing the right thing for the right reasons.

But that’s not what we always see in the world. We wanted to be really, really honest about how, sometimes, motherhood can be a compromise; can be greedy; can be tainted; can be…

Lloyd: Messy.

Spencer: …Can be messy. That was definitely a big part of our character’s journey.

Scott: Interesting you use that phrase, “allow the characters to be seen,” because that’s literally in the scene description, a couple of times in the script as I recall. This person could finally see this other person. It’s almost like masks sort of fall away.

Spencer: You know that moment in a film where a character gets that look in their eye — when they’re finally seeing themselves, or someone in front of them.

You can’t really describe it, other than to say that they’re finally seeing ‘something’, and here the word “seeing” takes on the meaning of insightful rather than just plain sight. It’s that moment the actor brings, when they gloss over in their eye…

Lloyd: …and the veil falls.

Scott: Let’s talk about the characters. I’d like to go through the key ones and get your impressions of them. The central character in the story is Jean. She’s the successful performance artist. Could you give us a thumbnail sketch of who she is and talk about some of these flaws and issues that she’s confronting in the story?

Lloyd: Jean is a powerhouse, above everything else. She knows what she wants. She’s a strong, visceral artist. Where people find her a little tough is that she’s also quite unwavering, but we always feel that she is very fair. At the core of her being, she’s a fair player in her game, in her story.

Being a strong, successful woman who chose or didn’t have the opportunity to have children at a time when most women seem to, or are told that they should have children…well it is hard for a lot of people to understand or even find that likable. Which is funny to us, it’s a cultural hurdle we still haven’t jumped over and we really need to examine why. We love Jean and we admire her. We think that same sentiment should be given to women who own their choices across the board.

Scott: Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s very obvious in reading the script. Jean’s character does some rather, even cruel things, says some things from time to time, that you weren’t hung up on this whole “screenwriting guru,” thing, or conventional wisdom, that you need to have a sympathetic protagonist.

“No, we’re going with this idea of this deeply flawed woman who is a powerhouse,” as you say, and has got, obviously, a lot of good qualities to her. Let’s get into the issue of her mother, Eileen. Jean has got this backstory where her mother, Eileen, was an alcoholic, to the point that Jean actually went to live with her grandmother.

Could you, maybe, talk about Eileen’s character? She is not in the story until later on. I don’t know if it’s OK to say that she re‑enters the story at some point. What do you think the impact, the key elements, dynamics that arose from this, I guess you’d say dysfunctional relationship with her mother?

Spencer: Eileen is also a mother in our exploration of motherhood. She’s another perspective on that. For us, her flaws have birthed a lot of Jean’s flaws, which is often the case in parenting. We are a bi-product of where we come from, intentionally or not.

Eileen, again, intentionally or otherwise, and I say that because I don’t think mothers ever go out intentionally to cause harm to their offspring, but I think in raising children, we can not protect them from ourselves. Through our cracks and flaws, I guess, if you think of it in a ceramic sense, [laughs] we bake them in. She’s definitely the key character to Jean’s story in that respect.

Lloyd: In her art as well.

Spencer: And in her art, yes. She inspires her art. It’s through our understanding of Eileen and Eileen’s story that we empathize and see Jean’s art more clearly.

Scott: Early on, Jean’s voice is recorded saying this: “Just before my eighth birthday, I read in a book that indigenous elders believed that when their photo was taken, it took with it a piece of their soul.”

I should say that they had the one day that they would spend with Eileen was her birthday, and they would go and get a picture taken in those little photo booths.

Jean says in this voiceover, “After that, I dreaded my birthday and the one day that I’d spend with my mother. I hated smiling just right, dressing just so, and sitting still at the right moment for that a flash to come and suck a piece of my soul away.”

What was the inspiration for that photo booth thing? How did that emerge as a thematic touchstone for the story?

Lloyd: It’s a big part of it.

Spencer: Yeah, it’s definitely the keystone. The artwork was born out of that story. It wasn’t the other way around. Eileen, apart from Jean, was one of our very first characters. We had this beautiful painting of a woman that we found in…

Lloyd: It was one of the original stimulus images we used.

Spencer: It was of a woman on profile. There was just something very interesting and captivating about her.

