Interview (Part 3): Lindsay Michel

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for her script Caravan.

Lindsay Michel wrote the screenplay Caravan which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Lindsay about her creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Lindsay reflects on some of the key characters in the script including the female Protagonist.

Scott: Let’s dig more deeply in your story’s characters. Nasreen, the protagonist. We know she had this experience with her father who left. She said hurtful words to him. She’s living with that guilt. How else would you describe her character at the beginning of the story?

Lindsay: She’s very distrustful of other people. She’s very alone, despite the fact that she’s been in this one town for eight years. She’s scrappy and resourceful. She’s taking care of herself and looking out for herself and not interested in getting involved with other people, almost like a drifter, but she’s not drifting.

I wanted to her to feel like she fit with the monster, and the monster is fueled basically by distrust. So Nasreen is already an inherently very distrustful person.

Scott: She is ten months behind her rent.

Lindsay: Yes. She is ten months behind on her rent.

I just wanted to show her as existing in a way that we haven’t seen women in the year 600 on‑screen before, where she’s working in a roofing crew and getting into altercations with the innkeeper and having to throw elbows at people and survive by the skin of her teeth.

Scott: There’s one moment where someone says, “Couldn’t you be doing something else?” She’s like “What? Spreading my legs?”

Lindsay: That’s what we would expect if this were a blockbuster in the year 2005. That’s how we would meet Nasreen, she’d be working in a brothel. I wanted her to do something other than that.

Scott: She has an instrument her father gave her, an ocarina. Can we talk about that?

Lindsay: Basically it’s a representation of all her pain and her attachment to her father and the emotions surrounding that.

When I’m writing I try to think, “Can I come up with an object that represents what the protagonist is going through?” Their relationship to this object becomes one more way to drive home the different stages of their journey.

I think the ocarina is like a cheat, but hopefully, it works emotionally.

Scott: A talisman, an object with symbolic meaning.

Lindsay: Totally.

Scott: So Nasreen, she’s stuck in this situation. She’s in this town and waiting for her father for eight years. Then Simon and Michael show up. Could you talk a bit about those two characters?

Lindsay: They’re actually based on real Byzantine monks who, during the Tang Dynasty, stole silkworms from China and smuggled them to the Byzantine Empire. They wanted to develop a silk farm of their own in Byzantium, so that Byzantium would not have to trade with China in order to get silk, because it was this wildly expensive commodity that no one else had, that China had a total monopoly on.

I found that story while researching and it really stuck with me, so I wanted to incorporate it in some way, and that’s how Simon and Michael came about. Simon was also partially inspired by Marco Polo, who lived in the 1500s, so not quite [laughs] Tang Dynasty, but in spirit…

Scott: Michael is an actual priest, right?

Lindsay: Yeah, Michael is a monk.

Scott: A monk.

Lindsay: It’s monks who would’ve been traveling and proselytizing at this time. They were probably some of the most well‑traveled people in the 600s because they were trying to convert people to Christianity, so they would go out to these “heathen” kingdoms, these pagan kingdoms to try and spread the word of God.

In this instance, it serves as a neat cover for Michael to sneak into the Tang Dynasty and steal silk worms. Simon is along to keep him from getting killed, as a sort of 7th century travel guide. When we meet them, they’re very close, almost brothers, and they trust each other implicitly because they’ve been traveling together for half a decade just on this one journey.

Scott: There’s a bamboo cane.

Lindsay: Yes, they smuggle the silk worms in a hollow bamboo cane.

Scott: Silk. Is there anything more than just the fact that it’s an interesting narrative device or is there some metaphorical something going on for you there with it?

Lindsay: Not so much metaphorical. What I wanted was to create this sense of distrust in the caravan already, before the demon arrives and starts doing its demon things. So the silk worms were a way to do that — Li-Peng, who’s a Tang official, is already tearing the group apart looking for thieves, making people look at each other suspiciously, when the action really starts.

Scott: From a historical standpoint, China was really protective of silkworms?

Lindsay: Oh yeah, it was illegal to export them. They would search travelers. They had Silk Road checkpoints. When you were leaving China, they would make sure you didn’t have any contraband on you and, of course, charge you taxes and shake you down a little bit. Silk worms were like, the exclusive property of the ruling dynasty.

Also, they’re extremely hard to keep alive. They’re very, very finicky in terms of their environs and how warm and humid they like it. Probably these silkworms would have died crossing the desert in “Caravan.” I left that part out. Either way, very tricky to get your hands on a silk worm.

Scott: Right there, there’s an object lesson that historical truth and emotional truth, and at some point, you got to be able to diverge from facts to tell the story you need to tell.

Lindsay: I’m a believer that if the audience knows you’re lying, you should tell the truth, but if it’s something that they’re not going to know about, you can do whatever you like.

Scott: You’ve got Michael and Simon. Of course, Simon, actually, at first I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be a romance subplot,” but Simon’s character evolves more into a surrogate father type figure, right?

Lindsay: Yeah, I had intended him to be, for Nasreen, a stand‑in for her dad because thematically, of course, she’s going through all of this stuff with her father. So I wanted Simon there as someone she could talk to and get at that emotional pain out loud.

Of course, through the writing process, he got his own ideas about what he should be saying and doing.

Scott: That goes back to that Jung observation: “it happens outside as fate.” All of the characters emerge in your process, you’re doing it creatively and they’re bubbling up, but they all serve Nasreen’s journey.

Lindsay: I think there’s some ‑‑ I forget where I read it ‑‑ quote about screenwriting, where you take your protagonist and break them down into pieces, and then all the other characters should be reflections of one of these pieces.

If they’re working through guilt, there’s one character who’s overcome with guilt. If they think they’re a terrible person, there’s a character who is the exact person they’re scared of becoming or something like that. Obviously, you can’t do that with every character all the time, but it’s a good jumping‑off point, I think.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Lindsay discusses how she felt writing a horror story with a lot of violence.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, here.

Kevin is repped by Bellevue Productions.

Twitter: @mintymichel

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