Interview (Part 1): Vanar Jaddou

My interview with the 2020 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Vanar Jaddou wrote the original screenplay “Goodbye, Iraq” which won a 2020 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Vanar 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, Vanar talks about being a first-generation American and how his love of movies and writing led him to learn the craft of screenwriting.

Scott Myers: You are first‑generation American, right?

Vanar Jaddou: Yeah, first‑generation. My parents came here from Iraq. They’re from a village in Iraq called Tel Keppe or Tel Kaif. It’s in the north of Iraq. That’s where a lot of Chaldeans came from.

Scott: You settled in the Detroit area.

Vanar: Yeah, my dad came to Detroit first. He’s the oldest child in his family. They’re 10 kids, seven boys, three girls, and his parents, so 12 total. My dad’s the oldest. When he came here, he and his brothers would have gotten enlisted in the war if they didn’t come. When he was 21, he brought his two younger brothers with him who were 18 and 15 at the time.

There are two primary locations where Chaldeans settle. Detroit is one, and San Diego is the other. My mom’s family went to San Diego. Eventually, maybe 10, 12 years later, they met up in Detroit and they got engaged after a few weeks and built a life here.

Scott: If I’m not mistaken, that’s the largest Chaldean population, over 100,000 people in the Detroit area.

Vanar: Yeah, definitely. There’s more than that even. Detroit is the largest area for Chaldeans. When you take into account Saddam and then even after Saddam with ISIS coming in, basically, those villages were completely wiped out, so they needed somewhere to go. There’s Chaldeans in all parts of the world. There’s maybe two million of us or so worldwide, I would estimate.

But Detroit is the number one place where Chaldeans settled. It’s a very small culture. Of course, people like to settle with their own. It definitely makes it a hotspot for Chaldeans.

Scott: Your father, I understand, had a small video store. You didn’t have cable, but you were watching video, VHS tapes when you’re growing up.

Vanar: Yes. My dad had a small video store. My dad put us to work when we were really young. Even before I could see over the counter, it was a place that I was working. He used to get the promotional VHS tapes all the time, the ones that were…before they came to theaters and before they were released on VHS, they had these promotional tapes. We got to watch all those demos. Just being in that video store all the time being surrounded by that, I really fell in love with movies. I used to binge‑watch them constantly. Whenever I worked, he’d let me take home whatever I wanted, even rated R movies, anything.

I watched anything and everything when I was young. Even some of the horrors, they’d be in a corner of the video store, and it’d be a little bit darker there. I’d be eight or nine‑year‑old kid terrified to go to that section of the store. [laughs] It was good times. Good times.

That’s definitely what sparked it for me. I mean, it’s never something you know until later on. You never know it’s going to lead to something like this.

Scott: You didn’t discover screenwriting until a little later, though you did take to writing pretty early on. I remember reading an interview with you. You talked about how you were writing skits in sixth grade. How did your interest in writing develop?

Vanar: Writing in general, I’ve told this story before that my mom used to make us write a short story or draw. Usually, we drew Dragonball Z or some anime characters. She used to make us draw that before we went outside to play sports. That’s initially where I fell in love with the arts in general.

Later on in school, it was something I discovered that I was pretty good at compared to other subjects. I remember in eighth grade, we had a really, really strict teacher. Would never give out As. If anybody got an A on a paper, it was a miracle. I was getting all As on all the papers. That’s when I thought that I was pretty good at writing.

I went to a specialized high school for math, science, and technology. I remember even writing the chemistry reports, the teacher would have a “see me after class” note. I’d be like, “What’s this about?” She’d be like, “These are not poems. This is not literature. This is a science report. I just want the facts.”

I tried to turn anything into a short story or into something poetic or literary. I majored in English literature in college. I was going to be a lawyer. I’ve talked about it before about the arts, they’re not a big thing in Chaldean culture. There are certain things, especially first generation, are expected to go into. It’s either entrepreneurship, law, medicine, engineering, finance. One of the staples.

We don’t have a lot of artists. We don’t have any screenwriters. I think I know only one Chaldean screenwriter out there in the world. I was going to go to law school. I chose against that. It was obviously a bit of a shock to everybody.

I don’t regret it. It’s been a struggle to this point, as it’s been for everybody, all of us. If you ever want to do anything worthwhile in life, then it should be challenging. That’s generally how I got to where I am today, I would say.

Scott: You had an interest in movies. At some point, were you watching these films when you were a kid and seeing “screenplay by” or “written by” or did it come later that you realized there are people who actually write these things?

Vanar: That probably came later. After college, I realized it was something that you could do for a career. It was never seeing “written by” or something and me saying I want to be that person. It was more of an infatuation with film and an infatuation with writing, and they just came together.

Having watched so many movies, I became almost a film critic. Not just for the writing or the directing. I would look at everything ‑‑ the acting, the cinematography, the music, the set design. Every single little component of a film, I would sit there and dissect it.

We all do. We all watch terrible movies and we all watch great movies. Especially when you watch the bad ones, when you say, “I would have done this, I would have done that,” after you do that for so long, it eventually starts to click that maybe I should try my hand at this and let’s see how I can do.

Scott: In another interview I read, you talk about some of your filmmaking influences. Clearly, you’ve had an immersive experience as represented by some of these names. Gilroys, Coen brothers, Christopher Nolan, Charlie Kaufman, Nicole Perlman, Spike Lee, Scott Frank, Vince Gilligan, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sophia Coppola. How did you go about learning screenwriting? Yeah, watching movies, but actually sitting down and understanding format, style and all that.

Vanar: When I first decided let me try my hand at this, I would start watching the films that I wanted to watch. Then I would have the screenplay pulled up if it was available, just going through it line by line as I was watching. I would pause and then read, and then play again and read.

All the great movies I had already seen prior, I went back and read all those scripts. In the beginning, I tried to mimic a lot of people’s techniques, which helped and didn’t help at the same time. “Goodbye, Iraq” was the fourth script that I wrote. Prior to that, I wrote a couple really bad scripts, I would say. Of course, there was a learning process. We all have to write those to start.

Then I realized that I wasn’t at the level that I wanted to be at. I’m still not at the level that I want to be at. To me, there was a huge gap between me and…I would read Oscar‑winning or nominated scripts and I would just shake my head and say, “How did they do this?” I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it.

I had to go back to the basics. I started reading a lot of books on screenwriting. That helped me to develop my technique structure‑wise and character‑wise and all of that. I was already a literary buff, but I went back to reading some classics and looked at it from a different angle, an angle of a filmmaker. If I was to turn this into a movie, what should I be looking out for?

I did a lot of little exercises like that. Then what I did was I compiled all this knowledge into this 25, 30‑page document on techniques of writing. Now before I write anything, I go back and I read that whole thing. It just takes 30 minutes to an hour.

What I found out was a lot of these techniques that these writers use, they probably don’t even realize that they’re using them. It’s just embedded into their subconscious. For me, what I wanted to do was try and figure out a way that I could do that as well. How can I just have this be a part of me without constantly addressing it?

Tomorrow in Part 2, Vanar discusses how real-life events inspired him to write his Nicholl-winning script “Goodbye, “Iraq.”

Vanar is repped by Bellevue and APA.

Instagram: @vanarjaddou

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.