Lloyd: She’s an interesting, working‑class woman with a very interesting face. Not the type of face you would traditionally paint if you were to talk in terms of classical portraiture.

Spencer: Yeah, it felt very incidental. It felt like she was getting her photo taken in a photo booth, from the side anyway. That was a big inspiration for us, this particular painting, this Eileen woman, and this idea that these two would go get their photograph taken in a photo booth together to record almost a false memory of happiness and togetherness.

This idea inspired the artwork. We wanted the artwork to reflect this relationship, because that was the foundation of the problem, I suppose, that Jean needed to confront in herself. A lot of this drama around the story occurs around this photo booth artwork.

Scott: I was thinking about that because there’s a series of performance art pieces. I want to talk to you about those later on, but the one, the photo booth, does seem to be the one most specifically tied to Eileen, literally, historically, because of these birthday events.

She would on the one hand say, “I hated this,” and this idea that “a little piece of my soul would get sucked away whenever these photographs get taken,” and yet she got this performance art piece where she’s still and invites these strangers to come and take photographs of her, one after one after another.

I was thinking, OK. What’s the motivation there? If she dreads the whole photo booth thing, why does she do this? Is it to overcome that dread? Is it to defy her mother? Is it inviting strangers to photograph her?

Is she both revealing something about herself or also, at the same time looking for something within herself, or all of the above? What’s your take on why she, Jean, does that particular performance art piece?

Spencer: This comes down to the theme of legacy and this question of what makes our life worth something. For her, giving away a piece of her soul to these people, this idea of giving herself away in her art, was the way in which she posed this question, “What was she worth?”

Lloyd: Do all these pieces matter?

Spencer: Yes. She gave away parts of herself. Was it for a purpose? When we give of ourselves, are we in some way imparting something good or making an impact on others in a way that gives our lives some sort of meaning? For us, I think the Photo Booth in particular, was…I don’t want to say therapeutic, but what’s the word for it?

All of her art in some way deals with her past or her relationships, and they’re a way in which she explores or navigates her own experience of the world.

Lloyd: Yes. She does that through endurance. That’s a big part of her work as a whole. All of her works are endurance performance. It’s about her having to sit through something or having to endure something in one way or another.

Spencer: I guess in that way she has to confront that pain.

Lloyd: Yes.

Spencer: In a lot of ways I think…

Lloyd: She forces herself to see the truth of it.

Scott: I picked up something that’s probably along the lines of what you’re saying. It struck me, because I know you said that basically all of the performance art pieces are tied to her experiences with her mother, not just the photo booth.

I was wondering whether that photo booth experience…You said it. It’s like a performance. It’s like she had to put on a smile for her mom. Then all of these art pieces in a way, either consciously or unconsciously are somehow recreating something similar. It’s like an echo, if you will, from the past. Is that fair to say?

Lloyd: 100 percent, yeah.

Spencer: That’s better than the way we said it.

Lloyd: Yeah. Use that. That’s good.

Scott: Let’s talk about Ben, who’s Jean’s husband, who himself is an artist, but a very different kind and at a different station in terms of the way that he’s perceived amongst the art culture. How would you describe his character?

Lloyd: Ben is interesting. Ben is beautifully flawed as a man.

Spencer: He comes from a family or from a father who is the epitome of success. His father is a very successful landscape painter and Ben’s gone and married a woman who also is, or who has become a great success. He is a man dwarfed by…

Lloyd: He’s a thorn between these two roses in a sense.

Spencer: He’s dwarfed by these great, successful people and he can’t quite measure up to that.

Scott: Yes, and that’s quite a shadow. We should talk about his father. You really can’t understand Ben unless you place him in the context of both of his parents. Susan, his mom, who you describe in one interaction as “waspish and curt,” which really pretty much gets at the core of her character.

Jeffrey, this famous landscape artist…Ben makes this decision not to paint landscapes, but to paint portraits. He even specifically talks about this at some point, that he’s made this pivot, I would think, to try and get out from under the shadow of his father.

Yet, isn’t it true that he’s still tethered to him? If he’s chosen to do portraits, that’s in response to his father doing landscapes, so he’s not really free of his father’s fame at all, is he?

