Interview (Part 1): Haley Bartels

My interview with the 2021 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Haley Bartels wrote the original screenplay “Pumping Black” which won a 2021 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Haley about her creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to her.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Haley discusses growing up in Northern California and how she found her way into screenwriting.

Scott Myers: You grew up in a wonderful part of California, up north in the wine country. Healdsburg, I believe.

Haley Bartels: Yeah.

Scott: What was that like growing up in that kind of environment? Was that where your interest in storytelling emerged?

Haley: Definitely, yeah. Healdsburg is incredible. Healdsburg is beautiful nine months out of the year, when it’s not fire season. Growing up, I never had fire season. That’s a new development. It’s a beautiful place to grow up, beautiful small town, but when you are under the age of 21, there’s really not that much to do because the primary attraction is wine tasting.

My childhood was mostly reading books, just devouring, devouring, devouring books, and going to the movies. They had this little, tiny, local movie theater that played the big releases, but also played some of the smaller indie films. That was definitely where it began.

Scott: I’ve heard where you’re a die‑hard genre fan, like science fiction and magical realism. Some of those movies that probably came through local movie theater, and books too, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. Were those some of the things you were attracted to?

Haley: 100 percent. Star Wars is the first movie that I can remember watching as a kid. I’ve written about it in my UCLA admissions essay and my AFI admissions essay. Star Wars definitely made an impression on me, and Harry Potter, oh my God, of course.

I was the kid that waited in line, and read the books in a day when they came out, and then reread them over, and over, and over again obsessively until the next one came out. I think I read “Goblet of Fire” 34 times.

Scott: Wow.

Haley: Yeah. And my favorite movies as a kid, and to this day, are Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I watched those over and over as a kid, and I rewatched them probably six or seven times in the pandemic. They’re incredible, and every watch I appreciate them more.

Scott: You went to UCLA, and I believe you were an English major.

Haley: Yeah, B.A. in English.

Scott: Is that creative writing or English lit? What were your focus?

Haley: Just purely English lit. It wasn’t super creative. I did a couple of screenwriting electives. Primarily, it was just reading a ton of books. Actually, my Shakespeare class while I was at UCLA with professor Stephen Dickey made a big impact on my writing. We’ll get into it when we talk about my script, but “Macbeth” is a huge influence. UCLA is where I fell in love with Shakespeare.

Scott: You took a couple of screenwriting classes. That suggested that you had a creative writing interest at that point?

Haley: Definitely. I had been writing creatively prose since high school or maybe probably even before, middle school, grade school. At one point, a teacher assigned a short story as a homework assignment, in maybe seventh grade. I got it back. She was like, “This is really good. You should keep doing this.” That was the first positive affirmation that I got.

Then, I had a friend in high school with whom I would do a short story swap. One of us would come with a prompt one week. We’d each write to that prompt. Then, we would switch the next week. We never did anything with them. It was a fun, little creative muscle to flex.

Scott: It’s interesting how a few words from a teacher could have such an influence. You hear that over and over again. In my interview with writers, it’s like, “Yeah. I remember this grade school teacher, this middle school teacher.”

Haley: In high school, there were two more. There was John Linker who I can’t say enough good things about, and Camille Lehrmann who I also can’t say enough good things about. Both of them encouraged me to keep writing. Teachers are so important.

Scott: In a proper world, we cut our military budget in half and put that right directly to teacher salaries.

Haley: Yeah, oh, my God. Even if we cut it by like 90 percent, I feel like we would still be outspending everybody else. Give it to the teachers, that’d be great.

Scott: You did take some screenwriting classes, but I think that you didn’t go directly to graduate school. You spent a few years kind of doing your own thing.

Haley: Yeah, I graduated from UCLA and thought that I hated Los Angeles. I didn’t, it turns out. I just didn’t really get along with Westwood, and I didn’t like not having a car to go to other places in LA.

I was like, I miss the dirt. “I miss mountains, Gandalf. I want to see mountains again.” So I moved back home, and I worked as a waitress for three years in a fancy pizzeria.

I took a little postgraduate jaunt to Moscow, in Russia, to study at the Moscow Art Theatre, which was very cool, really interesting, strange and intense.

Other than that, yeah, I was just working as a waitress for three years, and always writing on the side. I would get off of my six‑eight hour shift at the restaurant, and I would go to a cafe or a wine bar with my laptop.

I would just bang out a short story. Like before, I wasn’t doing anything with them.

Scott: Not screenwriting at this point. I mean you’re writing short stories.

Haley: Not screenwriting, all prose. Then eventually, I was like, “My soul is corroding with all of this creative energy that I feel like I’m not doing anything with. I’m serving these pizzas to very wealthy people. I don’t know, I just don’t feel fulfilled.”

So I did what any millennial would do. I applied to grad school.

I think I applied to probably eight places, and AFI was the only film program I applied to. They were also the only place that let me in.

Scott: That was fortuitous.

Haley: It was, yeah. It really was. I really thought that I wanted to go to Iowa Writers Workshop, or Columbia, or UT.

Within probably two days of being at AFI, I was like, “Oh, no, this is the thing that I want to do. This is the thing I’m meant to do. These are the people I want to be around. This is the work that I want to be doing.”

Scott: That stint in Moscow, before we get to AFI, were you acting?

Haley: It was a program run through the National Theater Institute in Connecticut. I have a family friend who knows the guy who owns it.

This friend goes, “Hey, you did drama in high school, you like film and theater, you should just go, do this thing.” And I said, “Well, I’m not doing anything else at the moment.” So, I did.

There were some acting classes. There were film classes, Russian language classes. There was ballet, there was movement.

We were going to see the Bolshoi and the opera and all these Russian plays. It was very Russian: six day a week, you’re up at 6:00 AM, so, you can walk to school in the snow and get there by 7:30, so you can practice ballet for half an hour before class starts, so the ballet teacher doesn’t whack you in the back of the knee with a ruler. Very intense.

Scott: Wow.

Haley: Dead of winter too. After that, I was like, “Oh, AFI, piece of cake.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, Haley talks about her experience at the AFI film school and the inspiration for her Nicholl-winning screenplay “Pumping Black.”

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.