Interview (Part 2): Sam Boyer

My interview with 2023 Black List writer for his script Foragers.

In 2022, Sam Boyer received a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his original screenplay “Ojek”. In 2023, his script “Foragers” made the annual Black List. Quite an accomplishment in back to back years. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Sam about his Nicholl experience, writing the script which eventually made the Black List, and writing in the action genre space.

Today in Part 2 of a 6-part series to run each day this week, Sam reveals what it was like learning his script had made the 2023 Black List and his inspiration for writing “Foragers”.

Scott: Okay, Monday, December 11th, 2023, which is the big Black List rollout day. Were you paying much attention to this?

Sam: I was totally. I think they do a video where they had a very deliberate calligrapher slowly write every name, and it took a while before they got to me. My fiancé and I, and a friend who was staying over with us just spent our morning watching that for 30 minutes until it came up.

My managers had told me there was a possibility that it might happen, just because there had been solid buzz and they were telling their own friends about it, but it was totally not a certainty.

It was something I was absolutely hoping for because I’ve been reading Black List scripts for over 10 years now. It was cool to be in this situation to be on a List with some really wonderful writers. It was so cool.

Scott: Let’s jump into “Forager.” Summary here:

“When the illegitimate daughter of a Portland billionaire goes missing, her loved ones turn to Juno and Andi, local homesteaders and members of The Foragers ‑‑ a grassroots network of experts dedicated to finding the lost and bringing them home.”

You’ve already talked a bit about the inspiration for it. You wanted to do something in Portland. You wanted to do something thematically that was around motherhood. You like the idea of having two female protagonists, co‑protagonists, perhaps inspired by your mother and your grandmother. There’s a kind of a hyper‑reality to this thing.

You set it in 2025 in Portland, but it doesn’t quite seem like Portland’s going to quite get there by 2025. Could you maybe talk a bit about how you’re constructing the city and that environment?

Sam: Yeah, totally. With hyper‑reality, the way I’m interpreting it is there’s a level of greater saturation to everything in there. I think I want whoever’s reading to really viscerally feel what’s going on.

Screenwriters, we have such limited time. I picked a sub‑genre within the action thriller that is slightly noir, where things are a shade and a half darker and a shade and a half stormier. There’s not a location, at least in that original Forager script you read, that does not exist in real life. They’re all real places.

They’re all places I’ve been, or loosely renamed places that I’ve been. I worked from memory. I wasn’t living in Portland at the time when I wrote this. I went back to visit my mom once and went to a few of these places just to make sure they existed or to be totally real.

If you’re somewhere on a sunny summer’s day, it’s not going to feel the same. It’s trying to make the audience feel how I felt when I was a really short and scrawny 15‑year‑old from the East Coast, who had arrived in this place where it felt like it rained every day and things were dreary.

I think that’s behind it. I wanted to make the world feel as visceral as possible and as brief in time as possible. That’s probably what led to that hyper‑reality. It wasn’t punctuated with action‑thriller violence in any way, my time there, but that’s just more of making an entertaining film.

Scott: In the preface before Fade In, you’ve got a quote from Euripides: “Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” Reading the script, I’m thinking, “Well, that’s got multiple layers of meaning.”

Of course, there’s the obvious one with the Foragers, where they’re trying to find these lost people and bring them back, but then there’s also a meaning in relation to one of the two protagonist characters, Juno, in particular, because of the recurring thing that happens.

Let’s talk about the characters and start with Juno. Why is that quote relevant to her as way to open up her backstory?

Sam: I’ve never put a quote in a script before. I’ve always seen in other scripts these quotes compiled on the first page. I genuinely thought to myself, “Oh, that’s so pretentious. I’m never, ever going to do that. I’d never…What does that have to do with the movie?”

I was finding myself in a strange place with this particular script and story that I did want to set the stage in some sense, which is probably what inspired that. I worked through a lot of quotes from different authors and dramatists before settling on the OG of tragedy, Euripides, there.

I feel like Juno, in the same way that I was coping with a loss last year of my grandmother, I wanted to embed that in her character. The idea that grief is something you, in a lot of cases, just live with for the rest of your life.

How you cope with and how you accept that ghost in the background is something I thought would set this apart from maybe other action thrillers and would keep me interested and invested during the writing of it.

Even the very first draft of this, where things come out totally messy, there are plot points that don’t make sense, I cared really deeply about both of these characters.

I wanted Juno to go on this journey of living with her loss. Accepting might not even necessarily be the right word because tragedies happen to us that are unacceptable, but we learn to bear them in a certain way.

I wanted an action thriller but with that grief at the core. I thought that it would also translate strongly to the A story of it all, which is that it’s about finding lost children and would explain their entire motivation and why someone might get into a vigilante‑esque business like this.

Scott: When you introduce her: “Juno, 40s, like the undertow of the Columbia River ahead of her, quiet, powerful, propelled by an endless energy.”

Parenthetically, you’ve got these natural elements that you associated with their introduction, but she’s lost Lucas. Maybe you can talk a bit about that.

Sam: This is a story about two mothers who’ve lost their son, and for reasons that are only almost hinted at beyond an explosive argument that the two of them have, but they’re on this…have lifelong journey to right this wrong that feels existential.

There’s this question of any kid they save could have been Lucas. They’re making that right for anyone else in the state, but there’s this flip side to it of no child they save will ever be Lucas. That is a loss that is solely unique to them.

They’re grappling with it throughout this, and they’re both processing their pain differently. Juno feels that Andi has completely moved on. Andi feels that Juno is totally fixated on a single aspect of this loss, and is not understanding how it’s affecting her.

I think it’s the way that grief or tragedy can cut people in a bunch of different ways, and they’re all unique to them. That’s what’s going on with loss of Lucas. You can tell I clearly was at a university last fall, the way I’m diving way too deep into this thematically.

Scott: Juno sees these images, sometimes she’ll see people and think they might be Lucas. Clearly, that’s a representation that she has not processed her grief, that it’s still quite present, whereas Andi is trying to move forward, right?

Sam: Yeah, exactly. Though, for her, it manifests in this literal thing that she and the audience can see. Then for Andi, it is truly this unseen thing. There’s a brief moment in the second act where you get a sense of what that might feel like from her perspective.

It’s truly…I’m trying to render aspects of that loss or the ways that she might be haunted in a way that everyone can see.

Scott: You threw in a little detail about Juno’s background, where she was on Team USA 2004, and she was a javelin person. That’s one of those little bits of business I wonder whether, did that come up and you went back and reverse engineered, “Oh, she’s going to be a javelin thrower,” or was that something that was part of her backstory and then you paid it off later on when she does the throw with the rock?

Sam: It’s entirely the latter. I really, in figuring out these characters, wanted someone who represented an athletic archetype versus an academic archetype.

I didn’t necessarily want her to be a team sport athlete, something that could pertain to how you interact with the world. Catching, throwing, something like that could be useful in this profession, from her angle. That’s all there is behind that.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Sam discusses the two lead characters in the script and why the journey they take in the story is the one they need to take.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

To read my 2022 interview with Sam about his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Ojek,” go here.

Sam is repped by Rain Media Partners.

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.