Spencer: No, and he never will be. I think that’s his hamster wheel.

Lloyd: Yeah. He’s stuck.

Scott: Then there’s Millie, who really, of the triangle between Jean and Ben, she’s the third part of that. A young woman with whom Ben says to have had a one‑night affair. Now she’s pregnant, as it turns out, with Ben’s child. How would you describe what’s going on with Millie in the story?

Lloyd: When we first meet Millie, she’s at the end of her rope. I guess financially and emotionally, she’s in a very complicated relationship with her family.

Spencer: Particularly her mother.

Lloyd: Particularly her mother. All of which we don’t find out until her story unravels a little bit more. We’re very much meeting a woman at rock bottom, who in that moment discovers she’s also pregnant.

Right from the beginning, she’s in a state of reaction to all of this. I guess that spurs her into this situation with Ben and Jean, and her options become a little bit slim to a certain degree. When they make an agreement or arrangement, I guess from her point of view, it seems a lot better than her alternatives.

Scott: Yeah. By the end of what we refer to as Act One… in Hollywood, somewhere along the line, I learned this thing ‑‑ I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I’ve always acted on it ‑‑ that you’re allowed one coincidence per story. Anything more of that smacks of writer’s convenience. If you’re going to do a coincidence, make it a good one.

You’ve got a good one, which is that Ben and Jean have got a woman who’s going to give up her baby. That’s when we start the movie. They’ve already made this arrangement. They’re going to adopt this baby. Then she backs out.

Just around the same time, Millie gets in touch with Ben and says, “I’m pregnant.” That’s the coincidence. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just like if you’re going to do it, do it big.

Spencer: Do it upfront. [laughs]

Scott: Do it upfront. Exactly. Do it upfront. It seems like almost, in a way, fate. I think that’s how Ben sort of takes it. Then they do have this arrangement where they invite her in to live with Ben and Jean and provide her money ‑‑ of course that would make sense they would do that to make sure she’s healthy and all that ‑‑ if she’ll agree to give up the baby.

Talk about the chronology of these characters. First was Jean and then Eileen. Is that right, in terms of emerging from your creative imagination? Were those the first two characters?

Spencer: They were the first two characters.

Lloyd: Yes.

Scott: Who was next? Was it Millie or Ben?

Lloyd: It definitely would have been Ben. It was about the nexus of this relationship between these two characters, the husband and wife. The element of the affair and the child actually came a little bit further into the process for us, which was is a funny thing, considering it is now the part that defines it. [laughs]

It was originally more a Ben‑and‑Jean relationship study, then we decided that…I think it was Spencer who came up with the idea of bringing in the child, the adopting the unborn child element that brought in this Millie character, and suddenly, all the pieces shifted and came together. It really became about the relationship of these three characters at that point.

Scott: It makes it so much more combustible because Ben cannot hide his, I guess you could say, rather lustful feelings toward Millie. Then there is an interesting twist that goes on with Jean, where at first she’s rather cold toward Millie, even hostile to her.

Then there’s a really interesting sequence where the two women bond. It feels like, in that short period of time, you’re touching on something that goes directly back to Jean’s relationship, or lack thereof, with Eileen.

Jean gets to act like the surrogate mother for Millie and gets to be the kind of mother she, Jean, wishes she herself could have had. Is that a fair representation of what goes on there?

Spencer: Absolutely. You definitely get a sense that these two, in this period of their lives, are giving each other something that they both need. Someone who “needs to be a mother” meets someone who “needs to be mothered”.

Scott: This is a very clean setup and you’ve got this mix of people, so that in the middle of the story, you’ve got all these little subplot relationships bouncing into each other.

You’ve got Millie living with Jean and Ben. You’ve got Ben with his lustful approaches toward Millie, even though he is trying to restrain himself for the most part. You’ve got Millie curious about the art these two people are doing. She reaches out to both of them to visit each of their respective creative worlds.

You’ve got Jean’s developing relationship with Millie. You’ve got Eileen who re‑enters Jean’s life. As it turns out, she is now sober and basically wants to reconnect with her daughter. How tricky was it for you managing all those subplot relationships, juggling all those different balls in the air, during Act Two especially?

Spencer: It’s always tricky.

