Interview (Part 4): Jonathan Levine

My interview with the 2022 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jonathan Levine wrote the original screenplay “Operation Gemini” which won a 2022 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with Jonathan about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Jonathan reveals who his favorite screenwriter is and how that writer’s approach has influenced Jonathan’s screenwriting style.

Scott: There is that truism that nothing defines life more than death. There are people who have served in the military. My father did. My grandfather did. You talk to them, and it really is the intensity of that. The proximity of your own demise at any given moment, there is not anything that can quite replicate that.

You’ve got these two guys who in effect are trying to redefine themselves in a way amidst this harrowing circumstance. That’s a really interesting psychological thing to explore.

Jonathan: The thing that in my questioning and unpacking of, “Why would you go out and do this? What are you trying to fulfill or how are you lost, that going out into this war zone would be something that you would be so gung-ho and determined to do?”

To me, I find it very compelling where it is revealed that Sam basically has a death wish. He has made the choice that he’s living to die. That’s what he wants to do.

Ironically, that was the one part of the script that I was nervous about because it felt very…I don’t know. It felt like if it wasn’t done right, it could seem silly and tonally wrong, or it could make it dark and too weird.

Sam’s journey is from nihilist to optimist, he finds a reason to live. I was nervous about that. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but I needed something. It felt unique. It gave him someplace to go, and it also allowed us to make his journey a little bit different. I hadn’t quite seen that arc done.

Plus I think it’s the anti-war movie arc. I didn’t want them all to die at the end. I feel like in a lot of these stories, by the end of it, the main characters die. They sacrificed themselves for this great cause and they die. To me, I wanted people to read this and walk away with the idea that you can look out for people, you can be selfless, you can go and try to make the world better, and you don’t have to die. [laughs] You can still walk away from it. You can make a difference in the world. You don’t have to die to make that difference.

Talking with a lot of people who’ve read it, executives and producers, a lot of people respond positively to that. They are excited by the fact that he lives, that he shows up at the end and they’re surprised by it.

Scott: There’s a theory that all stories pose this question to the Protagonist: “Who am I?” That’s, I think, what Sam is going through, asking the question of self-identity. He says to someone, “I want to do something. I’m going to make a difference.” Later he says:

“A funny thing happened on the plane ride. I got scared, really scared, that I made a decision I was going to die here. It just took the pressure off the whole thing. It became my mantra. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. It’s very freeing now. I just need to find some awesome way to go. I have nothing to live for except death.”

That is actually quite interesting. It makes me want to know more about his background. How does a guy get to a place like that? It does go right into the face of something that we as human beings, somehow as children moving forward, we accommodate ourselves with the idea that, you know what? We are all born with an expiration date, and yet we get up every day, we go through our lives. But with Sam, it’s like, “OK, look, we are going to die,” and he embraces that. I found that quite interesting. It added a whole level of dimensionality to him that may not have been there. I want to do something selfless.

Jonathan: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that because that was added in the last 72 hours before I had to submit the script. [laughs]

I was nervous people might think that it’s funny and be tonally incorrect. It was an interesting place to take him and an interesting place to land that made it feel a little bit different than a typical war movie.

Scott: Let’s talk about the structure of this story because by the midpoint of act one, Sam and Alvaro have intersected with Kalyna, and they’re in Poland. Her kids are in Ukraine. That’s a very compelling conscious goal. “We’ve got to get these kids.” Now they’re traveling in the opposite direction where everybody else is going.

It’s a great visual way to set up the underdog nature of this story. You talked about finding two needles in a burning haystack, which is a great metaphor. It’s like everybody’s going this way, they’re going that way. The Russians are coming in. It’s just a really tense act two with one complication roadblock or reversal after another.

It reminded me of a quote. It’s one of my favorite quotes. I always tell this to my students. From Janet Fitch, she’s an author. She said, “The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love and we torture them. The more we love them, the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.”

I felt like that’s probably the spirit that you had here because you put these guys through hell and back. Was that an enjoyable experience? All the plot twists and turns were gut-wrenching.

Jonathan: Thank you. That’s a great quote. I knew I wanted her to find her kids in the middle, which feels more like an ending. I wanted her to find the kids in the middle but then realized that it’s not just about finding them. It’s about getting back out.

How do you escape when literally these humanitarian quarters are collapsing? Also, structurally, the big plot points, the big moments in the story from the beginning to the midpoint, are all actual things that happened in the war. The tank battle in Brovary was actually a thing, so I knew I was heading toward that.

Tracking toward actual moments in the war kept me honest when it came to plotting the movie. I wouldn’t lean into anything too conventionally thriller-y, to make anything too over the top or too crazy. I almost felt like I was writing a documentary more than I was writing a feature or a narrative.

Going back to the comment you brought up earlier, a mother searching for her child in the worst possible situations when she just had a C-section when she herself can barely move? That’s all great stuff. [laughs] It’s terrible, terrible, great stuff.

I’ve read a lot of scripts, written a lot of scripts. This script I was like, “I want to make this thing as propulsive as it can be.” I was trying to keep things moving. I had the ticking clock of what actually happened in Ukraine that the characters are driving through. Then as they were exiting the same thing about all the stories I had read about things that the Russians had done or this bridge had collapsed, or this had happened here, or this city had been wiped out. It’s all terrible fodder for something compelling.

Scott: I want to get into the weeds of screenwriting a bit. You have a lot of action scenes. The way you approach them aligns quite appropriately, maybe not the right word, but breaking up paragraphs suggesting individual camera shots: “That paragraph is a shot. This paragraph is a shot.”

Had you read a bunch of scripts and figured that out? Because this does read like an action script.

Jonathan: Well, since this is the appropriate setting to nerd out on screenwriting stuff, let’s talk about that. I am a huge Tony Gilroy fan. I think everybody is a huge Tony Gilroy fan. His Michael Clayton script had a tremendous impact on me.

There’s something about the way that he writes. There’s an energy to everything. He says that you want the reader to feel that the writer knows the world of the movie that they’re writing. You want to sell the tone of the piece in the tone of the writing, and you want to make the reader feel confident they’re in good hands. I’m a big fan of that approach, of that style of writing. Writing in a very aggressive, propulsive, not too cheeky, but maybe cheeky if it’s appropriate way. Double dashes, short sections of action.

At the end of the writing process, all I have is a document, a PDF, that I’m going to give to some random person, and I’ve got to hope that they’ll at least get past page one and maybe keep going.

I don’t like reading huge blocks of text. Why should I expect some poor reader to do that? I’m not going to have huge blocks of text, I’m going to have short lines, I’m going to make it very easy on the reader to keep going and pull people’s eyes down the page.

I print off my first drafts. I like to hold the pages and write on the pages and mark on the pages because I definitely feel there’s something special about holding your script in your hand, having a physical copy of it, helps your brain streamline it. When it’s all digital, you can’t interact with it. It feels very elusive. When it’s in your hands, I make all the corrections by hand on the page and then go in and retype.

You say it’s an action script. Others say it’s a drama. I consider it a thriller, but I think all good scripts are thrillers. In the end, you want to have a mystery be solved and have a little bit of excitement along the way. No matter the genre.

Here is a video of Jonathan’s acceptance speech at the Nicholl awards ceremony:

Tomorrow in Part 5, Jonathan shares what it was like to win a Nicholl screenwriting fellowship.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

Website: infinitivefilms.com.

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