Interview (Part 4): Jennifer Archer

My interview with the 2022 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jennifer Archer wrote the original screenplay “Into the Deep Blue” which won a 2022 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Jennifer 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 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Jennifer reflects on happy endings and a wonderful runner in the script involving a baton.

Scott: Alex does serve a really important narrative function there in that she’s forcing him to move forward with this insurance claim. Similarly with Fiona. She’s got this friend, May, who meets Nick finally. They’re invited to a party. Then she finds him attractive. She has a moment with Fiona where she’s saying, “I thought there was a little spark there. If you don’t mind, would you have anything going on with him romantically?”

Fiona says, “No. It’s fine.” We then discover Fiona does have feelings. Is it fair to say that May exists as a way to force Fiona?

Jennifer: She makes her come to terms with her feelings, for sure.

Scott: It’s interesting how this all is organic, but if you step outside and look at it from a structural standpoint in terms of why the characters exist, you can start to see those dynamics there. Because you came at it from an organic way, the characters are lively, vibrant, and unique. Nick is an aspiring writer.

Jennifer: Mmhmm.

Scott: You get a personal point of connection there. You get this wonderful runner in the story. I’m just curious where this came from. Fiona asks Nick from time to time, “Happy ending this for me.” Where did that come from? Just that idea. It’s repeated like three times.

Jennifer: It is repeated. I don’t know where that came from. It started in the book. It’s something that came out once through stream of conscious writing. Sometimes you have an idea that comes out once and you’re like, “I’m going to latch onto this and it’s going to repeat.” It really becomes a coping mechanism for both of them.

Scott: That’s one of those, the magic of writing. Wrangling magic. It’s a lovely thing. It works very wonderfully in the story. There’s a theme that because of the happy ending thing, it probably ties into that, strikes me that happiness is a theme in this story. It’s an existential question.

Nick actually says to Grace, the therapist, “I don’t know, Grace. I think happiness is an illusion. It’s a product manufactured in books and movies, and everyone buys into this idea that it’s an attainable life goal but it’s all really pain management.” That’s him starting off pretty early in the process.

Were you conscious that there is this theme of happiness? Is it possible? If so, how conscious were you of that in the writing of the script?

Jennifer: Very conscious of it. Life throws us so many curveballs. I think everyone goes through phases of questioning this idea of happiness.

Scott: It feels to me like there’s these layers going on there. There’s probably some survivor’s guilt that’s underneath the anger and the looming depression. Out of that perhaps, do we deserve to be happy? Not like it even is it possible, but do we even deserve it? That’s a complicating factor in terms of their budding romance, isn’t it?

Jennifer: They each have so many issues. In the beginning, there’s not a lot of room for them to even recognize their feelings for each other because they’re dealing with so much independently.

Scott: I don’t want to give away the specifics of it, but the arc of it, these flawed, frail people living with trauma and tragedy, can they find happiness? Can they recognize what they have inside, which is these feelings for each other? Are they going to finally get through this balancing between the grieving storyline and the romance storyline?

One thing that was interesting is you got a set of objects along the way. I call them talismans, physical objects with a symbolic meaning. They’re symbolic of their moms and the attachments, almost like negative attachments because they can’t move forward.

For example, there’s Nick’s mother bucket list, which she got halfway through and didn’t finish. There’s a fancy bottle of Fiona’s mother’s skin cream, which she keeps. There’s Fiona’s mother’s camera with some photos.

There’s a dramatic scene that speaks to this thing about objects in the story where at one point, Fiona deconstructed. I think this is after when she’s really frustrated that May’s seeing Nick, and Nick hasn’t responded. In the script, it says, “Fiona sits at her desk. A gymnastics photo holding a trophy next to her proud mom beside her. She can’t breathe. She tugs at her shirt.

“She puts the photo on the floor. The entire room closes in on her. The trophies, ribbons, all of it. She eviscerates the room. She pulls everything down, tosses it all in a bag. She even rolls up the rug and removes her blue duvet cover. She empties her desk, pushes it into the hall, carries the empty drawers outside to the curb and drops them.”

It’s like a symbol of trying to disassociate yourself or disconnect from those attachments. Is that something you were conscious of, or again is that an organic thing?

Jennifer: I was conscious of that. She reaches a point where she’s feeling the weight of all of these memories and these reminders of what her life was, and she wants a clean slate. She’s trying to figure out who she is now.

Scott: Another one of those objects that I thought was an effective one is the baton.

Jennifer: I love the baton. [laughs]

Scott: I do too, because at one point, he’s so frustrated. Nick does write a series of these little victims statements, but he keeps erasing them and ends with a great line on which I won’t mention.

One of these more honest ones he says is, “To the airline industry, you guys fucked me. You fucked her happy ending because if she was alive, there was a solid chance she would have left to him, her husband.

“You know what that bucket list was, a countdown, and every time she crossed off another number, she was that much stronger, that much closer to making, and I wanted her to make it. You stole her happy ending. Where does that leave me? Now I have to pick up the baton because I still have a shot.

“Maybe I can be the one who makes it. Maybe I can have the happy ending. How can I do that South American Airlines? When the baton lies and ruins somewhere in the middle of the Amazon, what am I supposed to run with?”

You have this thing which is going to races. Later on, he’s in a hotel and this kid’s playing in the pool. It’s a baton.

I thought it was such a great symbol. It’s like, “Are you going to carry your mother’s story or are you going to be free?” You were talking about Fiona. Do your own story. That’s what’s going on with that, isn’t it?

Jennifer: Absolutely. The baton idea came out through free writing when I wrote his monologue. Then later on, when the pool scene came up, I was like, “OK, so there’s this kid in the pool, and what is he doing?”

I thought, “Oh, man, that’s perfect. That’s so good.” That whole scene is symbolic to Nick on so many levels and it worked beautifully.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Jennifer talks about what it was like to win the Nicholl and news about her script set up as a movie project.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

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

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.