Interview (Part 5): c. Craig Patterson

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

c. Craig Patterson wrote the original screenplay “Tah” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with c. Craig 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 5 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, c. Craig responds to my comparison of his dialogue to that of the great playwright August Wilson.

Scott: In real life, did Tah work with the Catholic Church?

c. Craig: Oh, yeah.

Scott: Was that part of it? OK. Because in the script, she’s desperate for money. I thought this was another thing, because you have food, obviously, as a whole thing here. One of the little, it’s like a screenwriter note. Like, OK, you want to provide these markers to suggest character development.

At the beginning, basically, all she’s good at is red beans and rice. And then she gets this gig at the Catholic Church as their cook. And she’s terrible. And then you cut the three years later and she’s making all these great food items and everything. Let’s talk a bit about the role of Father Frank, a mentor figure. How would you describe him in the script?

c. Craig: In the script, he’s a culmination of the priest that raised me and the one who hired Tah. I’m pretty sure Father Frank is the only White character in the movie. It was important to me to have the presence of a kind priest in the story because in that neighborhood priests were a huge component of our universe. And it was the kindness of this human that had a huge effect on my life. And I wanted to make sure that his comedic spirit was present in it too. Whenever he was in there, he was playing the straight man of it, you know.

Scott: He has these little moments like he has this quote when he’s like eating the vanilla wafer, you know. He says: “Sometimes knowing what you want is more important than knowing better.” One of my favorite moments in the script, Tah stood in about 10 pages earlier, I think, where she, her nephew, I think James, is getting baptized, in the church. And then later on, she’s alone. And there’s a wonderful little moment here.

It’s like four or five pages from the end of the script. Tah dips a cup into the now full sink. So she’s getting a cup. She’s about to take a sip, but stops herself. Instead, Tah turns her back to the sink before leaning backward and whispers some words to herself. She pours the water over her forehead. It washes over her, her eyes open as it flows. And then you bolded. Her head lifts, period. Baptized, period.

c. Craig: That was the first scene I thought I had for the movie.

Scott: Really? Well, unpack that for me.

c. Craig: For some reason it was the first thing I thought of for the film. I knew that’s where I wanted to go. Because later on in Tah’s life, she became a Eucharistic minister.

Scott: Really?

c. Craig: Yeah, yeah. That was her baptism, her new calling in life was to become a Eucharistic minister. I wanted to make sure that was in there but that was the first thing I had.

Scott: Wow, because it’s a very moving moment. Of course baptism represents theologically, new life, born again, and so, she is in a way at the end. I don’t want to give away the ending about the dispensation of some money that she comes into. But I love the ending. I just thought the ending was great because you could see, “Oh, it could go this way, it could go that way.” Did you always have that in mind, that ending?

c. Craig: Yeah, it was. When we talk about the alternate endings and alternate universes, and it was like if Tah had had the money, this is what she would have done with it. Knowing that woman, knowing those women, all of them, if the money was there this is how it would have gone.

Scott: One last thing I want to talk to you about. Your script, dialogue, reminded me of one of my favorite playwrights is August Wilson.

c. Craig: Oh, my gosh.

Scott: And I’ve seen almost all of his Century Cycle.

c. Craig: OK.

Scott: But “The Piano Lesson” is my favorite of them. But I just, literally a week ago, for my birthday, my family said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to go see “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” It’s at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. And we saw it.

c. Craig: What a beautiful birthday.

Scott: Yeah, the whole family, my wife, my two kids. August Wilson, I was reading the script. I was going, “Oh, my God, this is like, it has a feel. The characters are so real. The dialogue is so, has a sense of authenticity, everything about it.”

I don’t know. I just, I assumed you were a fan.

c. Craig: Of course, of course. Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be ever able to thank you for what you just said to me. That’s the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me. It’s about to make me tear up, to be honest with you. That man and his words are a huge influence in my life. So thank you for that.

Scott: You’re a director. And somebody, somewhere is going to pay money. You want to direct this thing, right?

c. Craig: Absolutely, yeah.

Scott: Well, it absolutely deserves to get made because it’s just a wonderful film. All right. I got some craft questions for you.

c. Craig: Let’s do it.

Scott: Evidently you’re coming up with all these ideas and submitting the Nicholl and whatnot. Doing these short films and animation and all these projects. How do you come up with story ideas?

c. Craig: I have an overactive imagination, like my walls are all dry erase walls. It’s like all these scribblings and I swear it’s not, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

But, it’s a ton of stuff, so I sit in my office all day long and if something crosses my mind and it crosses my mind a second time, by the time it crosses my mind a third time, I feel like it has a little bit of staying power. I’ll start to write on the wall about it.

The big jump is when it makes it from the wall to index cards. Once it makes the index cards, it’s like, oh, that’s a thing. Now we’re doing a thing. There’s lots of things that have come and gone on the wall. But once it makes it off the wall, there’s something poetic about being off the wall.

Scott: With the card thing, was that something you learned at Columbia or NYU?

c. Craig: USC.

Scott: That sounds like USC.

c. Craig: It has been really useful to me. The Columbia outlook on it was just like you write the story beginning to end. You do your outlines and all, but I had Paul Foley at USC and he had an outlook on what happens if you write your first act and then you write the middle of the film and then you write the end of the film.

You just jump and just write the midpoint, write the end. And when I tell you, oh my God, I was like, I was such a stickler for how I was taught to write. I was like, no, that’s absolutely sacrilegious. How could you do that? And it was amazing.

I’ve done it since. The other thing that, that he suggested that I do all the time was before I start writing, you write down 90 things that you know about the characters in the story. The first 20 are the easiest things in the world.

Then from 20 to 50 is a bit of a struggle. 50 to 90 is insane. But by the time you get to 90 things that you know about this story, oh, the pages just start moving. Because you’ve taken the time to think about what you would consider the most mundane thing on earth about them. But you have it. You have it to build off of when you know that about them now.

Scott: Yeah, it’d be like, well, you knew this probably from real life in terms of Tah, but the fact she smoked Kool cigarettes.

c. Craig: Absolutely.

Scott: That means something. That’s menthols. That’s different than Camels or Marlboros, right?

c. Craig: Right. And I knew that like Papa. In reality he was in the Knights of Peter Claver, but I was in love with Teddy from “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

I was like, oh, I’m going to take my great grandfather. Hopefully he forgives me. And I’m going to meld him with this this character that I love so much. One who is not exactly on the same wavelength as the rest of us. But there’s something special about him. The fact that, he’s always in uniform and he’s always together in that space, but that came from that process of writing those 90 things.

Tomorrow in Part 6, c. Craig answers some screenwriting questions.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

c. Craig is repped by Gotham Group.

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