Lloyd: Definitely, particularly when we’re navigating whose story we’re telling. That’s what we had to keep coming back to. “Whose story is this? What’s the most important information? Whose mouth do we put it in?” Answering these questions is how we understood where the subplots would come together.

Scott: Let’s talk about these performance art pieces. I thought that was fascinating. I’m going to list them here. There is the photo booth.

There is the mirror. There’s the screen. The tempest. The table. The preacher, which I guess was an early one on videotape, where she drinking a shot of vodka every time the bell would ring and videotaping her performance.

The eye test, the screen part two, and then the photo booth thing. First of all, when did the idea come about, “Hey, let’s come up with a bunch of these and use them as a narrative device?”

Lloyd: We knew we would have to come up with them at some point, because if we were to be fortunate enough to make the movie, these pieces would have to exist in a retrospective exhibition.

Spencer: It was actually after the first draft.

Lloyd: Yeah, after the first draft.

Spencer: We finished the first draft, and we went, “We want to punctuate things.” Lloyd’s idea, he said we should punctuate the scenes with these artworks, so we can get a sense of what she’s feeling without having to say it.

We can show it in this interesting way, in a way that’s specific to performance art. We’ve got this gift of the performance art medium. We should use it in a unique way.

Lloyd: As part of the visual storytelling.

Scott: That’s really smart, because I tell my students all the time, movies are primarily…It’s an externalized reality. In a novel, you can go inside a person’s head for 20 pages. You can’t do that in a script, so you need to figure out ways to visualize, either through dialogue or action, what’s going on inside. You’re right. Performance art. That’s perfect.

Lloyd: We were wondering why we didn’t use it in the first draft, really. [laughs] “Why did we not start with this?” Luckily we…

Spencer: We cottoned on.

Scott: Let me ask you a question. It struck me that, at least a few of these, they almost serve like chapter headings. “The Tempest” sets up when the mother re‑enters Jean’s life. “The Preacher, Part Two,” on page 80, caps off Eileen’s relapse, her relapse into drinking. Were you thinking about that at all?

Spencer: When you are ready with your first draft, you’re putting it in after having a full draft ready to go, you can feel instinctively where those chapters fall. You know what they should be. It’s a beautiful…What do you call it? Bird’s‑eye view you can utilize. “Here’s where we need it. Here is the breath. Here’s another breath.”

Scott: I read so many scripts and oftentimes, you can tell where thing are going pretty early on. One thing that’s really great about your script is the twists and turns with the characters. Even in the final act, I really had no idea where things were going to turn out.

Yet, the way that they do turn out, while I guess you could say rather melancholy in a way, or squarely in that arena of the gray nature of existence, the resolutions each feel…As you said, Spencer, you allowed them to live honestly, these characters, and fully in the world of the story. That must feel quite satisfying to you.

I think you’ve said it took you three years to write this script, but by the time you got done with it, it feels like all the…This iteration of the story feels quite complete. Does it feel satisfying to you?

Spencer: Thank you.

Lloyd: That is a lovely compliment.

Spencer: A lovely compliment. It does. A lot of it was about homing our story down to the thing we wanted to say. I was wrong in saying that, the thing we wanted these characters to say or these characters needed to say.

Because we were allowing them to live fully, we wanted them to realize, in a succinct way exactly why these three people needed to meet, what they needed to learn from each other…

Scott: And what they needed to take away at the end.

Spencer: Once we got that nice and clear, it really did feel complete for us.

Scott: That final image, the last thing. How far into the process was it that you came up with that? The very, very last scene?

Lloyd: That has been there from draft one, the very last scene is identical, minus a few tweaks, from its first incarnation.

Spencer: We’ve re‑rewritten a lot in the script, but the first scene and the last scene have survived pretty much unchanged.

Scott: You knew the broad parameters of her arc, if you will, from the very beginning.

Spencer: That felt like the most honest start and end for her. What she needed and what she wanted were two different things. The film couldn’t address all of it without it feeling too convenient. We felt like we needed to make sure she got what she needed first, and that’s what we did — she has the rest of her life, after the fade to black, to work on the rest.

Lloyd: Yes, we see the end as hopeful for Jean as a character.

