Interview (Part 4): Karen McDermott

My interview with the 2019 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Karen McDermott wrote the original screenplay “Lullabies of La Jaula” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Karen about her background as a screenwriter, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to her.

Today in Part 4, Karen burrows down into the key characters in her original screenplay.

Scott: Let’s get the alignment of the key characters. Dahlia’s family, there’s Mami.

Karen: Yes. Her arc mirrors the story of La Llorona. Like Maria of the folktale, Mami is married to a man who betrays her, leaves her for another woman — and as a result, she loses her children.

Scott: Felipe is Dahlia’s brother, and Abuela is her grandmother. Is that right?

Karen: Yes.

Scott: Could you describe the situation that exists whereby, the midpoint of Act One, they decide they’ve got to go to the United States?

Karen: I knew I wanted them to cross the border, but I wanted to avoid the cliché: they have to cross to escape the cartel. We’ve seen that so many times; I didn’t want that to be the reason. So since this is a story about family separation, I started with a family already partially separated.

The husband, Vicente, has “gone ahead” to the U.S. and has promised to send for his family. But they’ve been waiting for years. Felipe, who is 16, misses his dad so much that he creates this ruse: he pretends that the cartel has threatened him — to force his family to cross the border. He just wants to reunite with his dad.

Scott: Vicente?

Karen: Yeah, Vicente.

Scott: So the family crosses in order to try and reunite with the father figure.

Karen: Yes. Mami arranges this dangerous border crossing because she thinks the cartel is after her son. (It’s not.)

Another thing I’m trying to get at here, with the idea of the cartel not being the bad guys, is the theme of misperception. Misperception of danger occurs throughout the screenplay. Characters think something is dangerous that’s harmless. Or they think something is harmless that’s dangerous.

Misperception is at the heart of America’s problem with immigration, I think. We misperceive. We see danger where it doesn’t exist. And we don’t see it where it does.

Scott: Is it fair to say this misperception thing, that there are people out there who support this policy. They think that these kids are being taken care of.

Karen: Right. These kids are fine… Caging them is fine, placing them with American families is fine. But Dahlia is NOT fine.

Scott: How early on in the process were you hitting on that theme?

Karen: When I decided I wanted to avoid the cliché of a Mexican family fleeing some drug cartel, I thought, “What if they think the cartel’s after them but it’s not?” Then I thought, “Okay, maybe that can be a recurring theme.”

Then I tried to build it into other scenes. In one instance of misperception, Dahlia is warned about a boy in the cage, JuanAlberto. She’s told that he’s a gangster. But he’s not. He’s a hero, a protector.

Another misperception is by Dahlia’s American foster mother. She buys an abstract Azteca painting because she likes its pretty colors. She can’t see what it depicts: a coyote tearing apart its prey. She misperceives. She can’t see the danger right in front of her.

Scott: I know in your Nicholl speech you talked about how, I’m assuming many of your students, from your speech, at Cal State are Spanish‑speaking primarily. I mean, is their background Hispanic?

Karen: Yeah. Most aren’t first generation but they’re second, third‑generation Mexican.

Scott: You used them, in a way, as a development team.

Karen: Yes. [laughs] I did.

Scott: How much of what their stories are about, their writing or their discussions with you influenced your…?

Karen: The story that JuanAlberto tells Dahlia about how he lost his foot was based on a conversation I had with a student. He came to see me during my office hours to talk about his essay, and we started talking about his border crossing.

He was from El Salvador, and he talked about the “street bosses” there. One particular boss liked to show off his fancy car by cruising through the streets. Kids playing soccer (football) in the street annoyed him. So he put out the word: the next kid caught playing in the street is going to lose a foot. And so… I remember, he said, “After that, no more kids in the street.” And I thought that was such a powerful story. So that became JuanAlberto’s story.

Scott: How much research did you do into the coyotes and all that?

Karen: Talking to my students about it gave me more detail than I needed. Really awful stuff. I didn’t use a lot of it because I thought it would make for an unwatchable movie.

I asked them things like, “What would a 14-year-old girl carry when crossing the border?” They said, “A backpack. But in Mexico it’s not like here, where you get a new backpack every year. She’s probably still going to have the one she had when she was six.” So I gave Dahlia a Dora the Explorer backpack.

I’d be working on the script at night, then come in with questions the next day. Originally, I wrote a scene where the coyote tries to negotiate a deal with Dahlia’s mother. He says, “If you give me 15 minutes with your daughter behind that rock, I’ll take you the rest of the way.” But when I ran that by my students, they said, “No. No. He wouldn’t ask. He would tell her he’s going to take her daughter behind the rock. They never ask.” So I rewrote.

Scott: One of those things a scriptwriter needs to hit is that sense of verisimilitude, that it feels authentic. The script feels completely authentic. It had a major benefit from your students. I really like this idea of a mantra I heard years ago about screenwriting, which is, simple plot, complex characters.

Dahlia being separated from her mother, that’s a very simple plot in that respect. She’s just trying to find her mother but there’s so much other stuff that goes on.

Karen: Yes, a lot of other stuff going on. I knew I wanted to incorporate the prison poetry. I knew I wanted to incorporate the folktale of La Llorona; I wanted the Mexican ghost who steals children as a metaphor for U.S. Border Patrol.

In fact, the original title was “The Cage of La Llorona.” It’s a better title. But when a horror movie called “The Curse of La Llorona” came out, I knew I had to change it, to avoid confusion.

Scott: There’s a couple of sides of dialogue I paired together. They’re separated in time. One of them is, “They call us criminals then they make it so that’s the only thing we can be.”

Then, later on, Nurse Teresa says to Dahlia, “Honey, it’s fine to hate them. Just be careful you don’t become them.” Could you maybe unpack that a little bit about the insidious nature of being in these cages in confinement?

Karen: That line, “They call us criminals, but they make it so that’s the only thing we can be”… I feel like my students have been saying that to me for years. I’ve been reading that idea over and over in their essays.

It’s a vicious cycle: Racism leads to poverty, which leads to desperation, which leads to crime, which leads to racism…

Tomorrow in Part 5, Karen takes us into the dramatic events of her script’s final act and talks about the use of setups and payoffs in the story.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Karen is repped by APA.

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

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