Interview (Part 1): Daniel Hanna

My interview with the 2021 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Daniel Hanna wrote the original screenplay “Shelter Animal” which won a 2021 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Daniel 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, Daniel discusses how he found his way into screenwriting and filmmaking.

Scott Myers: I did a little Google stalking on your background and I noticed some interesting geographical elements. There’s Canada, Arkansas, Ireland, so maybe we could start there. How did all those pieces fit together as part of your experience growing up?

Daniel Hanna: My parents and all my extended family is Northern Irish. My parents lived there until the late ’70s then moved to Canada, where I was born just outside Toronto, and grew up in Ontario. Every summer or every other summer we’d go back to Ireland. My mom would save up all of her time off, and we’d go for like two months in the summer.

When I was six, my dad got transferred down to Arkansas and I was there all the way through undergrad at University of Arkansas.

Scott: That’s quite a transition, I would think. That’s Toronto to Arkansas. What was that like? You’re six years old. Now you’re in basically the South.

Daniel: What’s funny is I didn’t realize until later how different it was, since I was so young. To me, it was like, “This is kind of similar. Everyone’s still speaking English. The accents aren’t even as extreme as they are going back and forth between Ireland. It’s just hotter and a lot more humid.”

It wasn’t until I got older that the differences became clear to me. We lived in Waterloo, Ontario from when I was two. It’s a smaller city, not like Toronto, but I realized later how many of our friends were immigrants. My parents were from Ireland. My best friend was Japanese. Her grandma only spoke Japanese. My mom’s best friend was German.

I didn’t realize until a few years after being in Arkansas, I was like, “Oh, really, everyone here is from this town, or from Arkansas, or somewhere nearby.” It’s rare that someone’s even from the Northeast or something like that. It is definitely an interesting place. I love Arkansas. It’s got a lot of variety in its own way, despite what people think.

Scott: I’m from the South, born in Texas. I lived in Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina. I understand that there’s a perception of the South, but it’s not a homogeneous at all. It’s very diverse.

I’m suspecting maybe you had a similar experience as myself, as I moved around a lot. That outsider kind of thing, does that at all figure into your mindset as a writer or storyteller?

Daniel: Absolutely. I felt a little like an outsider anywhere I went. Maybe not so much in Canada, but still, my parents weren’t from there. Then we live in Arkansas, but we’re Canadian. And it wasn’t until I moved to California that I felt like I was Southern. It’s this weird thing of playing catch up everywhere you go, you realize, “Wait, I am from the South.” I didn’t really think of it that way because I felt like an outsider there. Now that I’m here, I’m alien to some of these people because I have a little bit of the Southern vibe.

Scott: Eventually, you moved to California for the USC MFA program. Was that for film and TV?

Daniel: Yeah, so film production MFA, which is sort of everything. You can write, direct, produce, cinematography. It’s like a catch all there.

Scott: Did you have that background at University of Arkansas? What was your major there?

Daniel: I’ll take you through that a little bit. I always really loved writing. I wrote a novel when I was a kid, like a 250-page, typed, small font novel. I just got up and did it every day. I thought it was the most fun thing in the world to just create my own stories and do things the way I wanted to do them.

Especially coming from Arkansas, you feel very far away from the cultural centers or whatever you want to call them where people do that kind of thing for a job, even though obviously you can write anywhere. So at the U of A I focused on Economics. I studied Economics and English at first, and then switched to the business school, but I continued taking English classes.

I had a writing mentor, Molly Giles, who is an amazing person who had been nominated for a Pulitzer and won The Flannery O’Connor Award for fiction. She read my stuff after I was no longer in her class and encouraged me to keep writing. She was an aspirational audience, someone who was really talented and I wanted to be able to learn all I could from her.

That was primarily prose fiction, although they did have a screenwriting class there, which was a grad-undergrad combo. All these were as electives because I still just couldn’t quite commit to the idea of I’m going to be trying to make a career as an artist. That seemed far too impractical, but there I was writing and making little films.

I even made a super indie feature with some amazing MFA and undergrad acting students. They had a great acting program there at University of Arkansas. I’d go out for a day and shoot a couple of scenes and then edit them. Then, a couple of weeks later, shoot the next couple of scenes. It’s the kind of thing where you don’t know how big of a job you have ahead of you out of naivete, you’re doing it as you go and then realizing, “Oh, man. That first cut is awful. Now, I have to re-edit the entire thing and sound and music and all that.” Not knowing what I didn’t know kept me going forward with it.

It was through my time there and meeting other people who seemed braver than me because they were going to go to grad school for the arts that made me think, “OK, maybe I’ll do the same thing.” I noticed I was putting all my extracurricular time into making films, writing films, writing short stories, whereas my friends in the business schools were interning in their fields. I realized I wasn’t going to excel at this business thing the way I was going. It’s not actually the “safe choice” if I won’t put the time I need into it. So I decided that I might as well go all-in on this filmmaking thing because that was the only career I was going to put 110% into.

I got into USC grad school somehow, even though I didn’t have an arts background, loaded up my truck and drove out there with everything I owned. I got a little studio in South Central, a mile and a half south of campus, and jumped all in.

Scott: Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but you have that Irish blood, a legacy of storytellers and novelists. It’s almost like fate would have been coursing through your veins to say, “You need to be a storyteller.”

Daniel: I know. It’s funny because there’s not very many artists in my family or extended family, at least, not in a career sense. My dad went to a little school called Portora in Enniskillen, which is a small city in Northern Ireland. It’s like the advanced public school, basically. Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde both went to this little school. Sometimes you can’t help but think maybe there’s just something in the water over there.

Scott: You’ve got editing as a skill set as well. So, director, writer, and editor. I’m assuming going out and making a feature film when you’re a student and an undergraduate, you also got producing in there as well. Cinematography. You’re like the Steven Soderbergh, Robert Rodriguez type of thing, where it’s just I want to do all of it?

Daniel: That’s how I started out. I definitely did everything on my first movies, shooting too. When going to school, I realized, even though it probably wasn’t as pronounced as it seemed at the time, the other students that wanted to do cinematography were so much more knowledgeable, so much more experienced and had put years into that. I felt right out of the gate like I’m behind on this. And I realized that editing was more in line with what I wanted to do because it was more about storytelling to me, telling the whole story versus the pieces of it.

They’re smart about how they do it at USC. Everyone wants to write and direct when they come in, but they encourage us to study a technical skill as well. Editing was my technical skill. It was a great way to make ends meet. That’s what I’ve always done primarily for money is editing.

Scott: You’ve done a lot of documentary work as an editor?

Daniel: I have. That’s one of the best learning experiences, editing documentary. At USC, the advanced project I did was documentary editing. You have to figure out how to make a structure out of the material. You and your editing partner, with a director obviously. I happened to take it the same time I was taking Feature Writing Structure, which is a script analysis class. The two things together merged because I was taking them at the same time and understanding what a story is even if all you have are these disparate documentary pieces that don’t seem to add up a narrative story, but you find that story as you’re going.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Daniel talks about his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Shelter Animal” and he used a real-life experience as inspiration for the script.

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.