Interview (Part 2): Harris McCabe

Interview (Part 2): Harris McCab

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Harris McCabe wrote the original screenplay “Nat Cady’s Boys” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Harris about his creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 2 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Harris discusses his Nicholl-winning script and the inspiration for writing a Western.

Scott: I’d like to talk about the script. Fresh off reading it, so it’s right there in my mind. Terrific read. Here’s a logline just for folks to consider, “Two young boys seek bloody vengeance on the posse that hung their outlaw father in 1882 Wyoming.”

You’d been cogitating about this for a while. What was the original inspiration? Can you remember way back when you got that into your mind?

Harris: I don’t remember when it was, but it was many years ago. I had this image of these two little boys looming over somebody much bigger than them and deciding to beat him to death. I don’t know where the visual came from, but I had this very distinct image in my head, and I thought, “Oh, what can I do with that?”

So I came up with this idea of the misdirect of the Clint Eastwood-style, lone rider cowboy getting lulled into a false sense of security by these two little boys and then ambushed. I wrote the scene out. It was three pages long. And it was more or less exactly like it is in the script. I haven’t changed that a lot since the time I wrote it out.

I didn’t know what to do with it because I didn’t have a story. This almost never happens. Usually, when I come up with a script idea, it’s because there’s an interesting character, or there’s an interesting scenario, or best of all, there’s an interesting character in an interesting scenario, and I have this idea that I want to explore.

This was just its own little thing. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I literally just put it on my big pile of ideas. It sat there for years. Every once in a while, I would pick it up and be like, “Who could these kids be? Why would they be killing this guy?”

Eventually, over time, I fleshed out a very barebones treatment. These kids are seeking revenge. Who would kids seek revenge on? Well, probably somebody who hurt one of their parents. Their mother? It’d be more interesting if it was their father. It would be more interesting still if they had a conflicted relationship with him. Oh, OK, now I’ve got something. That’s when I got excited about it. Up until then, it was just ideas that I was kicking around.

The theme that I was exploring was this idea of, as you get to a certain age you start to realize that the people who raised you weren’t necessarily right about everything. That your parents were flawed people just like everyone else, and that maybe not everything they taught you was true.

You start to develop your own more nuanced worldview based on how you were raised, but also based on the experiences you have growing up, the other people that come into your life, and the other mentors you have. It’s something I felt really strongly about, I was excited about writing it, and it’s also a very universal thing that we all go through.

Then it all clicked into place what the story was going to be. Still, it probably sat there for another year before I decided to do the script a month thing, and then it was the first thing in my mind.

Because as excited as I was to write it, the producer in me said: “Children, horses, gunfights, period piece…”

Scott: Well, at least it’s in a really marketable genre like a Western that everyone’s clamoring for.

[laughter]

McCabe: I thought, “There’s no way this will ever get made.” The idea of doing it in a month was like, “OK, I can get this out of my system in a month and then I never have to think about it again. If it turns out OK, it’ll be a good writing sample.”

I never would’ve written it for any other reason because I didn’t think it was a very sellable product.

Scott: You had passion for it.

McCabe: I did. That’s an important lesson, too. I’ve definitely tried to write things that I thought were marketable that I wasn’t passionate about, and those were a lot of the scripts that I got to the end and was like, “This is crap and I will never see this again.”

“Nat Cady’s Boys” I was excited about. Technically, I went a little over. I think I wrote the first draft in five weeks. It is a long script, so I give myself a break there. It was one of the easiest first drafts I’ve ever written and one of the ones that when I got to the end, I was like, “This is already in pretty good shape. It’s pretty strong.”

Scott: You mentioned this theme about children coming to understand that their parents are flawed. They’re not necessarily these demagogues that maybe we think they are when we’re two, three years old.

That really plays throughout whole script at a larger level. It’s a very morally complicated universe. It’s pretty nuanced. This is that. It reminds you of “True Grit” in a way because of the going after, the revenge, and that sort of thing.

