Interview (Part 4): Michael Ballin and Thomas Aguilar

My interview with 2021 Black List writer for their script The College Dropout.

Michael Ballin and Thomas Aguilar wrote the original screenplay “The College Dropout” which landed on the 2021 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with with Mike and Tom about their creative background, their script based on a period of time in the life of Kanye West, the craft of screenwriting, and what making the annual Black List has meant to them.

Today Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Tom and Mike discuss how they handled a pivotal turning point in Kanye West’s career: a car crash and his recording of Through the Wire.

Scott: There’s a scene in the script. Early on in his career. Kanye has a meeting with Columbia Records, I think it was?

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Thomas: Yeah.

Scott: They see him as a producer. Then, all of a sudden, he’s rapping in front of them and the guy that’s with them saying, “No, don’t do that.” What do you think is going on there where he feels compelled to push this point that he wants to be the performer?

Thomas: It’s funny. Kanye West is a bit of an enigma sometimes, but he was always passionate. He loved what he did and he was this exuberant about it.

Michael: Kanye has always been passionate and his vision is ahead of its time, in that he had a lot of those hit songs long before they came on the radio. He was already like, “I can visualize it and see it. You guys got to see it.” It’s a metaphor for sometimes the world’s not ready for what we’re about to bring to it. He was like, “No, I’m going to go that extra step and show you. Look what I have here.”

It’s crazy. He says it in songs too like “Last Call.” They turned down Jesus Walks, which was a number one song, but it showed that the world’s not always ready for what you have to bring.

Scott: One of the best things about your script is you did such a great job of using the tools of visual storytelling to visualize what he’s seeing and experiencing as he’s coming up with these songs or having these moments. You know what I’m talking about?

Thomas: Yeah.

Scott: Several times, it’s almost like fantasy sequences. How did you hit on that idea, write these dramatic, visual, cinematic moments where you’re like, “This is the dude’s vision of the world. This is his experience of the world?” It’s quite great.

Thomas: We definitely had fun with those moments. When we write, we go through a number of drafts and we say, “Let’s make sure we’ve found it, is there magic here? Is there magic in the screenplay?” It’s not always like…

Michael: It’s not always magic.

Thomas: Right, not magic magic. But, is there something else to unlock? We started to think what was going on in his mind as he was starting to write this album?

Michael: We were in New York without our wives, so we would spend the weekends writing the script. I remember we got to a point where I wanted to be done with it.

Tom was more of like, “Look, I think there’s more we got to do here. Something’s missing.”

We had the “Through the Wire” sequence and the “Spaceship” sequence, but they were outliers, at least, from the rest of the script. Tom was like, “Let’s unlock this a little more and find more of these. We started building it out, and then all those things came together.

That’s our process, too, is that somebody’s got to convince the other. I had to convince him to do it, and then he’s like, “Dude, we got to make this better.” Being brothers, sometimes, it’s harder because you’re like, “He’s right or he’s wrong.” I think that’s what’s cool is that we’re both just trying to make this better.

Thomas: I think that’s important to unlocking that kind of stuff. Oftentimes, when you’re a partnership, you get asked, “Who wrote that? Who wrote that great scene?”

But, once you’re in it and you’re doing it, the whole world falls away and you’re like, “That was just us now, and it’s just our voice now. It is a mixture of me pushing him, him pulling, or him pushing, and me pulling.”

Scott: That’s great. I have to say that that part of the script really stands out because you’re trying to understand why this guy’s got this passion. As soon as you start to see these visuals the way that he experiences reality, you get it. It goes beyond logic. It’s like we experience the world at the level 10. He’s feeling it at a 12, or a 13, or a 14. It’s all the stimulation, and he’s processing it and coming up with all these new and interesting ideas.

One thing I want to talk to you about practically speaking as a screenwriter, because you are covering seven, eight years and you got to make these time jumps, it’s a pain in the ass to make these time jumps, and you did a really good job on that.

Sometimes, you use montages. Sometimes, you use visual-to-visual or audio-to-audio transitions. That’s a challenge, because you’re asking the reader to make those time jumps with you. How much of a struggle was that for you?

Michael: We’re big fans of Mad Men, and what we always love about the show is that it never tells you or changes the filter when you go into the past with Don or in the future. Every time we’re writing, we’re thinking like that because it’s so natural. Another movie that influenced this movie was Moonlight.

