Interview (Part 3): Jonathan Levine

My interview with the 2022 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jonathan Levine wrote the original screenplay “Operation Gemini” which won a 2022 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with Jonathan 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 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Jonathan discusses the central characters in “Operation Gemini,” some of whom are inspired by real life individuals.

Scott: I’ve read tons of interviews where writers say the stories they write are really the ones that they are intuitively drawn toward.

Jonathan: Ironically, I discovered months after submitting “Operation Gemini” that I have a great-grandfather who was born in Ukraine, so maybe on some level my lineage was driving me to write this story.

Scott: It’s almost like The Hero’s Journey. The journey they take is the journey they need to take. It’s like the writers. The writers, the stories that they write are the stories they need to write. Your wife made an interesting observation.

Jonathan: She did. I’m trying to apply that looking ahead to the next things that I’m working on, because I still have a day job, still busy. I’m keeping myself open to having an emotional response to material. That’s the difference in my approach, post-Nicholl, and pre-Nicholl. Pre-Nicholl was very intellectual. Post-Nicholl is more emotional.

Scott: It’s a thrilling story, but it’s more of an Action Drama. That was an interesting departure, I suppose for you. Let’s talk about these three characters. You’ve already mentioned Sam, who’s the Protagonist of the story, but it’s all about this woman, the mother.

Jonathan: Kalyna.

Scott: The war breaks out. Kalyna’s with her husband. Now she’s going to have these twins. Talk about her character, the evolution of that character in your story-crafting process from hearing a real-life story on the radio to becoming the Kalyna character in your script.

Jonathan: For me, there’s a lot of my experience as a parent, my wife’s experience as a parent. That inherent fear about being a parent, but then instinctual drive to protect your children at all costs. There’s this theme in this script where everybody’s telling her what she should and shouldn’t be doing as a parent.

You encounter that all over the place as a parent. Do you have kids?

Scott: Yeah, two.

Jonathan: What ages are your kids?

Scott: They’re grown. 31 and 21.

Jonathan: There you go. It’s like everybody when you first have kids, everybody’s telling you, “We do it this way, or do it that way.” Especially the COVID-ness of the world and the question about COVID and kids and protecting your kids from the world. It was all funneled into Kalyna and the way I wrote her.

She serves as the Bill Paxton character of the movie, which I always think the Bill Paxton character is the guy who is the audience, the guy who is constantly asking questions, “What are you doing? Are you crazy? This is what’s going to happen if you do this cray thing!” She serves as that voice and you get to talk about Ukrainian people and what the city was before and after.

Giving her the background in mathematics as this professor, it was a way to play into the theme about the idea that the world can go crazy, but if everybody cares about each other, there is this undefinable factor: People looking after one another, nobody can underestimate the power of that.

She represents that both literally as a statistics professor, but also in the way that finding two needles in a haystack when the haystack’s on fire is [laughs] impossible. Her determination makes it possible and her gut as a parent to know the connection with her children that can help her find her way. If you care about your children, that’s enough. [laughs] If that drives what you’re doing, then that’s enough.

Scott: I’m a huge fan of Pixar and I’ve done a lot of research on them. They never green-light anything unless they have a very specific understanding of what’s the emotional connection the audience is going to make. You can’t get much more emotional than a mother who’s trying to save her children. It’s primal.

She may be intellectual, she may be very well-schooled, but once she gets separated from her children which is what happens, there’s an attack where the children are born. She wakes up and all of a sudden she’s in Poland and as it turns out, her husband was killed in the attack. The twins aren’t there.

She’s got to find her way in, way back. Now, that brings us to Sam. He’s an American. He shows up in the Ukraine. What were you going for with this character?

Jonathan: Sam is an amalgamation of all these different stories that I heard about civilians who traveled to Ukraine. Some of them did have some military background, but a lot of them felt a calling. I talk about this in the script. Sam does have his family he can’t be with them now because they’re so freaked out by COVID.

He’s not married, he doesn’t have any kids. His business has gone under because of the pandemic because nobody wants to let an electrician into their house, especially when they can just go online and look up how to do things. He’s searching for meaning. He’s this broken character and he goes there hoping that his life will matter. That he can make his life matter.

Even though he has no idea what he’s doing when [laughs] it comes to being in a war zone. There’s some fun humor that comes out of that.

I also found it very compelling in the context of a war movie to have a character who goes into the war zone, who has no business being in the war zone. No connection to it at all.

What kind of people go head first into the war? That’s very interesting to me. What part of your life has led you to feeling that you would take that risk and take that chance?

At the same time, I didn’t want to make it seem like this is like, an American is going to come in and save the Ukrainian people. I tried to poke fun at that by having the Ukrainian military make fun of him by spouting off all the famous action movie lines from “Die Hard”.

Plus, it wasn’t just Americans coming. It was people from all over Europe and all over the world coming over to help.

Scott: Of the primary characters, I guess it’s almost like a partner. This Alvaro.

Jonathan: Alvaro. Yeah.

Scott: Alvaro does have a military background. In fact, at one point, he poses that question to Sam, which is the question that you played as a mystery because Sam doesn’t answer this until late in the story. Alvaro says:

“I have the training. What the hell are you doing here, Sam? Are you a crazy war enthusiast? Did you murder someone and now you’re running from the police? Or do you just want to get high on those pills you’ve got? Drive people around, watch things explode. Do you even know?”

Alvaro, at least has his military background. Of course, he’s got even though it was a very foreshortened one, and he had this injury in which he’s got a replacement leg.

Talk a bit about Alvaro and how those two guys are essentially partnered together.

Jonathan: Alvaro, like Sam, is broken and lost. He missed his chance to be a hero. His whole family is ex-military and this accident happened and now he thinks he’s worthless.

He’s coming out to find his own purpose and do something that matters and to show the world that he may be handicapped, but he’s not. Don’t count him out.

It seemed like an interesting couple, an interesting dynamic with these two guys who didn’t know each other except for six days ago and they met in the airport, waiting in line to rent a van. Now they’re trying to be these heroes.

They may be ill prepared but hopefully the audience roots for them because they’re coming out from such a pure and hopeful and selfless place.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Jonathan reveals who his favorite screenwriter is and how that writer’s approach has influenced Jonathan’s screenwriting style.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

Website: infinitivefilms.com.

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