Interview (Part 6): 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 6 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, c. Craig answers some screenwriting questions.

Scott: So is this the same approach that you would like if you get a writing assignment in OWA, you go in and with that is the same approach that you would do right at one point and or 90 things?

c. Craig: Yeah, it’s my go to thing now, to start anything, because it gives you those small details that when you’re backed up against the wall and you’re trying to figure out how to make somebody feel more real what you know things to pull from to go to.

Scott: So how do you get to those 90 things? You can’t just, they don’t pull them out of midair. Do you have like specific character development exercises, interviews, free scenes, stream of consciousness? What do you do to get the characters to come to life?

c. Craig: First, you write their history. I had the great fortune of working with the incomparable Miss Ruth E. Carter. She asked me once to give her a character history and she was like, I want the history, I want to know the hospital they were born in. She’s doing that for costume. She taught me so much about character.

Those types of things are really useful. Like, say for me, I use exclusively Bic pens and the one I’m using, I put orange tape on so I know that don’t pull a new Bic pen until you finish this one. This is the one that we’re using. That’s, that’s specific. We’re in the specificity business.

Scott: There was a novelist, I can’t remember what, but somebody asked him, he said, what do you know enough about your characters? He said, when you know what color socks they like to wear.

c. Craig: Right. Or if the socks match. Like, to me, I love the Einstein thing of, like, life’s too short to take time matching socks.

[laughs]

Scott: Yeah. OK. Dialogue. Got to talk about it. Now, of course, August Wilson has a great story. A student asked him, how do you write such great dialogue? And he said, I don’t. They do.

c. Craig: They do. They do.

Scott: And he would just be walking along on a character he’d written 15 years previously, just pop up in his mind. Is that your experience? Because your dialogue, that’s one of the reasons I’m thinking of August Wilson. When you read your dialogue and your script, it’s just so vibrant and whatnot. How do you do that?

c. Craig: The age‑old thing of making sure everybody sounds different, that they have their own vocabulary, that they have their own cadence. And any script I’m writing, you set them off of, as best you can, real people. Like I’m writing a script on astronauts right now, and they’re all people I know. And so they’re based off of humans I know and how they speak to one another.

I learned really quickly from one of my professors, Loren‑Paul Caplin at Columbia, that humans don’t speak in complete sentences. It’s always…it’s a dance, man. Barnet Kellman at USC speaks about dialogue as tennis. Something that is active.

Scott: So, theme. How do you think about that? Is that something you front load or is that something you discover along the way? How do you approach theme and storytelling?

c. Craig: Very loosely. To avoid the feeling that I know something because, I don’t, I’m like, I’m a guy. I’m just, trying to give a little bit of an outlook. The thing I’ve wanted, I told you that I wanted to complete with this was, give a hard life a happy ending.

Scott: There we go.

c. Craig: And that was it. That was, the guide post. That and find a way to work the red bean story into, because that was such a catalyst. The red bean story is a huge story in the family. So it was like, I had…

Scott: Did the dad actually throw that pot out?

c. Craig: Yes. It was way more chaotic than that. But that was enough to get the point across. In reality, she didn’t have a BB gun. She did it with a broomstick, and nobody bought that she used a broomstick. They were like, how did she beat him with the broomstick? Well, he was drunk. So I had to switch it to a BB gun to make people believe me.

Scott: That’s pretty awesome. The BB thing landed really well. Let me ask you, where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years professionally?

c. Craig: If I’m lucky enough to be in a space where I’m creating things, man, this is a beautiful life. We chose a beautiful vocation. I haven’t been doing this long enough to not feel a s though every second of this is amazing. To have this conversation with you is amazing. I had no plans for any of this. I walked on that campus and started pretending to be a screenwriter. I take it one step at a time. In five years, if I’m still doing things, it would be great.

Scott: Last question, I always ask this. What’s your single best piece of advice to someone who is an aspiring screenwriter, filmmaker?

c. Craig: That’s the easiest question of the day. That Columbia MFA student who I brought up to you, Jesse Gustafson, told me at that table — he told all of us three under his tutelage — he said, this industry belongs to finishers. It’s like anything you’ve ever seen is because somebody finished. So when you start the script, finish the script.

Here is c. Craig delivering his acceptance speech at the Nicholl Award ceremony.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Part 5, here.

c. Craig is repped by Gotham Group.

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