Scott: Absolutely. It feels like it’s the start of a new story. A new chapter, really. Three years to write the script. Is that right?

Lloyd: On and off. We’d get to the end of a draft, put it away in drawer thinking it was done, and then we’d look at it a month or two later and realize how much work it needed. We had a lot of trusted readers and friends who were happy to read it for the second, third, or fourth time. Over the course of the three years, somehow we got to this version of this draft.

Scott: In the Nicholl Ceremony, you mentioned a writer’s group. Are you participants of a writer’s group?

Lloyd: We do have a writer’s group. We were on hiatus for a little bit, particularly while we were away, but we just started up again two weeks ago, which has been really, really nice. We have a group of actors, playwrights, screenwriters, lots of people from different writing mediums and it’s open to drop ins. It’s a really nice safe space where we can show fresh, timid pages.

Spencer: Show unfinished work without judgment, with everyone understanding that it is not finished.

Lloyd: We wrote the whole first draft of Photo Booth within our writer’s group. We had 20 pages a week to present, then we’d go away, tweak, take it back, and bring the next 20. That really helped us meet our personal goal to get the script done in a certain amount of time.

Scott: That structure, that accountability, there is nothing that beats it. Then you submit it to the Nicholl. What happens after that?

Spencer: The first time or the most recent time?

Scott: There’s more than one time?

Spencer: We took our very first draft to the Nicholl.

Lloyd: With a little bit of courage.

Spencer: Which, if we read back…

Lloyd: It wasn’t so bad. It just wasn’t as tight and specific as this draft. It did OK. It got into the semifinals, and got some good feedback from the reader’s comments, which we really appreciated. It helped us make the next draft stronger. Then we submitted it for 2016…

Spencer: We were very ready this time.

Lloyd: The script was ready. We were also not expecting anything at that stage, knowing that any fellowship like this is a very subjective process, even though the Nicholl as a competition is exemplary in the way that it safeguards against bias, but reading someone’s writing is always going to be a human experience. You don’t know what reader you’re going to get and that’s just a part of it.

We were very fortunate that we had a lot of support behind Photo Booth this year, and it made a really big difference to us.

Scott: I think you were on location somewhere, Lloyd, and you were in your car with your parents, Spencer, and some sort of Skype calls. What happened? How did you find out?

Lloyd: Skype. Yes, we weren’t together, we weren’t even in the same country. I was in New Zealand. We were both heading over there for our Grandma’s 90th birthday.

I had gotten there a little bit earlier and Spencer, along with our parents, were on their way to the airport. It made sense for me to be in front of the computer to take the call.

It was very nerve‑wracking, particularly to wake up early and sit there in front of my computer just waiting. Spencer was on the other side of it, watching it live‑streamed on Facebook, so it was completely out of her control too. [laughs]

Scott: Sort of a metaphor for a screenwriter’s life.

[laughter]

Scott: The experience in L.A.?

Lloyd: It was fantastic.

Spencer: We’ve been visiting for the last five years for different reasons, with different projects. We’ve had no representation, very little help apart from a few special friends who have always championed us, and who would helped us get things into a few hands here and there. But this was a completely new experience.

Lloyd: It was an L.A. we had never seen before.

Spencer: Yes. Suddenly, people were calling us. Suddenly, we had choices. People were taking the time with us to talk about what we were looking to do with our career. We had help.

Lloyd: We had representatives. We had people who wanted to read it and potentially make it. It started some amazing and life‑changing conversations for us that we did not expect to happen at the end of 2016 at all.

Scott: You signed with UTA and the Gotham Group?

Lloyd: We did, yes.

Scott: What is the status on the script?

Spencer: At this stage, I don’t know how much we are allowed to announce officially, but we have a producer who is optioning it at the moment. We should be going into the next stage with her in January.

Scott: Great to hear. Well, very exciting. Again, congratulations on that. Thanks for walking us through your script. I hope people can find a copy of it, because it’s a terrific read. Let’s jump to craft questions here starting with this: How do you come up with story ideas?

Lloyd: We do a lot of walking. Being the two of us, we can talk a lot, which I know is a real blessing in having a writing partner, having someone on the other side to answer your internal questions and validate your ideas.

