Interview (Part 6): Jimmy Miller

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jimmy Miller wrote the original screenplay “Slugger” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Jimmy 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, Jimmy answers some screenwriting craft questions.

Scott: How about themes? What do you think about the subject? Are themes important to you? Do you start off with themes or do you find them as you go along?

Jimmy: I’ve had a love-hate relationship with theme. [laughter] And I think so many writers can relate to this. For me, theme comes out after a few drafts. And I’ve learned to be OK with that. For me, theme is where my honest truth as a person starts to come through in my story. Because at the start I rarely know exactly why I’m compelled to write a certain story. I just know that I am and it must be in there somewhere.

But I have to write it to figure it out. I think a lot of writers go through that, not knowing the theme until you’ve dug in further and further and it reveals itself. Some people call writers explorers, but I think we’re excavators. We’re not discovering anything new. We’re uncovering things we’ve buried.

In Slugger, the theme came through when I realized I didn’t want this to be about Callie accepting her father or her father accepting her, but about Callie accepting herself. I wanted her to realize that she didn’t need her father’s acceptance to be whole. And when she stopped fighting for something she didn’t need, she started fighting for the things that really mattered.

And that’s part of my truth because I have a complicated relationship with my father, who passed away in 2014. My father talked a lot about loving me, but often did unloving things. So, I always felt unacceptable in ways. And it was important for me to let go of the need for that acceptance because I would never get it. He was gone. So, my only path to kind of find peace was to accept and forgive him after he died.

Callie’s plot is not my personal plot, we are totally different people and acceptance from our fathers doesn’t look the same. But I get how Callie had to let go of him to get closer to who she was.

Going through addiction and learning the process of amends, all of that started to come through in my story, too. There was so much about the story that I realized was about forgiveness and accountability, and the idea of how they need to coexist.

So much of what I was learning and going through in my life that was not in the early drafts started to poke through. It took me several drafts to pull it all together and making it work.

And as I get more honest with myself about my story, my themes come through better and earlier in my writing. I can see more clearly what should stay and what should go and what needs more work.

Scott: I got one last question for you. What’s the single best piece of advice you have for someone who’s attempting to learn the craft and trying to break into the business?

Jimmy: I’m not sure that I can say anything so unique that readers haven’t heard before. But there was something I learned in film school that had nothing to do with writing, that I realized later had a lot to do with writing.

I was in a summer film class that worked like an indie feature film. The professor was the writer and director, and everybody enrolled in the class was part of the crew. So, we were recording sound, creating sets and props, first and second ADs, first and second ACs.

I was on the lighting crew and the DP, who had taught us lighting, asked us to light a scene. And we got it done, and it looked great, except we had a little shadow on the wall that we just couldn’t get rid of. None of us could figure it out. And we’re adding lights to the scene and pointing them at the shadow, trying to get rid of it. We didn’t want to move all the lights that were good. We just had a weird shadow, and we were stumped.

And the cinematographer finally said, “If you got a shadow you don’t want, you can’t shine lights on it fix it. You got to start over. You think it’s perfect, but you did it wrong or it wouldn’t cause the bad shadow. Start over. Move the lights.”

And I realized in screenwriting sometimes when I’m developing a plot, if I get too attached to a certain aspect that I think shouldn’t be touched, I can plot myself into a corner. And I’m so attached to whatever that thing is that I do things that are just bad writing. Trying to explain away logic problems with an unnatural line of dialogue, making people do things that don’t quite make sense, or adding even more plot to untie the knots I’ve put myself in. I’m trying to find shortcuts to solve the problem.

I’m trying to fix the shadow my light is making with more light. Instead of moving it to a better place. Sometimes you have to give up the thing you think is perfect and accept that it’s not. Sometimes you gotta move the light.

There’s something I’ve tried to accept when I’m writing and rewriting. It will not work the first time I write it and that needs to be OK. I’m doing things I might have to completely tear apart and write again later. I will put some lights in the wrong places the first time. And I’ll get shadows I can’t fix unless I start over.

When lighting, and writing, are done right, they look and feel natural. Everything’s in its place. I don’t have shadows making the reader go, “I don’t get that” or “that doesn’t really make sense.” “That’s not what somebody would say.” And I think it takes every writer a lot of work to get there.

We all have different ways we do things, but as much as we’d like to believe it, even the most brilliant screenwriters don’t write perfect screenplays in one sitting. It’s not a goal that should be strived for. It’s not a thing. I think the work of screenwriting is figuring out how to make the mess of our world and the complex people navigating its millions of variables every second still feel human and real when you boil down their stories, that would really be weeks and months and years, into 120 minutes.

Why do we even do that? Is it possible that art is just the acknowledgment that only a very tiny fraction of our lives really matters? And when we cherry pick them out and put them together in just the right way, we find meaning and connection.

But if you do it in a way where all the things in between that we are purposely leaving out — don’t feel like they can exist… then it stops feeling human. Because we only get the good parts if we survive the bits in between.

Here is Jimmy 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.

Jimmy is repped by Marc Manus at Persistent Entertainment.

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