Interview (Part 2): Renee Pallai

Interview (Part 2): Renee Pillai

My interview with the 2019 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Renee Pillai wrote the original screenplay “Boy With Kite” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Renee about her background as a screenwriter , her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to her.

Today in Part 2 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Renee talks about the inspiration for her 2019 Nicholl winning screenplay “Boy With Kite”.

Scott: I was going to ask because you were very specific in your speech, saying you wanted to write in Hollywood. Was that desire based on the movies, the storytelling that you were experiencing out at Hollywood, or is it, just in part, dealing with the reality of the Malaysian film market? I did a bit of research on that. I know they had the big financial scandal about four years ago.

Renee: Oh, yeah.

Scott: They don’t make a lot of movies. I think last year, there were just 84 that they mentioned as being produced annually. I’m curious. What is it? Is part of it just trying to escape the Malaysian film world, or is it more of you’re just attracted to Hollywood filmmaking?

Renee: It’s the push ‘and’ pull factor. I’m glad you brought both points up. I’m going to say something and it’s going to sound so ridiculous because it shows something of the warped view I probably have of the world right now.

I actually found it easier to try and break into Hollywood… not that I’ve exactly broken in yet… but the Nicholl does open up a lot of opportunities, and doors, and everything. So it almost seemed like it was easier for me to do that than to break into the Malaysian film industry.

And it’s not like I haven’t tried — I have. But, first of all, there’s not a lot of demand for English language storytelling. You’ve done your research, so you know. Any film with more than 30 percent, I think, of English or any language that is not Bahasa Malaysia — the national language of the country — is considered a foreign film even if it’s done by Malaysians, starring Malaysians. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Scott: Yeah. Absolutely.

Renee: And even then, the language — it’s not so much a barrier. But the stories that you could tell were very limited for me, personally. Because most movies produced locally tend to lean in very heavily into the cultural aspects of the country.

Scott: That dials in then to what you were saying in your speech where you said, “there are freedoms here, freedoms that so many of us take for granted.” You think that in Hollywood, compared to in Malaysia, you’re going to have a lot more freedom to write stories and express stuff that you want?

Renee: Yes. That’s the absolute truth. It’s very interesting. Look at the list of films that have been banned in Malaysia and the reasons why. There’s a long list.

“Hustlers” has been banned for the obvious reasons. At one point, “Beauty and the Beast,” the live‑action movie was banned, but when Disney took a stand of either you show it in its entirety or you don’t show it at all, then the situation changed. It was eventually shown.

It’s all these movies. Abominable, the animation, is banned for, I believe, political reasons because of the dispute of certain islands, who owns it in the South China Sea, something along those lines. Movies that you generally would not think would be banned are banned for many reasons.

If movies like that cannot even be shown in the country, how can I have the freedom to tell whatever stories I want to tell that are not constrained by certain cultural, or racial, or religious restrictions?

Scott: Tyger Williams said, in discussing your script, the Boy With Kite, that he was quite moved emotionally by the story. He said, “I thought it was really profound.” He said, “I believe the ability to bring real emotion into our work is a skill which is more important than ever.”

You echoed this point. You said, “In everything I write, I try to find and am often spurred by the seed of something deeply personal. When I started writing this script, Boy With Kite, I was hurt, angry, bereft, and unimaginably spiteful, but the more I wrote, the more the characters grew to be worthy of hope. And what started as an idea based on diatribes became a story that demanded my respect in its own right. I can’t say if I wrote it to heal myself, but I do know that it taught me a lot about hope.”

I’d like to ask you, how important is it for you as a writer to have the freedom to tell stories in which you’re, “spurred by the seed of something deeply personal,” that they’re personal stories?

Renee: The freedom to write things that come from a real place is of such importance to me, because that’s where I can find the connection. Because I believe all writing has to be about communication with the reader, with the audience. It has to communicate and to connect.

It’s going to sound so cliché, but if I am brave enough and honest enough to do that, then I am halfway toward winning that battle of being able to connect with the stories I want to tell.

As far as deeply personal goes, this particular story… it’s not a real experience that I had, but it was a real feeling I was going through at a point in my life.

I think most stories that come from something that’s deeply personal have a way of connecting with a lot of people. The humanity of the piece is very, very important.

Let’s say it’s a genre movie like an action piece, because I’ve written action pieces as well, as long as I can have characters and situations that are very human, then I can connect.

Scott: That’s what I tell my students, “If there’s no point of an emotional connection or resonance on the part of the script reader or the movie going to characters, all the action in the world is just noise.”

Renee: Yes. I agree.

Scott: It’s interesting you mentioned these two words: Communicate and Connect. Because, thematically, that’s actually quite a bit of what’s going on in your script, Boy with Kite with the characters.

The plot summary for the project, “A surly loner inherits an odd little boy who must overcome her loathing of him to incur the truth about the one person they both love.” You mentioned the story, and you said this came from a place where you were hurt and angry and bereft of unimaginably spiteful. Would you unpack that? Maybe talk a little bit more specifically how that flowed into the origination of the story concept.

Renee: I had been witness to a family situation that I think I drew inspiration from because these characters — they are characters, they’re not from my real life. I’m from Malaysia, it’s set in Nebraska — it doesn’t get any more different than that.

Having said that, I think the best way to say it is even though I am none of those characters, but I am all of them at the same time.

I think the approach was, from witnessing something and feeling completely helpless and unhappy… over a period of time helped me channel that creatively into the concept of the story.

I also knew I wanted to touch on craft, because and I think you realize this too, everything that is pertinent to something like painting or dancing, the temporal arts, also relates to writing. Knowing all that, I came up with these characters that could embody these different feelings and insights that I was having at that time.

Scott: I want to get to the characters in just a second, but I’m curious, you sound like you’re a real student of film, and of course, thanks to your father for getting you started off on the right foot there.

Was there a movie or maybe movies which provided you a touchstone in terms of tone or feel, something you can reach out and touch as you were developing the story? Or is this kind of its own thing, it had no reference points to another film?

Renee: Yeah, I know what you’re saying, because I actually have used that for some of my other works. In this particular case… I’m trying to think if there was… No, I believe you’re right. This was its own thing.

Since writing it, I’ve had people relate it to some other films with similar mood or tone. But when I created it, when I came up with it, I don’t think I was influenced by anything at that point. It was just a story that came to me and I just explored how I could tell it.

Here is a stage reading of an excerpt from Renee’s screenplay “Boy With Kite” featuring actors Tyrese Gibson, Rosa Salazar, Amandla Stenberg, and Wes Studi.

Tomorrow in Part 3 of my interview with Renee, we dig into the central characters in her Nicholl-winning script.

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 53 Black List writers, go here.