We liked how it had chapters, but we were like, “There’s a way to do it that way and let the music supplement it.” We’re like, “Musically, there’s a great way to do transitions here, because a lot of Kanye’s work is sampled.” You get to go from this original track, and then into what he made. It’s conducive for transitions.

Thomas: We are always thinking about what does the audience needs to know at this moment? What could we tell them or how can we give them just a little bit of context? Maybe its, “Look, he’s driving a nicer car now.”

That’s not necessarily in the script, but it’s like, “This is different now. He’s gone through this experience that we’re not caught up with yet.” If you can trust that the audience or reader will catch that little thing — they will and they do.

Scott: A couple of other things I want to talk to you about pragmatically speaking as screenwriters. You know how most Hollywood movies, they’ll have certain character archetypes we see like a Nemesis or an Antagonist figure. This story doesn’t have that classic bad guy. Instead, there are a series of characters who provide opposition to Kanye

How did you work that out, lay in characters who would generate conflict by standing in Kanye’s way or pushing back against him?

Michael: In that case, it was more of using the research to see what were the roadblocks, and some of those people represented them. What we didn’t want to do was label people as antagonists because even the people that were roadblocks to him became friends with him, and they learned, “This guy is cool, and he is great.”

One person wasn’t an antagonist, the whole system was. It was the bureaucracy of business. That was the reason why they didn’t let Kanye release his album sooner.

Sometimes, in Hollywood, you feel like you’re ready, but maybe that person in front of you doesn’t see it that way. At every stage. Tom would tell me stories and it’s like, “Man, that’s crazy that a decision was made because somebody wasn’t into a certain subject or something.” It isn’t a meritocracy.

Thomas: In screenwriting, that’s true for all of us. There’s always questioning, “Is this right for the market? Is this right for us?” There are so many reasons not to do a project or not to do something. It’s like echoing that notion from earlier, but if that voice is stronger and saying, “Do it, go for it.” Listen to that one.

Michael: Kanye was bringing out a whole new brand of music and the music at the time was gangster rap. The hardest thing for people in the music or movie industry is to take a chance on something new.

Scott: Let’s talk about the car crash and Through the Wire. It seems like that’s a natural point you’re going to build to because it’s a big dramatic moment. In some ways, it feels like that’s a breakthrough moment for him creatively.

Michael: It was. You know, it’s funny. It’s something early on that we relied on, which is the scene where a car crash changes everything, but then, when we were rewriting it and the struggle became, “Are we just doing the cliché car crash scene?” So we tried something different.

Thomas: Obviously, it was monumental in Kanye’s real life, and that song, “Through The Wire, launched him to the world. For us, like Mike said, we knew that was where the story was naturally headed, but our goal was how do you still make it surprising? How do you…

Michael: …make it organic? The other thing I would say in rewriting, sometimes what we’ll do is we’ll start watching movies… we were watching Eternal Sunshine and we were like, “How would Charlie Kaufman approach it?” In some way, you got to step outside yourselves if you’re not hitting it.

We had that thing where he’s in the dream, he hears a car crash, he runs and sees himself. We were like, “Oh, that feels unique and different and it honors the story.” Once he got into the hospital, we were like, “Look, we’re sure this is not exactly how it happened.” He did actually record it in the hospital, but we tried to have fun with how he heard the sample. Everything came together.

Scott: Now that I’m thinking about it, you have a series of All Is Lost moments at the end of Act Two, big reversals in the plot. First, there’s the thing with Capitol Records where they pull his contract. You go, “Oh, wow, that’s All Is Lost.”

Then he signs this deal with Roc-A-Fella, but then they say, “Well, we’re not going to release the album,” so you go, “Oh, now that’s got to be the big All Is Lost reversal.”

But then there’s the car crash. It’s a trifecta of bad things going on with Kanye. Now, all of a sudden, he’s experiencing it outside himself, so you’ve laid the groundwork to do this. You talk about the magic — not magical with a capital M, but a small M — way of handling the car crash. It is not trope-y. It’s not melodramatic. It’s something almost outside that realm. Does that make sense?

Michael: That’s a great way to put it. In all that rewriting and figuring it out, ultimately, that’s what we came to. We didn’t quite articulate it that way when we did it, but that’s a great way to look at it.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Mike and Tom talk about what it meant for their script The College Dropout to make the 2021 Black List.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Part 3, go here.

Mike and Tom are repped by:

Mike Goldberg, Kyle Loftus, Adam Perry (APA)
Matt Ochacher, Michael Pelmont (New Wave Entertainment)

Twitter: @MichaelBallin, @Thomasraguilar

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