Interview (Part 4): Lindsay Michel

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for her script Caravan.

Lindsay Michel wrote the screenplay Caravan which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Lindsay about her creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Lindsay discusses how she felt writing a horror story with substantial violence.

Scott: Let’s talk about a couple of other characters. Kadir and Divash. Could you talk about those two because they have a different role than Simon and Michael?

Lindsay: Yeah. I feel like, in these sorts of movies there’s always one character whose perspective you trust, outside of the protagonist. I wanted to build a character that Nasreen could trust with Kadir. He is the expert, he knows what’s going on.

I think of it like — this is a completely different genre, but when you have FBI movies where they’re hunting a serial killer, there’s always a bunch of dumb FBI agents who don’t know what they’re doing but think they’re really smart. Then there’s one guy who really can see the truth about what’s going on. I think of him as that expert agent.

Scott: Divash?

Lindsay: Divash is obviously, he is… [laughs] yeah, he’s the flaky navigator who’s ripping people off and leaving them for dead. He’s squirrelly and snaky.

Scott: Trickster.

Lindsay: Yeah, he’s the trickster character, for sure. There’s not a whole lot to him. He’s very fearful, he’s very greedy, he’s doing stuff for himself. I guess maybe Nasreen sees a little bit of herself in him, where she’s only interested in taking care of herself, and Divash is clearly only interested in taking care of himself.

She knows that he had something to do with her father and she’s trying to get to the bottom of that. He’s there to serve a plot purpose. Not too deep of a character, for sure.

Scott: No, that’s quite common for trickster characters because they are driven by their own ego needs. They’ll align themselves with anybody that they figure is going to benefit them and they’ll also oppose anybody that they figure is going to get in their way. They aren’t terribly deep, but they do serve an important function in testing the will of the protagonist.

Lindsay: Yes.

Scott: By the end of Act 1, Simon and Michael want to go and get the silkworms out. Nasreen needs to leave, pragmatically, but then, spiritually or fatalistically she needs to leave in order to deal with her father. They go off on this journey into the desert.

Was that early on in your thought process that this was going to basically be like a road picture?

Lindsay: Yeah, for sure. I like plots that start from point A and go to point B. It’s just all one direction, it’s very satisfying to me.

I didn’t want there to be any way they could turn back, feasibly. So it’s just this straight trudge through the desert, where if they stop they’ll die of thirst before they reach the next oasis, so they have to figure out what’s going on and try to stay alive while on the move.

The Taklamakan Desert is this huge dune sea in Western China, and at this time people had to either go underneath it or above it and pretty much no one went through.

I liked the idea of, “We’re trying to do something that no one’s done before and hopefully not dying in the process.” The journey itself is already dangerous.

Scott: Now that’s interesting because on a physical sense, you’ve got this pretty substantial obstacle, nobody’s gone through the desert straight through. There’s a mythic, religious stuff around ‑‑ it’s considered to be spiritually dangerous, too. Where did that idea come from? Was that something you got out of research, or was that something that just emerged in your writing?

Lindsay: I don’t think it came up in research. Time in the desert, forty days in the desert for instance, has this automatically spiritual connotation, where you’re stuck there, really going through it, and having this physical as well as spiritual suffering. I think in a lot of religions physical and spiritual suffering — and deliverance — go hand in hand.

It felt natural to attach the two, to build up a spiritual foreboding and a supernatural foreboding as well as this natural foreboding of the fact that we’re going to be trying to cross this insane natural obstacle.

Also, I didn’t want the demon to just come out of nowhere. Obviously, you never want the genre to surprise your reader.

Scott: It sets it up. It recalls the Israelites forty years in the wilderness as they escaped from Egypt. It recalls Jesus and the Gospels, where he has forty days in the wilderness and is tempted by Satan three times.

Let’s discuss the eternal flame and this god Ahura Mazda, that scene, I’m assuming that’s historically based.

Lindsay: Yes. The Sogdians, they’re all Zoroastrian, which is obviously an actual religion.

Ahura Mazda is a real Zoroastrian god. The eternal flame is a real representation of Ahura Mazda. Druj, the demon, is inspired by a Zoroastrian demon as well. I say inspired by very loosely, because I wanted to build a demon that fit the script in particular, that fit the desert, and that fit the characters I was working with and the overall tone.

I didn’t want to pluck a Christian demon out of Christian theology or anything. I wanted to concoct something that felt like it fit with the script, and create a weakness for this demon that is difficult for them to exploit.

This demon lives in the desert, so it sort of follows that it doesn’t like water, that it’s vulnerable to water. Our caravan doesn’t have water. Water is a scarce commodity, so even when they get some, they have to choose between dying of dehydration or dying of being ripped apart by this demon. There’s a scarcity there that was interesting to play with.

Scott: It tracks in the common perception of a demon’s possession.

Lindsay: Possession, but also it’s eating you. It can wear your face, so it’s a gnarly twist on possession where it’s not just a ghost inhabiting your body. You’re dead. You’re not going to come back from this.

Scott: Did you know from the get‑go this was going to be a horror genre?

Lindsay: Yeah. Pretty much. A lot of my inspiration was horror movies — “The Thing,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” even “Pitch Black” in a way, which is one of my favorites.

Also weirdly, the TV show “The Terror.” I don’t know if you’ve seen the first season of “The Terror.” That’s one of my favorite seasons of television ever. I definitely took that idea of being trapped with a group of people, somewhere where walking out spells certain death. Something is hunting you, people are turning on each other. There’s this paranoia that’s setting in, attached with a scarcity of resources and the dread of the landscape around you. This completely punishing, unforgiving landscape.

Scott: Did you know how violent it was going to be?

Lindsay: What scares me, I think, is mostly this hyper‑violent stuff. So going for horror, I wanted to go for what scared me personally. Realism, and terrifying survival situations. The sense that even though the characters are being hunted by something supernatural, they’ve only got the same tools that we would have to respond to it.

Survival movies scare me. “127 Hours,” “Arctic,” which is a movie where Mads Mikkelsen gets hunted by a polar bear, that sort of thing — the idea of something harrowing happening to you, and you’re all alone, so you have to do something about it. You can’t just sit there and die. It’s the stark horror of what you have to do to survive that I was trying to reflect, if that makes sense.

Scott: It does. Campbell talks about the outer journey is really about the inner journey. He says the outer journey is “incidental” to the inner journey. For Nasreen, it’s like all that physical torture that she goes through, including this really gut‑wrenching ending. It’s all about dealing with that inner guilt. So at the very end, when she walks off on her own, you feel like, “Yeah, she’s gone through what she’s needed to go through.”

Lindsay: I feel like when you have a concept like a demon that eats people, you have to push it all the way. Otherwise, your readers are going to feel like they’re getting cheated. I didn’t want to pull any punches or anything.

Scott: Did you enjoy writing that? Because they’re really graphic, in a good way. Very visceral.

Lindsay: I do. I enjoy torturing my characters. Maybe you were right at the beginning. There’s a little bit of sadism in “Caravan.”

Tomorrow in Part 5, Lindsay answers some questions about the screenwriting craft.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, here.

For Part 3, here.

Kevin is repped by Bellevue Productions.

Twitter: @mintymichel

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.