Interview (Part 3): Ward Kamel

My interview with the 2024 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Ward Kamel wrote the original screenplay “If I Die in America” which won a 2024 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Ward about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Ward delves into his approach screenplay structure and the underlying psychological dynamics of the Protagonist in Ward’s Nicholl winning screenplay.

Scott: I want to move off the flashbacks, but one last point about them. The script establishes Manny and Sameer in the early part of the relationship, their past story, where it’s all lovely and beautiful and they’re in the full flesh of the romance.

Then as you go along in the script into other flashbacks, there’s a more nuanced thing happening there. Part of it is that issue about the green card, but there’s something going on with Manny in particular. That has to happen in order to understand what he does with Eren, who is another character, Manny actually has an affair with. Otherwise, that would be like out of the blue. That revelation causes us to ask: Why did Manny, who is in a long-standing relationship with Sameer, have an affair with

Why did he do that? That is one of the things you tried to accomplish in the flashbacks, yes?

Ward: 100 percent. I think it’s also this idea that he’s very guilt-ridden, and he’s going out into the…There’s this adage, that you want to be really, really hard on your protagonists. I think we tend to protect them because they’re to an extent an extension of who we are, but I think the instinct is that you really do want to put them through the wringer.

I think the reason that Manny is put through the wringer is because he’s simultaneously having to play offense and defense. What I mean by that is that he is both having to defend the fact that he really did love Sameer with all his heart because here is his family disenfranchising him of his right to grieve.

We know that he did love Sameer, but at the same time, he’s dealing with the fact that, like you described, he had had an affair and that towards the end, the relationship wasn’t just strawberries and cream. That it was, as most relationships will be, it wasn’t perfect.

I think that tension is really interesting because the thesis statement I think that I’m making is that the relationship doesn’t need to be perfect for someone to have the right to say, “Yeah, but we were still in love. What we had was still loving, and I still have the right to grieve this person.”

It just complicates that because I think that there is a version of this movie where they really did have just this perfect relationship. It’s just simpler in a way that I don’t think is as both realistic and entertaining because you’re putting your protagonist through the wringer but for the wrong reasons.

You never want, at least I find that I don’t want just the bad things to happen to the protagonist, like that’s very passive and that almost is like a little bit masochistic. I want a lot of the pain to be coming from this internal turmoil that they’re having. It’s not that they’re just getting beaten up, and they don’t deserve to be beaten up at all.

In that way, that thread, that mystery that you’re talking about that unfolds in the flashbacks, is coloring every single time he’s having to, in so many words, yell out, “He was my husband, we loved each other.”

There’s also, we’re starting to become privy to the fact that well, towards the end, it was bumpy.

Scott: You say guilt-ridden, and there’s a profound set of circumstances around that. Manny’s trying to tell Sameer this thing. Sameer is hungry. He goes out in the car to get something to eat, and he crashes and he dies. That’s like the midpoint of Act One. It’s a very provocative event.

There is this mystery. Manny finds his phone that’s sitting on the bed and he’s wondering whether Sameer might’ve seen that and may have seen some text chats with this guy, Eren, that he had an affair with.

You plant that seed there. That’s part mystery, and also we understand the guilt because he never did tell the truth to Sameer before Sameer died. Was that always in your mind to have that conjunction of him not being able to tell Sameer, then Sameer dies in the car crash?

Ward: That wasn’t in the half-baked version. I think that something that happened going off the previous one that I was making, when we were making the short, I think I really quickly realized that in the short, it works because it’s so short that Manny is a little bit perfect.

He doesn’t really have this flaw in the short. It’s just this crazy circumstance that happens to him, but he has this loving relationship as far as we can tell. Again, it’s a short, so we don’t get all that much from it, but there’s this one flashback where, even in the flashback, he’s not in the wrong.

Like the flashback essentially just elucidates the fact that, this is just in the short, that Sameer doesn’t do a good job of connecting Manny with his family. I think when I started, what I was struggling with in the feature and what unlocked to me, I think, once I made the short was that it’s really difficult to care about…

It just becomes a little bit exhausting for everything that happens to Manny happening when he’s perfect. It’s brutal. It’s a little bit too much that a lot of it unlocked for me when I realized that he needs to come in with some sort of flaw. He needs to come in with either a vice or something that he’s guilty about or something that he wants to get done or maybe some ulterior motive.

