Interview (Part 3): Sean Malcolm

My interview with the 2019 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Sean Malcolm wrote the original screenplay “Mother” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Sean his background as a screenwriter, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 3, Sean describes what it was like to write a story about a young woman becoming a sniper.

Scott: Let’s talk about those two characters in the script. Farida Mohammed you describe her in the script. A Syrian mother, late 30s, traditional hijab covering her hair and neck, guides her six‑year‑old son Sami, S‑A‑M‑I, through the market at a determined pace. The little boy rushes to keep up, his Real Madrid jersey too large, his mangled flip‑flops nearly tripping on the rocky path. Why don’t you describe, if you could, briefly there the circumstances they find themselves in Aleppo in 2016?

Sean: In the story, her husband owns a small electronics shop. They live in their apartment above the shop. The eastern part of Aleppo has become a rebel‑held neighborhood. They are surrounded by the regime or rebels on all sides, and this is exactly what was happening in mid‑2016. Aleppo was split into two parts. You have the regime‑controlled side and the rebel‑controlled side. Of course, you had people and tribes and different groups that had aligned themselves with one or the other. Then you have people who are caught in the middle of all that. In the story, things have deteriorated, but not to the point where every single person has left.

I think this is one of the things that I tried to show, that I know people around the world watching something like this unfold, maybe they’re asking, “Why don’t they just leave? Why don’t they just get out of there because the neighborhood’s being bombed?” I was asking the same questions.

But there are so many forces that push back against that, whether it’s their home, and they’ve been there their whole life, for generations even. So the desire to defend their home, as I think anyone can identify with, is primal. Also, not having the financial wherewithal or the resources to go somewhere else, or anywhere else to go to that will accept you, and everywhere else around them being either occupied by the regime or rebels. Even if they make it out, they end up in a camp in Lebanon, and don’t have any future anyway, and could easily die.

So the setup is that they’re in this mode where she’s torn, and they could have gotten out if they had maybe left sooner. But now things have deteriorated beyond the point of being able to leave safely. Her father has come to live with them. Her mother has died. Her father is ill, and run out of medicine, which is obviously a common problem in a war zone. He needs it for his heart. Her husband has no choice, takes her father to venture out of eastern Aleppo and trade some electronics to try to get to a working pharmacy on the regime-held side, in order to get his prescription filled or he could die, and then they never return. Now she’s trapped there with just her son. She doesn’t know where her husband and her father have gone. They’ve been captured by the regime, and it just goes downhill from there.

Scott: To add to the problem, there’s an explosion midway through act one, where she’s injured but, more importantly, Sami’s injured, his eye. She goes to the hospital. Then there’s another attack there. By the end of act one, it’s a pretty dire situation. The interesting thing is that you’ve got a pretty simple plot with complex characters, which I think are really the best stories in many ways.

It’s like, “Will these characters survive? Will they reunite?” Was that more of a screenwriter instinct? Do you think that, where you ended up by the end of act one, those dual story lines that you could cross‑cut back and forth to, or was that just something that arose out of your working with the characters?

Sean: That’s a good question. I certainly had my screenwriter hat on. With this particular script, once I hit on her story and combined the two and started laying out the beats, I knew what would be the classic inciting incident was actually going to be the barrel bombing where he’s injured, because remember: back to the photograph and surviving that, that was the genesis of the whole thing. So I knew that was going to happen quickly, around page 10 or 12.

But I knew that I wanted her to have her family in there, and not just start out with the two of them. So the subplot got created for her father. I needed to do something to introduce them then remove them, so you end up sort of having two inciting incidents instead of one. The men leave and get captured, then you’ve got the bombing. Now you have this parallel story track. So that was intentional, also because I didn’t see a way to just do 90 pages of purely her story. I wanted there to be some cross‑cutting, so that it would give some contrast, some periodic relief, and hold out hope, and so there would be that question of whether they would be reunited to help drive the narrative forward.

I also wanted to show some of the reasons why people felt trapped. Because if you tried to leave and you did get captured by the regime, if there was any sense that you had ever resisted and been part of the rebels, you would just be disappeared. You’re left with no other choice but to stay where you are, fight back and try to survive.

It became a very simple survival story for both parallel arcs. With the idea being that there needed to be this flicker of hope of either reunion or escape, so that you could get through the darkness of what was happening to them. You’re right. It’s definitely a double whammy when the hospital gets bombed and then of course, the whole thing that happens in act two, which I’m sure you’re headed towards. But that’s war.

Scott: The husband and her father get taken and imprisoned. Again, you’re cross‑cutting back and forth between these two story lines. One thing that I was very impressed with was that you explore the grays in terms of morality, in terms of character choices.

There doesn’t seem to be any really black or white decisions. I think that’s probably largely just out of the character work you’re doing and then understanding the situation in Syria. I’m wondering, if there’s a subtext at work there, that these individual character choices do reflect these larger complexities of the social circumstances and geopolitical circumstances in the country?

Sean: Well, that’s right. I consciously decided that’s how I wanted to approach it, because I have a personal position about who’s right and who’s wrong at a macro level in this whole war, but the reality is much grayer on the ground. There are atrocities occurring on all sides.

Part of what makes it so difficult, and we saw this from the U.S., is wanting to get involved but not knowing what to do, not knowing who to trust. It’s just completely gray, and alliances can be formed and then dissolved. You’ve got terrorists taking advantage of the rebel situation. Some of the rebels are terrorists.

I knew that trying to paint a binary, black and white, these are the “good guys” and those are the “bad guys” was not anywhere close to the reality on the ground. I also wanted it to be more of a human story, that could maybe transcend this particular war, and be a story about the survival of a mother and child, that could maybe be transplanted to a different war or a different era and still have the same meaning. So the principles would be universal and still be true. For that reason, even though I wanted to make it factually accurate — and I did a lot of research to support it ‑‑ I didn’t want to focus too much on the politics. In order to diffuse the politics, I made sure everyone had a bit of conflicted perspectives and choices.

In fact, there’s something you find out in the end about her husband, and the fact that he actually has been providing some support to the rebels. They haven’t just been sticking it out solely for the purpose of their own survival, and that’s something which she wasn’t even a party to. So even at that level of their own marriage, there was some deception and conflict. Of course, the biggest conflict being her own internal one: you have a religious, pious woman who ends up becoming a killer.

Here is a video featuring the 2019 Nicholl winning writers receiving word of their awards

Tomorrow in Part 4 of my interview, Sean talks about the carefully orchestrated stages the story’s Protagonist goes through to become a sniper.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

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

For my interviews with 53 Black List writers, go here.