Spencer: There are lots of different types of thinkers out there. I particularly am a talker/thinker. When I talk, I think better. Sometimes, at the beginning of a sentence, I have no ideas where I’m going with it, and by the end, I’ve figured it out. I like to jump in, I don’t necessarily go into a sentence with clarity. I think talking really, really helps me in particular.

Scott: You land on an idea, and now you’re going to do some prep work on it. What types of things do you do in terms of story prep?

Spencer: We do a lot of visual boards.

Lloyd: We also work with mood reels, particularly as we are drafting, to really get a sense of how the story sounds and how the story feels.

Spencer: Tone is so important to us. If you can make sure you have something, a peg to pop in the dirt there to say, “This is my tone,” then as you naturally veer away from it at certain times, you can go back to that peg, whether it be the mood reel or a look-book. You can go, “That’s the tone,” and remove things that don’t fit.

Scott: How do you go about developing your characters, getting to know them so they reveal themselves?

Spencer: Talking, taking, talking. And these visual representations. Collages. Collections of photographs, paintings, even music, especially music.

Scott: Seeing is believing. You visualize them and all of a sudden, you start to hear their voices come alive?

Spencer: Exactly.

Lloyd: That’s a big help for us.

Spencer: Like the painting of the woman who inspired Eileen. We could hear her voice speaking out of the painting.

Scott: Do you subscribe to the practice of going to outline or no?

Lloyd: Not exactly, not always.

Spencer: We have quite broad outlines, generally.

Lloyd: We definitely don’t start typing until we really know where it’s going to go, at least a good chunk.

Spencer: I feel like having a beginning and an end really helps. Then you figure out a way to get there. [laughs] Sometimes, you have markers along the way. “Act One needs to shift on this point, the midpoint around here, Act Three around here.”

Lloyd: That being said, we’ve just been working on a pilot where we used cards for the first time. Doing scene cards for every scene, committing to that practice to see how we would go with it, and we enjoyed it.

Spencer: Yeah. I have no idea what it would be like for a feature — that has to conclude, but for a pilot, it was nice.

Scott: It was a one‑hour drama?

Lloyd: Yeah, one hour drama.

Scott: So you use note cards to break your story?

Lloyd: We have now.

Spencer: It was helpful, when you’re sitting down and doing the grunt work of writing out the guts of a scene, to not have to wonder what’s coming next. You already have an idea of that, so you can move straight into it.

Scott: Speaking of scenes, what do you think about when you’re writing a scene? What are your goals?

Spencer: For something to happen.

[laughter]

Lloyd: And hopefully something unexpected. [laughs]

Spencer: In a way that’s interesting. When you’re writing a scene, you need to know what you are trying to achieve. And you ask yourself, “What is the most interesting way that I could achieve that?”

Scott: I’d like to talk about your approach to scene description, because it’s quite entertaining, compelling to read, and flies against that screenwriting guru convention of these unfilmables. You do some commentary from time to time. It’s like the narrator almost dropping in and providing some insight as to the mood or the tone of the moment.

Does that feel pretty natural to you? Are you aware of being judicious about doing that? We’re not writing a novel. It is an externalized reality but you feel comfortable. You understand what I’m talking about, right?

Spencer: Yes.

Scott: Could you talk a little bit about that?

Spencer: We love that. [laughs] I don’t know if that’s just us, but we love it. I love reading that in other people’s work as well because that’s when it reminds me that I’m watching a movie. There is going to be another voice there. That is the voice of the filmmakers.

Lloyd: The actors, the musicians. All of these pieces.

Spencer: All of these other pieces and it reminds us that there’s a greater goal. There’s something more than just, “He picks up his hat and puts it down on the table.” There’s something more to it. There’s a greater purpose to any of those minor actions. I think sometimes hearing that filmmaker’s voice can assist the tone.

Lloyd: Throughout our drafting process, we do a lot of table reads with other writers and actor friends. That, for me, really helps to see when it needs more flavor, or less, or where to lean into the scene direction, to give weight to a scene or not.

Just because when you’re hearing it out loud and you’re watching people engage with it as a listener, that seems to help me see it.

Scott: That’s a really good note. I always tell people, “Just try it.” Then, people will read it and if it’s too much, you can pull it out.

