Interview (Part 2): Kate Marks

My interview with the 2020 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Kate Marks wrote the original screenplay “The Cow of Queens” which won a 2020 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Kate about her creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to her.

Today in Part 2 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Kate reflects on making feminist films and how two real-life events inspired her to come up with the story concept for “The Cow of Queens.”

Scott: I read an interview with you and it seems like you continued on that track. You’re quoted as saying, “I’m a disgruntled child of fairy tales. I love their magical worlds but hate their thin stories which often serve as cautionary tales for disobedient girls and women. Filmmaking gives me the chance to remake them. I like to fill the fairytale frame with complicated characters who have deeper things to do than slay the dragon or find the treasure.

Making feminist films is not just about having complex female characters at the center of the story. It’s also about exploring new narratives, visual styles, and genres. In other words, you can’t just change the gender of the protagonist, you also have to send her on a different kind of journey, and put her in a world or a genre we don’t quite have the words for.”

We see that in the “The Cow of Queens.” It starts off very much like a hero’s journey. I mean, there’s a call to adventure, and the protagonist has a specific goal, and yet you do turn it into, as you say, something different.

Was that intentional, do you think, or is that just an outgrowth of your experience of growing as a writer? “The Cow of Queens” is set in a very specific urban environment yet it’s also fantastical. Maybe you could unpack your take on storytelling.

Kate: Yes, there’s two journeys. There’s the outward journey of Sonya and Del on a quest to save this cow. And then there’s the inner journey. For Sonya, it’s arriving at a place of acceptance. She has to accept that her dad is dying. And for Del, he has to feel like his daughter’s going to be OK without him.

Scott: It’s like Campbell has that quote, where the outer journey is really an inner journey?

Kate: Right.

Scott: The logline I found says: “ ‘The Cow of Queens’ features a father-daughter duo, Del and Sonya, as they embark on one last adventure, saving an escaped slaughterhouse cow rampaging through Queens, New York. Their frenzied race against the clock occurs against the backdrop of Del’s cancer diagnosis.”

As I understand it, this is inspired in part by your experience of your father’s death. Could you maybe talk a bit about that and how you found the genesis of the story?

Kate: When I was in my last year of film school, my dad got diagnosed with cancer. After I graduated, I stayed with my parents to help take care of him while he was dying. Being with him to the end was something that changed me on a very deep level, and I knew that I wanted to write about it. But I like to make movies that are funny or offbeat or, as you said, fairy tales, and it took me a long time to figure out how to frame this story in a way that felt like a movie I would make. So I ended up just writing a lot of sad poetry.

Then, when I was living in Queens, I heard some neighbors talking about a cow that had escaped from a local slaughterhouse, and had a field day evading the police. There was something about the image of the cow running for its life that collided with my own experience of fighting to keep my dad alive and suddenly I could see the movie.

One of the things that always haunted me about my dad’s death was, “Did we fight too hard? Should we have given up sooner? And if we had done that, would we have spared him some pain?” We spent our final moments fighting cancer instead of just enjoying the time we had left. We never really said goodbye because that seemed like giving up. So when I heard about the cow, I began to see my dad and I as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, AKA Del and Sonya. They go on a ridiculous quest to save this cow but really they are searching for a way to say goodbye.

Scott: It really is an interesting symmetry in a way between them trying to save this cow’s life, meanwhile there’s this metaphorical thing going on between them trying to save the father’s life when there’s an inevitability about his death looming in the horizon.

Kate: Thank you.

Here is a video of the moment Kate and her fellow writers learned they had won the 2020 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Kate talks about the two central figures in her script “The Cow of Queens” and how their outer journey in the events of the plot are really an inner journey into each character’s soul.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Kate is repped by The Kaplan Stahler Agency and The Radmin Company.

Here website: LINK.

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.