Interview (Part 2): Daniel Hanna

My interview with the 2021 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Daniel Hanna wrote the original screenplay “Shelter Animal” which won a 2021 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Daniel 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 2 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Daniel talks about his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Shelter Animal” and how he used a real-life experience as inspiration for the script.

Scott: You directed a feature film, Miss Virginia.

Daniel: Yes.

Scott: It was written by someone else, right?

Daniel: It was written by someone else, yeah.

Scott: How did you get involved in that?

Daniel: It shows in this industry, your jobs or career milestones or whatever will come out of some of the least expected places in a way, or a couple of years after you’ve worked with someone. Years ago I’d gone through a little writing workshop with “Shelter Animal.” I rewrote the whole thing during the pandemic more recently, but I’ve been kicking around the story for a long time. The woman who ran that writing workshop, Erin O’Connor, she was the mentor, like the screenwriting coach or story coach that guided everyone through the process of rewriting their script.

A couple years later, she reached out and asked if I would read a script that she had written that they were in the process of producing and raising money for, and to give my unfiltered opinion on things I thought could be issues from a production standpoint, story standpoint, anything like that.

I read that script. It’s based on a true story. I thought it was a great story, but maybe it was a little too bogged down in the specific details of A to B to C to D to E, and I gave my thoughts on how ways to tell the story in a more simplified way from A to Z, or whatever you want to say.

In the process of giving notes, they asked me a couple weeks later if I’d be interested in pitching to direct, which I never expected that they would ask. I thought maybe I could edit this movie if I played my cards right. That was how that came about.

I talked through what I would want to focus on and emphasize from an emotional standpoint, character standpoint, and eventually got the job. From there, it was trying to work with Erin as a director and the first person that she would give the new drafts to.

We talked through what we wanted to accomplish with each draft and the problem areas. It was a great experience because she would always try and think of how to get to the heart of the note and fix it. That was how that came about.

Scott: Miss Virginia starred Uzo Aduba, Matthew Modine, Vanessa Williams. You had quite a sizeable cast. How did the movie do in the indie circuit?

Daniel: We played festivals. We were going to play, even after our distribution, SXSW, they’ve got an education component now, because the movie is a story about education, but Covid shut that down. We got distribution. We were on BET, a cable premiere on BET and Netflix, and a very small theatrical…You know the way indies do them where you get up in a few theaters.

As far as our first feature goes, it was a huge success from that standpoint. I was the director. I was not producing. I was not the person that made sure it got out there in the world. It was great to not have to shoulder all of that.

Scott: Congratulations on that. Let’s jump to your 2021 Nicholl-winning feature film screenplay “Shelter Animal,” which as I said I read and quite enjoyed. Compelling story. Terrific characters.

Daniel: Thank you.

Scott: Plot summary:

“A fiery female prison trustee working at the county animal shelter finds purpose rehabilitating an abused pit bull, but her attempts to rally employees and the broader community for shelter reform puts her own freedom at risk.”

You mentioned that you did this thing with Erin O’Connor where you were workshopping this particular project, which you subsequently rewrote. That leads to the question what was the inspiration for the story?

Daniel: The inspiration was my girlfriend at the time and I, we had decided that we were going to do some animal fostering. We already had three cats, but we thought we’d throw some more animals in the mix, I guess.

What happened was she went to try and get this cat from a shelter maybe an hour, 90 minutes outside of LA. She was working with a rescue, and the shelter would not give her the cat because they had a beef with the rescue, who had been critical of them in the past. There was this bad blood there.

She had to leave without the cat and then go back later as an individual and get it even though she was still working with the rescue. I remember thinking, “What a crazy situation. Why would this shelter not give her the cat? This is a kill shelter. They’re full of animals. How would they not give a animal away to someone that wants to take it in?”

It was a realization that any organization is made up of people, and people are flawed and petty and political and all of these things. That was the impetus.

Then as we were fostering dogs over the couple few years, I learned more about how shelters work, how rescues work, how many shelters are really doing the best that they can with the resources they have.

Over the course of doing research, I came across the detail that some shelters take prison inmates as volunteers, in part because it’s a difficult environment that the public doesn’t always have the stomach for, and partly because prison inmates don’t really have a voice. They can’t back out or give much criticism.

Coming across that, that was something that happens in various shelters. It seemed like it was just a perfect synergy of a person who had been discarded from society, interacting with all of these animals that have been discarded from society.

Scott: Let’s talk about the Protagonist of the story, Petra, a fiery female prison trustee. How did this character come to be?

Daniel: In terms of her specifics, I was thinking very much in terms of coming from the research with how dogs are deemed unadoptable if they have aggressive tendencies, which might be based on fear, which might be based on past abuse, any number of things.

I initially thought of it from the human standpoint of that, like who is someone who has this past trauma that has manifested in anger, in violence and has landed her in jail because of that?

How does this person learn to become — trained is a weird way to put it — but to train herself to put those things behind her and heal from them and be able to be someone that can go out into the world and be free again. I was very much thinking of it from the sense that the human and dog were mirror images of each other.

The way I can get myself going on a script is I just have to start writing, writing what excites me, what seems interesting. Otherwise, the structuring phase is a little too dead to me, a little too intellectual maybe. I really want to get in there and start writing.

Generally before I really even know exactly how the story is going to all fit together, I’ve written maybe somewhere between 20 or 60 pages or something like that.

The characters come organically, in a way, in what I’m wanting to feel or accomplish in that moment of writing. Then later, rethinking and studying them and figuring out who they really are. It came from that initial germ.

In terms of writing her, it was asking how does this character evolve across the story as someone who is shut down and can’t really let all of herself be seen because she knows that she could be misinterpreted or she could be viewed in a negative light.

Scott: That’s interesting approach. With my students, I talk about that receptive writing where you’re just freewriting and letting the stuff come. Then you step outside and see what you’ve got. That’s the executive writing, and you need both. It sounds like you’ve got that.

Daniel: Definitely. Like I said, it’s in the sense of editing. With editing, you have the footage. You have the stuff. Then you’re figuring out what is it about this that can all fit together and work as a story. In documentary editing especially, you have to have this raw material to work with.

For me, a little bit of the initial writing stage is coming up with raw material that is exciting to me. If I were to structure everything from the get-go and force myself to do that, there’d be a lot of the things that wouldn’t fit.

Often my favorite scenes would be hard to fit in, and things would be too streamlined and not jagged or messy enough. Like in “Shelter Animal,” the scene where the family comes in, and their dog’s had been accidentally euthanized and the fallout from that. That was inspired by a real story I had read somewhere that was almost as wild and crazy. I was like, “I have to have this in a movie.”

Finding how that moment fits within an overall story, it can’t be this crazy thing that happens and then you move on from it. It has to, in some way, advance the character’s overall tensions, especially Petra’s tension with her primary manager, Molly, at the shelter.

That’s how that process works for me. I have the scene. I don’t want to lose it because I really like the scene. It’s a scene that people may talk about after they see the movie, but I have to figure out how it can be part of this overall story.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Daniel talks about some of the key characters in his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Shelter Animal.”

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.