Interview (Part 1): Byron Hamel

My interview with the 2021 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Byron Hamel wrote the original screenplay “Shade of the Grapefruit Tree” which won a 2021 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Byron about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Byron describes memorable path he took in his life-journey that led him to becoming a writer.

Scott Myers: Welcome, Byron. Great to have you here, and congratulations on the Nicholl.

Byron Hamel: Thank you.

Scott: Let me get started here with some background. Over at Coverfly, this is how you’re described:

“Growing up with a convicted child murderer for a stepfather and living in one of America’s most violent projects, Byron has a high functioning condition of complex PTSD. His writing often a personal journey of healing is darkly poetic, violent, trauma‑informed, and weirdly humorous, while effortlessly folding in hope, optimism, and fantasy elements.”

This is clearly not your typical USC MFA in Screenwriting graduate.

Byron: No. [laughs]

Scott: Can you give us some sense of what it was like growing up? Then, how the storytelling instinct developed and emerged.

Byron: Growing up the way I did, we were always moving. We were always poor until I was an older kid, like dirt poor. For a couple years I lived in the projects in The Guthries in San Bernardino, which was at the time the third most violent city in America. There was an active gang war. The Bloods and Crips were turf warring. Drive-by shootings. Shot at by cops. Nobody believed we’d live past 20. But I used to be part of a kids’ breakfast program where I had to join the choir, which I loved. It was like an all-Black choir, except for me, and we’d sing songs from The Little Mermaid. Just surreal.

When I lived in the projects, I had the best friends I ever had growing up. All my friends were Black. I was like the only White kid my age in my neighborhood. I remember my friends being amazing, even though I was this White geek minority with a crossed eye who loved Weird Al and they were all listening to N.W.A. and Public Enemy. For some reason, my friends fucking loved me there. I was a funny kid. Always joking. My mom wouldn’t allow any of my friends in the house though because they were Black, and she was a racist. I grew up around really heavy racism. I wasn’t allowed in their homes either.

It became important to tell non‑romantic stories about love between people of different races. You’ll see in “Shade of the Grapefruit Tree,” it’s a story about love between me and my landlady, who was a real lady. But she wasn’t Black in real life. That part is fictional.

I changed that because I was trying to write a character who was inspired by my life experience of interracial love, and by some interviews that I was watching with Viola Davis, who’s one of my favorite actresses. She essentially challenged White writers to write better roles for Black women, and I was like “I can do that.” So in all honesty, I wrote that role specifically with her in mind to play it. Not that I’ll have any casting power. And not that she’d necessarily want to play a role written by some White guy she’s never heard of. But if she reads it and loves it, that will be a dream come true for me, just personally, as a fan. Also, it helped a lot in the writing to have a specific person in mind who in reality is mindful, deep and caring, like the real Felicia was.

Scott: As part of the Nicholl-winning experience, you had a chance to have a conversation with Phil Lord who’s awesome.

Byron: He really is.

Scott: He and longtime writing-producing partner Chris Miller. Phil said, “You had a pretty circuitous route to professional screenwriting.” Walk us through that journey.

Byron: I went to acting school, and I studied as an actor under this fascinating man, this Pakistani Canadian director who had the critical brutality of Lee Strasberg, and the love for actor freedom of John Cassavetes. He was an absolute legend in Canadian theater named Arif Hasnain, and he infamously turned down working with amazing talents like Keanu Reeves and Tennessee Williams. We loved him. I’m actually writing a screenplay about that experience too. But I didn’t pursue acting. For whatever reason, I didn’t stick with it. I don’t think I felt I was good enough. Knowing what I know now, I could have been a great naturalistic blue-collar actor, but I didn’t pursue it.

After I left university, I tried to find work with music, and that wasn’t working out very well. I had a comedy band called Ticklish Brother and we almost signed with BMG Ireland, which was a Sony label. That didn’t work out because our manager fell into a depression in the final hour, and I didn’t know enough at the time to take the reins, so we lost that contract. You know music. I couldn’t pay the bills doing bar shows.

Then I got picked up by CBC Radio, which is the biggest radio network in Canada, and that was as a sound technician, but as they started learning about my entertainment skills, they were like, “OK, can you produce for us?” I was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” Then they started training me in journalism, [laughs] and I worked at CBC for 12 years as an associate producer and sound tech. Writing and directing and producing specials, promos, and comedy shorts. And running the live morning show behind the glass. Lots of copywriting and editing too. That’s where I learned to edit, which came in handy for the promotional video business I started on the side.

Scott: So it was acting, music, journalism, but folded in on each other.

Byron: Because of all the songwriting, I was able to tell stories well with music and radio. Because of the intense acting experience, it was easy to direct non‑professional actors in short radio plays. And the journalism I started to like after a while, but not the news. I hate news. I’d be assigned to news stories sometimes and I just dreaded those days. Hanging around politicians. I hate politicians. Almost always pieces of shit. Literally always liars. And not the good kind.