I went through a lot of different iterations, and eventually landed on this idea of like, well, let me pull from experience and really hone in on this idea that these green card situations, like they can add some toxicity to these otherwise loving partnerships.

That toxicity sometimes comes out as one partner acting out by deciding that they want to feel like they still have some agency over their lives. That agency comes out in the form of having an affair. If that were to be something that had been truncated, like he had never confessed it to Sameer, and then Sameer passes.

Then all of a sudden he’s putting up this fight about how much he loved him. At the same time, he’s carrying this secret that he wants to confess, but also knows that confessing would just kill whatever progress he’s making with his in-laws. I started asking myself all those questions. I was like, cool, that’s it. I would watch that movie. I also, more importantly, would want to write that movie.

Scott: Yeah, because it’s bad enough that he had that thing that he never confessed to Sameer, but there’s the toxicity that it surrounds queerness in much of the Islamic tradition. He faces that at one point early on when Dalal, they come because Sameer’s family wants Manny to basically sign off so they can take Sameer’s body back and do what you were just talking about, let’s get him buried as quickly as possible.

Manny is not ready to deal with this at all. I mean, it’s just a shock to the system, obviously, that his husband has died in this crash. Dalal brings, I guess it’s her brother, Khalil, and he says to Manny, “This was not a marriage.” He says it was an arrangement for a green card.

For Manny to express the truth about the affair at ths point would just make it even that much more complicated.

Ward: Absolutely. Manny finds himself in this position where he’s having to defend both his relationship with his husband, but then also to an extent, the validity of queer love, and that this was so much more than an arrangement. It was, and we learned that it was.

That’s also another function that the flashbacks serve is that like early on, we’re not getting all that much of the relationship that there’s a part of you that wants to leave Manny when Manny says, no, this was so much more than an arrangement. This was my husband. We loved each other. Then the flashbacks are proving that to an extent.

But at the same time, Manny now has to put his guilt aside because all of a sudden his main goal in a lot of those scenes is to validate and or provide some validity that no, this was a loving partnership. Queer love is real and this was so much more than an arrangement. I wasn’t taking advantage of your son. Not only was I not taking advantage of your son, I have such a right to grieve him.

He’s, again, it’s that idea of him playing defense and offense. Like he’s put again in this corner, but in doing so, he’s delaying and delaying and being very… reticent, is the word that you used, even though he really needs to confess, he needs to get it out and it’s eating him up inside.

Scott: I doubt you were necessarily thinking about this, but it is a classic hero’s journey. He leaves the Old World and goes to Dubai, the New World. Just like Joseph Campbell says the journey in the outer world is incidental to the journey inward. It’s about transformation. In other words, Manny going to Dubai and confront Sameer’s family forces him to deal with his inner state of disunity.

You just hit on it that Manny’s got this conflict going. He’s got to present himself to the people in Dubai as if they had a perfectly loving relationship in order to push back against the prejudices and biases against the queer love. Yet on the other hand, he’s got this secret that’s just eating away at him that at some point has to come out.

It’s an interesting dynamic that he, as he enters Dubai, that he’s dealing with, as you were saying, offense and defense.

Ward: Yeah. We have flashbacks, so I’m breaking some rules, but I definitely am a screenwriting nerd. Joseph Campbell, like the eight sequences, it does matter a lot to me that.

I think the idea often is you have these tools in your toolbox, you need to learn how to use them so that when you aren’t using them, it’s a conscious decision, or when you’re deciding to break them, you’re doing it on purpose and you’re really aware of what it is that you’re doing “wrong.”

I do think that in a lot of ways I’ve ended up in this position where as specific as this film is and as identity-based as it is, and as culturally relevant as it is or culturally rooted at least as it is, it ultimately is still pretty structured and pretty classically an eight sequence structure.

I feel like I can call out every single eight-sequence beat. That’s what I’m a fan of, but even the acts are pretty clear. I mean, the Act Two break is immediately as soon as he gets on a plane, and that’s about as clear as you can get when it comes to leaving normal world.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Ward talks about some of the other key characters in his script and how he was inspired by the myth of Orpheus.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

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