Interview (Part 1): Ward Kamel

My interview with the 2024 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Ward Kamel wrote the original screenplay “If I Die in America” which won a 2024 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Ward about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 1 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Ward discusses how he developed a passion for movies while growing up in Damascus and Dubai, leading to film school in New York, then writing and directing a short film which resulted in writing his Nicholl-winning script.

Scott Myers: Ward, congratulations on winning the Nicholl. That must have been exciting.

Ward Kamel: Yeah, it’s a dream come true for sure.

Scott: Let’s learn about your background. You describe yourself as a Syrian filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Where did you grow up?

Ward: I grew up in Damascus in Syria until I was about 13, and then I moved to Dubai in the UAE and went to an international high school there from 13 to 18. Then at 18 years old, I moved to New York and have been here ever since.

Scott: You must be fixed on what’s going on in Syria right now politically.

Ward: Yeah, very much so. The last 72 hours have been a bit of a whirlwind. I obviously have lots of family there. It’s a mixed bag of emotions, but it’s the most significant thing that’s happened in the country essentially in the last 14 years since the Arab Spring started, but also arguably in the last 40, 50 years since the Assad regime has taken over. It’s a crazy time.

Scott: Good luck on that to you, your family, and friends. Where did you develop an interest in film, TV, writing, and the creative arts?

Ward: I would say I was lucky enough to be one of those people that from an early age decided that I loved film. Around the 12-year-old, 13-year-old mark, I moved to Dubai from Damascus, and my father established a little bit of a tradition for us where we would go to the movie theater at least once a week, usually on Fridays.

I think it was an attempt on his part to maintain some semblance of consistency in my life after such a big move. Being part of not only watching films, but also watching them in the context of the theater with an audience became a pretty regular practice in my life.

Then thereafter, discussing the movies with my dad over dinner. The consistency in doing that allows you to start seeing patterns like what you like, what you don’t like, and a little bit the artifice of the craft in a good way and understanding like, “I’m generally starting to wrap my head around a 3-act structure. I’m generally starting to wrap my head around the flaws of the characters.”

I was just really fascinated by it, almost at an academic level. I think I didn’t really take it seriously as a potential career until a few years after that. I went to an international high school and they offered an IB class, an IB curriculum.

A group of friends at that school and I, we learned that there was an IB film class that was available, but our school wasn’t offering it because none of the teachers had been trained to teach the curriculum. We approached one of the teachers that taught media studies or something tangential to film, and we asked her.

This was the year before we were starting IB. We asked her if it was at all on the table for her to over the summer get licensed to teach the film IB curriculum. She was also a cinephile, so she was into it. There were enough of us, I think it was seven of us, that the school justified it.

We signed this little petition and she got trained. Then for those last two years of high school, I took the film IB class that I think really opened it up as a craft, not just as sort of…took me from being like a cinephile into an aspiring filmmaker. We made a couple of small, really bad short films.

That was when I was like, maybe I should apply to film school to study film. There are a few film schools in the Middle East, but I really had my sights set on either Canada or Europe or the US. I had never left the Middle East until then, and I was really hungry to explore the world. But in the end I actually mostly applied to STEM or English programs.

Film schools were plan B, but then the compromise that I had with my family was I would only really apply to film schools that I felt were towards the top. It felt like I couldn’t really convince them to let me study film at a university unless I could also say it was one of the best film universities or one of the best programs.

The one that ended up taking me with a full ride, which was massive, was NYU. The idea of living in New York was so exciting. I moved to New York to go to NYU to study film. I think at that point, I was locked in. The rest was just continuing down that path.

Scott: Wow, getting a full ride at NYU …

Ward: It’s prohibitively expensive otherwise, but I was very, very lucky to get that for me.

Scott: I hope you’ve stayed in touch with that teacher you had in high school. I love it when I talk to writers and they say there was this one teacher who saw something in them. That’s one of the beautiful things about teaching, when you can provide some inspiration and influence with a student.

Ward: Yeah, 100 percent. We’re still in touch. We’re connected on Instagram. Her name is Claire Young. She’s great and she’s still teaching. I think that she’s still maybe offering the film class at school, so it’s cool. Yeah, she’s the best. I owe her a lot for sure.

Scott: You may have started a tradition that maybe other students will take the IB film program and who knows, they may follow in your tracks.

Do you remember some of the movies you watched with your dad? Were there any that on those Friday nights would you go out and then you come back and have dinner and talk about them or maybe a couple of them that popped a mind that really influenced you or inspired you?

Ward: Yeah. It’s funny. The thing that I think I retroactively have realized was because this was happening in Dubai, we weren’t really getting any of the indies. It was really just the global film exports. Pretty big budget, like blockbuster films that we were watching. I think at the time, I obviously wasn’t really enmeshed in the indie filmmaking scene or films that I felt like were probably like the movies that I really looked towards now for inspiration.

I remember there were a couple, this was later on, but very randomly, the one movie that does stick out that I’m still to this day surprised made its way at such a global level to screen in Dubai was Anomalisa, the film written by Charlie Kaufman, a stop motion film.

I watched it with my dad. It’s a weird movie to watch with your dad. That’s number one, but my dad is a cinephile himself. It wasn’t awkward at all. We were able to talk about it afterwards.

That movie, I remember, was also one of those along the journey. I think every filmmaker has a list of a few films they can draw a straight line from towards how they got to where they are today in a very serious way.

Anomalisa was definitely one of those movies for me. I remember watching in theaters and being like, oh my god, there’s something so special about this from a craft perspective, but then also from a content perspective. Yeah, that definitely was like a bit of a touchstone for me.