That was a pretty pure thing. Her father was an innocent guy who got whacked by somebody, and she’s going after him. This is not that. Could you maybe unpack a bit for us? These two brothers, talk about their personalities. They both go on that are together for most of the movie parallel journeys, but they each have their own arc, you could say.

Maybe could you talk about Heck, Cady was 12, and Cole Cady was eight. Give me your impression of where they begin their journey.

Harris: I have two younger brothers. That is another thing that I felt like I could write with some authority on, that relationship, both the good and the bad because I had two younger brothers who both looked up to me in a lot of ways. But there was also a lot of antagonism. We were very different personalities and we’re individuals who didn’t get along a lot. These two brothers, in my mind, the backstory for them was they were raised largely by their mother.

Their father wasn’t around, and when he was, it was a mixed blessing because they idolized him being this larger-than-life outlaw guy. He taught them how to shoot, he taught them how to hunt, and he taught them different things, but then he was also a little abusive, he was also a live wire, and he also was not very present.

So Heck’s father figure was his not-present father, and Cole’s father figure was in a lot of ways, Heck, who could do no wrong in his eyes. Heck is being taught a lot of things by his dad, like when somebody kills your family member, you get revenge. That’s something that…

Scott: Principles. He says principles.

Harris: Yeah, these are the principles that he’s been taught, and he takes them unquestioningly. Cole is a little more…He’s following Heck no matter what because this is his hero, his big brother is his idol. But at the same time, he is a little more skeptical.

I don’t want to say he’s softhearted because I don’t think it’s that. I think he’s a little more pragmatic, and he wants to know why. He’s asking that question. Heck is just accepting, “Why is because that’s the thing we do. That’s how we were raised.” Cole wants to know the reasons and he wants things to make sense.

As I was writing, I was getting really nerdy into breaking down the worldviews and the personal philosophies of both the boys and everyone they come into contact with. They get a lot of conflicting input.

As they go on their journey, they start to see that, especially when they kill the homesteader in front of his family, even Heck starts to recognize, “Yeah, maybe we’re doing something that’s bad, too,” but he still thinks on principle, “We have to do it.”

Whereas Cole is starting to realize, “We’re the bad guys in these scenarios,” and push back on him more and more, like, “Hey, we can still get out of this.” Then that becomes a source of conflict.

Cole isn’t strong enough to really oppose his brother. He would never split with him, but he’s going to push back more and more as they see more of the world. They both start to question what they’re doing.

I always wanted the brothers to split up, but my original plan was to have Cole end up getting kidnapped by the marshal and Heck ending up with a bandit gang. My original theory was that it was going to be his father’s old gang, but that felt a little too neat.

I also wanted something even bigger than his father. I wanted a real boogeyman. Then it occurred to me that it would be more powerful if they switch places, if their worldviews got flipped on their heads and Cole ended up with a darker experience, and Heck ended up seeing the light.

I had this idea that the marshal could show Heck how you can have duty and responsibility, but still have your own integrity and morality within that. That just because you should do something, doesn’t mean it’s always the right thing to do.

The marshal is very much beholden to his obligations, and he should arrest Heck. At the same time, he recognizes that Heck is a victim himself, and not beyond rehabilitation, so he’s going to make an exception to his rule for this kid.

Meanwhile, Cole, who is very pragmatic, meets Kinderman, who is this figure that is so pragmatic that he’s drummed life down to “eat or be eaten.” Cole is haunted by this, and it changes his view of the world. It forever scars him. Even though he doesn’t become Kinderman, this definitely impacts how he views the world and how he views what his moral obligation is to anyone.

Here is the video where the 2023 Nicholl Fellows found out their scripts had been selected as winners.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Harris discusses the approach he used to break the story and the importance of developing characters.

For Part 1, go here.

Harris is repped by Entertainment 360.

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