Interview (Part 1): Jonathan Levine

My interview with the 2022 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jonathan Levine wrote the original screenplay “Operation Gemini” which won a 2022 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with Jonathan 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, Jonathan discusses his film school experience and how he launched his own production company.

Scott Myers: Jonathan, congratulations on winning the 2022 Nicholl Fellowship. A nice way to round out the year for you.

Jonathan Levine: It’s a very crazy, exciting time. I wrote the script very quickly and so it’s very surreal to have it so well received. It’s quite an honor.

Scott: Let’s talk about your background because you’ve got a different one than the more conventional Nicholl Fellowship recipients in that you’ve already carved out a career in film and TV. In fact, you’ve even got your own production company Infinitive Films, but I want to work our way up to that. I think originally you’re from Florida. Is that right?

Jonathan: Yeah. Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, in a nice little beach community out there. When I turned eighteen, I moved out to Los Angeles to go to a USC’s screenwriting program.

Scott: How did you become interested in film and TV, so that by the time you were eighteen, you were ready to leave Florida and go to LA?

Jonathan: The arts have always been a part of my family. My mom is a graphic designer and an artist, and my dad is a musician and a composer. My earliest memory is wanting to be an animator when I was three watching Disney movies.

I was around ten when me and a friend were bored on New Year’s Eve. We rented a video camera from a video store and started making our own little movies. And so the story goes.

I actually made two features in high school and wrote a musical in high school. I’ve always been editing and writing and producing projects so it was a natural progression to start looking into film schools.

When I was accepted into USC’s screenwriting program all the way out in Los Angeles, I just figured: “Well, if I’m going to try to go for this, I might as well go for it and move to where the industry is. So instead of going to a film school at Florida State or University of Central Florida, which have great film schools, I might as well take out the loans and try to get out there to Los Angeles and see what happens.

Scott: You’re writing two feature films in high school. How did you figure out what you were doing screenwriting wise back in high school?

Jonathan: I’ve always been an avid reader. I tried to write short novels as a kid, wrote comic books as a kid. When you discovered that there were screenwriters and what a screenplay was, you start reading the screenplays to your favorite movies, and then you start writing them.

You start writing like, what would my ideal “Batman” movie be when I’m eleven years old. I think I made five short films in elementary school and middle school, and then made a one feature my freshman year in high school and then a second one my senior year.

I grew up in a beach community, a soccer community. I was in a band and all that, but I was the unique movie kid. Everybody was always like, “Oh, what’s Jonathan doing? Let’s help Jonathan out with his new movie.” I’d recruit my friends and their friends and the whole community to come out and make it happen. It was a great way to spend a summer: shooting a movie with your friends.

Scott: Sounds like your own version of The Fablemans, getting in touch with your inner Spielberg.

Jonathan: The one thing that was really compelling about the movie, that I hadn’t seen before in the “young kid makes a movie” story was the reaction and impact when you make something for your school. I made the band video every year and screened it at the big band event. I did the “Senior Year video.” I’d never seen that in a movie before: how different people react to seeing themselves and then how that reaction impacts, for better or worse, the kid who made the movie. That was very recognizable to me. Sometimes it would mean a lot to people, and I think that positive reaction gave me the confidence to keep going, to keep making things.

Scott: That probably shortened your process whereby you graduate from SC and then you got this production company. Talk a bit about the type of work you’ve done after graduating from college.

Jonathan: When I graduated from USC, I got some good interest off of my thesis script that I wrote there. I worked with a management company and sent it out. This was 2008. The writers’ strike was going on. The recession was happening at the time. I keep making the joke that I’m like a reboot of myself now from then. It’s 2022 and James Cameron is releasing another Avatar movie, the economy is in trouble, there might be another writer’s strike coming up. [laughs]

Anyway, coming out of SC, I had a good writing sample and I got a lot of good meetings off of it, but nobody was interested in hiring young writers for anything.

I ended up leaning back into my production background and creating a production company. I would produce commercials and documentaries, even film opera recitals and audition videos for college submissions. Aside from my company’s work, I also did video work for a law firm and helped teach a writing course for the theater school at USC.

Since nobody was making my scripts, I decided to write and direct a feature myself.

Scott: “The Daughter,” right?

Jonathan: Yeah. It’s a hostage thriller about a bunch of rich kids being taken hostage on the eve of an election. My girlfriend at the time, she’s now my wife, was the producer and star of the movie. We raised money. I leaned into all my production friends who couldn’t get a job being a gaffer, DP, or an editor because of the writer’s strike and economy. I said, “Come on: work on my movie for free and you can get those credits.”

I wrote it, directed it, produced it, and even ended up doing some of the post sound and color work on it. It was exhausting, but we got distribution around the world for it. It was released in Japan, Spain, and a couple international territories.

It was my Swiss-Army-knife ability for that project that led me to work for Larry King.

Scott: How long did you do [Larry King Now]?

Jonathan: I was there for about five years. He had just left CNN and brought all his lead producers with them. It was a startup but they were used to CNN resources. I was brought in with a couple other friends of mine. Friends from SC actually, people I knew there, because we could make something look expensive for a small budget.

I built the control room, I ran post for about three years and then ended up directing the last two years I was with the show.

It was his 80th birthday at the time, and so I got to produce and edit the documentary about his 80 years in broadcasting. The event was at Dodger Stadium and I got to work with the tech team there to make the giant graphics that wrap around the stadium. It was great.

Scott: During all this, doing all these different things, you’re still screenwriting?

Jonathan: Yeah, still writing. When I first graduated, my plan was: “I’m going to try to do one script a quarter, one feature a quarter, and try to work on it.” That dwindled down to about two a year. As I was writing these, I’d be leaning on old connections that I’d made when I first graduated from SC and gone out with that original thesis script. And of course, submitting scripts to the Nicholl every year — probably five scripts total before the one that won.

Before work or on my lunch break, I go and write. I have a nice catalog of scripts. Some that I was going to try to make myself but couldn’t get the money for, others I’d work on with producers or development executives who I had met in my travels.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jonathan talks about the inspiration for his screenplay “Operation Gemini” and how he wrote it in six weeks in order to submit it to the Nicholl competition.

Website: infinitivefilms.com.

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