Scott: When you were back in high school, you said you made some short films that were, obviously they’re not going to be that great at that point, but then you’ve gone on to make other short films which have done well, including “If I Die in America”, which inspired your Nicholl script. I watched it on Vimeo because it was selected as one of their short of the week Vimeo staff picks. Talk about writing-directing. Is that where you’re headed now?

Ward: Yeah, I think so. I like to think of myself as a bit of a writer director as opposed to just a pure screenwriter. I feel like in the NYU Film and TV program, I was definitely focused a lot more on directing, but what often ends up being the case when you’re starting off and especially in school, you’re not really getting sent scripts. Do you know what I mean? No one’s having you direct their writing. You end up having to write almost out of necessity because if at the time, my goal was to direct something, I’d have to write it first.

For a while I did think of screenwriting as a means to an end almost, the end being directing. Obviously, I’ve definitely moved past that now and I think of screenwriting as very much its own craft. I think screenwriting opened up to me as a craft or I became enmeshed in it as a craft as a result of COVID.

I graduated in 2020. I was supposed to make this thesis film, this thesis short film, but it was delayed because I was supposed to shoot in April 2020. I think we all remember what happened. It was delayed and then I graduated in May and all of a sudden it was like, OK, welcome to the real world.

My whole shtick, the way that I paid my rent was working on set. I did a lot of grip and electric and AC-ing work, and I couldn’t do that anymore once the pandemic hit. I started taking like development internship jobs at doc companies, little odd remote jobs that were still somewhat film-related, but it was always like a few days a week. It was never full-time, and you start atrophying the creative muscle.

It was so frustrating not being on set. It was so frustrating not being able to make this film that was supposed to be this crowning achievement of all the four years. The only thing left to do was just to write as much as I could. That was the only creative output that was available to me at the time. I joined a writer’s group, a group of friends that I had known at Tisch.

They were more serious screenwriters than I was at the time. We started meeting over Zoom and I feel like I had a bit of a re-education almost after graduating when it came to screenwriting features specifically. I had written a bunch of shorts, but I’d never really written a feature.

They are just an incredible group of screenwriters and were able to take me in, teach me all the tools that I still use to this day. Since 2020, I’ve written more than a feature a year. That’s usually what we aim for. We try to do these writing retreats and this feature specifically, If I Die in America, was my fourth.

I do think of myself as a bit more of a writer-director. However, I’m more than open to the idea of maybe writing for someone else to direct. It’s just for this particular project that is the way that I’ve been thinking about it.

Scott: Your short film actually reminds me of Whiplash. Where Damien Chazelle figured let’s take a sequence of, or in that case, it’s like literally basically one scene. You have a similar a thing. It’s a stretch of scenes that tells a narrative, which is actually reflected quite closely in the feature script. Were you inspired by Damien Chazelle in that regard?

Ward: Yeah, that’s such a case study and such a north star about how you can make some forward momentum or forward progress on getting a feature made by then just going out and making a short film. I feel like that is the gold standard example.

In my case at least, the life cycle and the way that both the short and the feature have orbited each other, it started off as a feature. It was always a feature in my mind.

I remember, I think this was like 2022 or something like that, as part of the writers group, we were stress testing different scripts. I had written up to the midpoint, something like that. It was like the first 60 pages of the script. Something about it was just not working. I couldn’t quite crack it. I was just banging my head against the wall and dropped it and then wrote like two other features.

A couple of features later, earlier in the conversation, I had mentioned that my thesis film was delayed. My thesis film was delayed as a result of COVID. NYU gave us this three year extension to say that we could use the allotment that we would have been able to use for a thesis film should we decide to boot production back up, and it was about to expire.

This was 2023. It was my last chance to be able to make this thesis film using NYU’s resources. At the time, I had already taken a full-time job and I had forgotten about it, and you have to pay rent and bills. It had fallen to the wayside, especially after 2020 and 2021, those two years, the last thing that was on my mind was making a short film.

But it was about to expire and I was like, OK, well, I need to make this thesis film, I think. I read the script that I had written for the short that was supposed to be my thesis and just absolutely hated it like three years later.

I was like, wow, this was trash. First of all, thank God I didn’t make it. Second of all, I think I need to write another short. I started ideating, started thinking about what I would want to write.

I can’t remember exactly how it came to me or what exactly inspired me, but at some point, I started considering like, “Well, wait a minute, that feature that has been in the back of my head for the last couple of years, is there a short out of it? And could that maybe work better as a short than a feature?”

And so, I wrote the short, fleshed it out, sent it to my DP and my producer and they loved it. Immediately we were like, OK, yeah, this is it. This is going to be the thesis film. And then I cast it, we were fully in pre-production.

I met with the actor, Gil Perez Abraham, who’s in the short, who ends up playing Manny in the short film. We just had a lot of conversations about the character. That opened up almost the feature in my mind, but I was still focused on the short. We shot the short, finished it, everything.

We started submitting it places. It premiered at SXSW. When it got into SX, we found out in December of 2023. SX happens in March of 2024. I knew that I had three months up until I actually had to be on the ground in Austin.

Immediately, my first reaction was, OK, well, I bet people are going to ask what’s next as they often do. I already have a half-baked version of this feature, and now I feel like I’ve so many more tools to attack it because I’ve actually directed an actor playing this character.

I’ve been thinking about it. I was living and breathing the short for a while. I started rehashing an outline, like a page one outline for the feature. It just came out easier than it had ever been. I think really making the short, it’s a very roundabout way to work on a feature script, but at least in this case it worked.

I wrote the outline out in like a week and I was like, OK, I think this is it. I think this can be a pretty decent feature. Then I went and I wrote it on a little writing retreat with my producer. That was what we were shopping around at SX and that was what I submitted to the Nicholl.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Ward reveals what the inspiration for “If I Die in America,” backgrounds on some of the key characters in the story, and his decision to use flashbacks.

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