Interview (Part 3): 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 3 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, 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.

Scott: Let’s talk about these two central characters, Sonya and Del. This is essentially an adaptation. It’s fantastical in nature, but you’re adapting an aspect of your own life. How challenging was that for you to fictionalize these characters and give them over to their own story universe, and yet at the same time, draw upon your own personal experiences with your father?

Kate: Writing Del’s character was really fun for me because it felt like I got to reincarnate my dad. But writing Sonya’s character was incredibly difficult because I had to step back from my own experience and get enough perspective to track the lessons she needed to learn.

Scott: How would you describe Del and his personality? How would you describe Sonya?

Kate: For Del, I would say he’s a jokester. He’s larger than life. He’s a dreamer who never really got to live out his dreams. He has a lot of regrets but if there’s one thing he’s proud of it’s being a dad.

For Sonya, she’s awkward and nerdy. She has lived as her dad’s sidekick for most of her life and she hasn’t ever had to step out on her own because her dad has always been there to help her.

Scott: Circling back to what you said earlier, both of them have a need. For her, to be able to accept the fact that her father’s dying. For him, to feel like she’s going to be okay when he’s gone.

Let’s talk about the opening scene. You drop us into the story where Sonya is literally attempting to insert a catheter needle into Del’s penis. Very awkward, very strange, and very funny. Was that always there as your opening scene?

Kate: No, originally it was a scene where Sonya was making her dad green juice. But I wanted to show their closeness and I also wanted to capture the ridiculous extremes of cancer. There is a lot of comedy in the human body falling apart.

Scott: I don’t know if you saw that movie 50/50. It was originally called “I’m with Cancer.” It’s funny, but also about someone dealing with cancer. Your script does the same thing and right from the beginning. The catheter penis thing. Then you cut outside to see there’s a cow on a city street peering up at Del’s bathroom window.

So from page one line one, we know the story is dealing with someone who’s got cancer. Death looming there. Yet it’s humorous because of this awkward catheter business. And also fantastical because of the cow on the street. Three, four pages, boom. This is what the story is about, this is the tone of the story. I thought it was a really effective opening.

Kate: Thank you.

Scott: Sonya and Del go on a short wheelchair-bound trek to the hospital to get the test results from the latest chemotherapy round. Del’s resistant about going into the hospital. Along the way, they see this cow. There’s your call to adventure, your inciting incident. Del is enamored of this cow.

When they get to the hospital, that’s when you’re talking about earlier, there’s a line of scene description where he’s like, “Let’s go find the cow. Let’s go find the cow.” In the script, it says, “Sonya stares at her dad. He’s been waiting his whole life for an adventure like this, and he’s pumped.” That really speaks to this idea that he wanted to do something Don Quixote-like. Is that right?

Kate: Right.

Scott: Again, you’ve got a classic hero’s journey structure there. By the end of Act 1, there’s a clear goal: find the cow, save the cow. Did you always have that story structure in mind? By the end of act one, the duo would have this in mind — to find the cow and save it?

Kate: Pretty much. In the very beginning of the writing process, it was more of an ensemble film. I was thinking the movie would be about all these different people that the cow touches. But then I had to peel all that away because I knew that was just me dancing around the meat of the story, which was going to be harder to tackle because it’s more personal.

Scott: Maybe it was a benefit to you because the family of characters, if you will, that exists in the story around Del and Sonya are all very colorful and specific, and feel like they have their own protagonist experience. For example, there’s this wild renegade taxi driver named Wormhole. How would you describe her and how did she emerge in your creative process?

Kate: Wormhole is an encouraging voice for the sacredness of the cow. She started off as South-Asian and was inspired by the band “Bloodywood” which is this amazing metal band from New Delhi. But I didn’t want her to be a stereotype, so I made her a straight-edge vegan Hindu wannabe.

Scott: She plays an important role, you said the word “encourager,” in that she encourages Del and Sonya to think more broadly about what the cow means.

There is also a nemesis character Ralph, who’s the butcher. How would you describe his character?

Kate: He’s living life by rote, doing everything that’s expected of him. He’s following in his dad’s footsteps. He’s taking over the family business. Then he has this major screw-up, which is the cow gets loose under his watch. He’s got to get it back to restore his reputation with his family.

He’s still living in the basement of his family home, surrounded by all his childhood toys. Like Sonya, he’s stunted. The runaway cow gives both of them the opportunity to break out of their box.

Scott: I had that same thought, that both Ralph and Sonya are, as you say, stunted. When the cow escapes, you give Ralph a specific goal, a plus from a pragmatic screenwriting perspective. It’s akin to a cop losing their gun. That’s the worst thing a cop can have happened to them, right? They lose their gun. That’s shameful. He loses the cow…

Kate: Yes, exactly. [laughs] That is so great.

Scott: At first, the way the script treats Ralph feels like in the vein of Pink Panther movies where you mess with the bad guy. Ralph breaks a copying machine, so now he has to buy it. He gets multiple tickets from a cop. So at first, we may think, “Oh, the writer is having fun messing with the guy, that’s funny.” But I think what you’re doing is humanizing him, we start to feel sorry for him. And that lays the groundwork for an inversion of his character where by the end, he becomes an ally to Sonya.

Did you always have that in mind that this character was going to have that arc, or was that something that evolved in writing the character as well?

Kate: I always imagined that at the beginning of the film, Sonya and Del have this cloud over them and that when the cow gets loose, that cloud blows onto Ralph, and he gets their bad luck, but I love what you said that it humanizes him.

I think that’s so beautiful. I’d never thought of it like that, but I think the revision process was finding him as a real character and finding the depth in his plight.

As I was writing it, I was like, “What are they going to do with the cow? How are they going to save the cow?” I tried out a bunch of different solutions, but I knew that ultimately the answer was going to be with Ralph because, thematically, Sonya has to face death, and that’s the butcher.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Kate talks about the cow as an active character in her story “The Cow of Queens.”

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, 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.