Interview Part 3: Jane Therese

My interview with the 2020 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jane Therese wrote the original screenplay “Sins of My Father” which won a 2020 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Jane 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 3 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Jane delves into the complex relationships between the Protagonist (Imogen) and her abusive father (Brendan).

Scott: You mentioned that you had this epiphany, when you’re at the Athena IRIS Screenwriting group, victims are groomed. There’s Bridget, who is Imogen’s mother. Could you unpack the nature of that relationship a bit and how she was…literally in the script you talked about her grooming her daughter?

Jane: I know some women and which is where I drew this from not personal experience, but the experience of that kind of a woman. We have it when women who have children and their marriages are not working, where they get involved in a relationship and maybe the child isn’t received as well as they had wanted the child to be received with a partner. Let’s put it that way.

The mother who is invested obviously in this relationship, she’s had these children, but she’s also competing with her older daughter, who’s a child, for the father’s attention. She didn’t know what to do. She’s just as repulsed as anybody else and it’s a sickness. It was also culturally accepted for a very long time in Ireland.

The Catholic Church was there, turning their back, understanding that the only way this country is going to be populated is we may have some scenarios like incest. You’re talking hundreds of years ago, but culturally ingrained, and maybe not practiced as much as it was, but it’s also something that’s in the culture and handed down through generations.

With this being said, Bridget is not part of that culture in her family, but knowing this culture exists, happens upon this in her marriage as a very rude awakening and caught up in something in the beginning that was unacceptable. She left. All around she couldn’t deal, but she didn’t go far because when Imogen goes back to court, she sees her daughter’s photo. She does go out of curiosity to Imogen, but once again, just to see how things were wasn’t really to be a part of her life, that Bridget would never be a part of Imogen’s life.

Scott: A part of this is the patriarchy. That’s probably tied in, though you don’t get into it at all, the Catholic Church, but that kind of male dominated society. There is this don’t rock the boat mentality, like her sister Colleen at first. Then some of these other characters, they take out their anger toward Imogen or even bringing this up.

Jane: Right. I do set it in a time in the 90s in Dublin. It was toward the end of the troubles where the Protestants and the Catholics, they were going through that part of history.

We do have that on the outskirts, as far as theology, and how that is ingrained in that culture. Once things start bubbling up, Colleen, her sister begins to experience these thoughts. Memories are repressed, so certain triggers bring out those memories. Then to find out that her brother has taken on the role that the father had with their niece, awakens everybody in the family.

Scott: Let’s talk about Eugene, the brother. You got these three siblings Imogen, Eugene and Colleen. Colleen has basically repressed this stuff, but Eugene, talk about his character.

Jane: Eugene is the middle child, and he has been caught up with the sexualness of just being a teenager and a boy. He notices things are going on in the home. It leads us to believe that he’s been spying on Imogen.

It’s not so much his spying on Imogen, but watching his father, and how the father behaves in the family. He’s taken that because it’s a learned behavior as well as anything else, but not just because it’s learned, it’s ingrained and has done those things to his family and his child.

It’s a huge complicated family with a lot of their own individual realizations, awakenings, awareness of what really their childhood was a like. Once they all started to look at it for what it was, just realize that the house of cards is tumbling quickly. There’s no saving anybody.

Scott: I have a theological background. As I was reading the script, I was reminded of the Catholic idea of sins of commission and sins of omission.

Eugene is an example of someone who is engaged in sins of commission that he is behaving in a way that was taught to him by his father. He’s committing these acts consciously, setting aside the sort of conflicted psyche he may have about that.

On the other hand, Imogen’s mother has departed. She has no maternal representative there to help her. Her sins, if you will, are omission. When her daughter, Ane, it’s 15, that’s when her own maternal self starts to come out irrespective of the vacuum that Bridget created by leaving.

So it appears she’s now leaning into and embracing her own maternal self to help her daughter not suffer the consequences that she did.

Jane: That is an extremely fair assessment. I think, Eamon, Imogen’s husband to his credit, bringing Imogen and bringing Ane at a very young age and being a father figure to not only Ane, as a small child, but a father figure, not age-wise, but behavior-wise.

It’s something that she could look at and model and go, “OK, this is normal.” Even in the back of her mind, she might have some thoughts about Eamon as far as…”I didn’t want to explore that because I didn’t want it to be something that Eamon was guilty of or anything like looking towards at Ane and or anything like that. I wanted it completely normal.”

Both of these women have had a taste of normalcy. When Imogen’s emotions and these triggers happen, she at least has the foundation or her backside up against what she knows to be a normal model, if that makes any sense.

Instead of leaving a home of abuse going into abusive relationships, abuse, abuse, abuse, which, yes, does happen, she was able to go into a family where there was love and nurture.

That’s what was able to give Imogen that strength not only being the mother to a 15‑year‑old Ane, but also being in a family unit. That was a positive.

Scott: Yet it’s so complex, because once Eamon understands what’s going on, then see how Imogen acts toward Brendan. There’s a scene in the grocery store with a bay leaf, the spice, after she’s already may have known the legal processes are started and Brendan knows this.

They have a conversation, but it’s like two people who are talking about spices. Eamon has to live with the fact that she actually invited this guy into the house and how does he deal with that, and so it’s just this whole layers of complexity going on there.

Jane: Right, yeah, he has a lot. He gets into his little state of denial too. Towards the end, he’s like, “I didn’t ask you. I should have asked him, but I didn’t ask you any of this,” because I felt like it wasn’t important. He almost admits that it doesn’t matter what you say to me, just if I asked you a question, just answer it. I don’t even care what the answer is.

There’s so many things going on. I don’t know what to do with it. He, at that point, just sits back because Imogen has a moment with her cousin, or is it her cousin, Grace? She has a row with her.

Eamon doesn’t butt in. She’s just in the kitchen drinking a beer watching it all crumble around them and just giving Imogen her space, and that’s tough. That’s tough. He really has to hold himself back on a lot of accounts. Meanwhile, he has to come to the term said his wife was raped over and over again by the father. That’s tough.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Jane explores what it was like to write such a complex Nemesis figure: Brendan, the abusive father.

IMDb

Jane’s Website

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, 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.