Or covering people grieving over the loss of loved ones. Just terrible. Leave them alone. But I loved human interest and covering artists or fighters. I had lunch once with boxing heavyweight champion George Chuvalo, who I interviewed. He went the distance with Muhammad Ali but lost by split decision. 
 
 I did a story on George and it was really good. Things like that got me interested in stories about real people. That’s when good journalism clicked with good storytelling for me. The idea that I could take a real story and make it into an amazing story.

Scott: When did your creative writing start to emerge?

Byron: I was overcoming a drug problem when I was in my teens. One of the things that I started doing, just to form better habits, was I started songwriting, and I started writing poetry. I wrote over 11,000 poems and songs in that time. I threw all of them away because I was using it to learn how do you write, how do you tell a story, how do you express?

With everything new that I wrote, the thing I wrote before that one was embarrassing. [laughs] It was like I had this pile, stacks and stacks and stacks of handwritten poetry and songs. I threw them all away one day and said, “I can do better.”

I tried to write my first feature film script in 2008, and it was just absolute shit.

I remember I was so proud of it at the time that I wrote it. Then I read it again two weeks later, and I was like, “This really sucks.” I didn’t know why it sucked because I didn’t know anything about story yet. I was still learning. I was mostly writing and producing two-minute jokes for radio at the time. And you really didn’t need powerful stories for short-form comedy.

After radio, I worked in TV doing non‑scripted documentary stuff and didn’t actually start writing movies again until the pandemic hit. It was a business decision that my girlfriend and I made. She’s also my production partner.

I couldn’t afford to make these documentary things anymore because of the insurance for the COVID and other COVID related costs. Also, it became really hard to maintain the access to your characters. Most of the stuff I was producing was low‑budget content for local TV, and I no longer would be making enough money to pay the rent. So my girlfriend Hasty and I decided that I should focus on writing features. That was my next foray into screenwriting.

Scott: You said you wrote your first script in 2008. I’m assuming you had read some scripts or how-to books. How did you educate yourself?

Byron: You know, “The Screenwriter’s Bible?”

Scott: Yeah, sure.

Byron: I read that, and I had to do all the margins and formatting manually back then. I didn’t have Final Draft or anything like that. I can’t remember what I was using, like Courier or something. What is that thing called? I don’t know, some software that’s just basic writing software. I didn’t have screenwriting software when I started.

That first script was a technical exercise. Learning by doing. Formatting has been important to me since I learned a good format was all you really needed to write A-papers in university. But of course, style changes over time. You have to update that as you go. These days, people don’t need fade‑in and fade‑out, for example. The cut‑to stuff is gone for this kind of script too. I’d only use that if I knew that I myself would be shooting it. Even then, that’s not the script I’d give an actor to excite them into wanting to be in the film. I think transitions and shooting directions get in the way of the connection with the reader, for the most part.

Some people do use a lot of technical directions still, but I feel it is a mistake, because it impacts the quality of experience for the reader, who typically doesn’t give a shit about the technical side of things. I worked a lot as an editor for radio, video, and my own TV projects, and that stuff is all subject to change anyway. Leave those aspects of the rhythm to the DP and the editor, because if you have good ones, they’re better at it than you are. And the editor has the music or they are working with a composer. That changes the game. Writers can’t do what editors can do. I’m a writer with rhythm, but still, even if an editor isn’t as rhythmic as me, they’re not gonna follow my script. They’ll have their own ideas. Focus on the story. That’s what the reader is gonna go ape for.
 
 Reading my script should feel like reading a damn good book. If I can eliminate as much distraction from the story as possible, that helps people feel the emotions. It helps them escape into it.

Scott: To your point, I tell my students the same thing. You want to write this script in a way that has the least amount of distractions. You want to engage them so that they’re just sucked into the story. That’s it. They don’t even realize they’re reading a script as much as like you said, a damn good book.

Byron: I’m always looking for the VR experience. I want you to be completely engrossed. If you need to go to the bathroom, I want you to shit yourself before you leave that script. I don’t want you to put my script down.

That’s important to me because I am so easily distracted. I’m like, “Other people must be as easily distracted as me.” They probably aren’t, because I have a reading disability.

Scott: That first script that you wrote in 2008. What genre was that?

Byron: [laughs] Oh, man. It was a strange fantasy comedy about a war in heaven. It was loosely based on if I did a trajectory from The Prophecy and said, “How did all of that fall apart?” You know The Prophecy movie with Christopher Walken? I liked that.

I thought that was an interesting film. I wanted to expand on that idea but make it funny, and it ended up being a trash pile. It was awful. Kevin Smith did it far better, and before me, in Dogma. That first script was one I was glad to throw away.

Scott: A step in the process for you.

Byron: A step in the process. Everyone has to write their first piece of crap and be sad that they wasted the time.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Byron discusses his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Shade of the Grapefruit Tree” and how real-life experiences were the inspiration for writing it.

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.