Lloyd: You see that moment when people just start to disconnect because they’ve stopped listening. “OK, it’s too long now. We need to pull this back.” [laughs]

Scott: You think so cinematically. There’s a description, “Ben hangs back a minute. He looks small in such a large room,” which is a great way of framing what this guy’s life is like. Setups and payoffs, or callbacks, you got so many great ones in there.

You got a setup with an elephant. You got a thing with someone in a bathtub, water. I won’t get into it, but you’ve got so many of these wonderful setups and payoffs. How cognizant are you of that when you’re in the process of writing?

Spencer: Sometimes very much so, and other times, not at all. Actually, I remember, Michael Arndt, I don’t know if it was a podcast, or a speech, or something that I had read, but he’d spoken at a function and he was talking about the scene in Little Miss Sunshine, when the police pull the car over…

Scott: Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah.

Spencer: I feel like he described it best when he said, “The solution to his problem in how to get his characters out of the scene was inside the car,” as in, it had already been written. It was already in his movie somewhere. He didn’t need to reach outside of it.

Scott: Here’s what you have.

Spencer: Yeah, and I feel like that’s such a great way to explain what I want to say, which is, you get to a moment in your story and you look back. Sometimes you don’t even need to look back. Sometimes instinct just steps in and you know what you need to pull from. You know this is, a reprise of the “elephant” or a reprise of the “bathroom incident”.

Lloyd: The elephant being an interesting one, because I don’t think we had ever intended that to be as pivotal as it ended up becoming. We even found that it kind of back‑played a lot more than we expected too. It started out as a prop and quickly became a weighted vehicle throughout the rest of the draft.

Spencer: Kind of became a symbol for the whole thing. Pun intended.

Scott: The elephant in the room.

[laughter]

Spencer: Exactly!

[laughter]

Scott: Of course, that can happen too, the other way, where you’re writing along, all of a sudden, you hit on something great and you go, “Oh, wow! I can set that up, back 50 pages ago. That’ll be a great payoff here.”

Spencer: Yeah, that happens a little less often to us. I don’t know why. I wish that would happen more often.

Scott: A couple more questions. Perfect world, 10 years from now, what are you two doing?

Spencer: We hope to be making the films that we’re writing with love and support around us, with people that we enjoy collaborating with. That would just be…

Lloyd: That would definitely be the dream.

Spencer: …A dream come true.

Scott: Writing and directing?

Spencer: Yes.

Lloyd: Writing and directing, yes. We have a few other feature scripts we love that we’ve been redrafting and we continue to keep redrafting and we hope they…

Spencer: Become films after Photo Booth, if we’re lucky enough to…

Lloyd: …make “Photo Booth” which is the goal.

Scott: Let me end with this question. I’m sure you’ll start to be asked this much more as you move along in your career. What advice do you offer aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into the business?

Spencer: I’m worried I’m going to give you some clichÈs.

[laughter]

Spencer: Ok, so I think, if you want to write, read a lot. Give yourself permission to make mistakes with people you trust, and make them often because that is the only way you learn.

Scott: Lloyd, you have anything to add?

Lloyd: If I was to add anything, and maybe this is kind of timely, I’d say give yourself permission to enjoy the small wins along the way.

Spencer: That’s a good one.

Lloyd: We make it a practice within our creating, our writing, and our making, that whenever we achieve a small thing…It could be just cracking a scene that was tough to crack, or it could be a really nice response from someone who’s read something of ours. Whatever it is, we make an effort to enjoy the win in that.

Scott: That’s actually really great advice because those victories, even the small ones, they’re sometimes hard to come by when you’re working in this business, so be sure to celebrate.

Lloyd: Yeah, and whatever a victory means to you, that’s all that needs to be.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. Take yourself out for a margarita.

Scott: Have you seen that video with Kiwi Smith and Karen McCullah that they did for the Academy? Have you seen that video?

Spencer: Yes, we love them! Where they write by the pool and have margarita Fridays?

Scott: By the pool, right. [laughs]

Lloyd: They’re amazing. We think that is a very fantastic way to celebrate Friday. [laughs] Kirsten Smith was actually on this years Nicholl Committee…

Spencer: …that’s right she was. We’d love to have a margarita with those ladies one Friday.

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