Interview (Part 6): Ward Kamel

My interview with the 2024 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Ward Kamel wrote the original screenplay “If I Die in America” which won a 2024 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Ward about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Today in Part 6 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Ward shares his take on aspects of the screenwriting craft.

Scott: Let’s talk about theme and working with story themes. A lot of writers I know say, I don’t understand what the theme is until I get halfway through the process, or I’ve written 10 drafts or whatever. Other people start with theme. Where are you in terms of theme, and what do you understand it to mean?

Ward: I think I’m a little bit more on the latter camp, but I think it’s important to at least first define what the theme is. To me, I think often what it boils down to, is the why of it all. Why am I telling this story? The question is somewhere in there. It’s not exactly that. The theme isn’t just the answer of why you’re telling the story.

I’m not counting writing assignments, although you can definitely approach writing assignments that way. I’m counting your very personal work. Like the thing that you want to be your magnum opus or your calling card or something that you just can’t help it.

To me, it’s pretty important to have an answer to that question. If I don’t have an answer to that question, I do feel like I’m flailing. But, sometimes the answer is pragmatic.

Like, I wrote a sci-fi rom-com and the reason I wrote that sci-fi rom-com was because I wanted to write a sci-fi rom-com. But I also did have a little bit of a thing that was, you know it’s a sci-fi rom-com, it was very, very genre, genre heavy. But I wanted to write something where the protagonist was Arab and it wasn’t a big part of the story.

In my mind, it felt like, well, let me double down on genre, write something that’s super-duper fun. Then your protagonist just happens to be this Arab kid named Omar, but that’s not what the movie’s about. That wasn’t quite a theme, but that also falls into that universe of why am I telling the story? To me, that’s important.

The line from my bio, the underrepresented characters in grounded, relatable ways, I feel that I’m still at a moment in my life, and maybe this might change, but I feel that I’m still at a moment in my life where for me to really rev up about a story, I need to find my in to it. My in often comes from this idea of, what am I adding to the canon of narrative filmmaking or maybe even TV that I feel is missing or that I wish was around when I was consuming?

Very often the real straight line that I can draw is Arab characters, Muslim characters, characters at the intersection of maybe multiple hyphens, hyphenates of my identity. It’s like, are you a Syrian immigrant or a queer Muslim? Like all those kinds of things that I’m like, well, I haven’t really seen that and I think I can maybe play my part and put it out there.

I think what I’m also realizing is that my in can be something as simple as this idea that I mentioned earlier, which is, is this an immigrant narrative? But that can come in so many…Like, Superman is an immigrant narrative. Do you know what I mean?

Scott: Sure.

Ward: That can be such an in to be able to tell a story. But then if you’re writing the superhero story and it’s for some reason you’ve decided you want to do that, I think for me grounding myself in this idea that like, OK, yeah, this is the superhero story, but what it really is, is that it’s an immigrant narrative all of a sudden gives me that in that I’m able to attack with.

Then the grounded and relatable is just an attempt. The main concern that I have is often when it’s a similar instinct as to why when I wrote that sci-fi film, the sci-fi rom-com thing, I wanted him being Arab to not be a big part of it. The concern and the anxiety is that you’re fetishizing or that you’re maybe…Like in my day-to-day life, like I still, I’m probably experiencing, I don’t know.

You want to avoid making it the whole thing because I feel like in real life, it often isn’t the whole thing, but in so many ways, it influences everything else. How can you tow that line between being authentic and representational and grounded without being facetious, or the other word that I’m thinking of is self-aggrandizing or something like that.

Scott: All right, one last question for you. It’s been a great conversation, but let’s wrap it up with this. What’s the one single piece of advice you would give to someone who aspires to win a Nicholl, aspires to break into Hollywood as a screenwriter. Do you have a single piece of advice you would to give them?

Ward: Ooh, that’s a hard one. My single piece of advice, this is a bit of a cop-out answer, but my single piece of advice would maybe to…Honestly, I think what really got me to where I am today, I described that for a while, I wasn’t really that intently focused on screenwriting and I doubled back down into it.

A piece of advice that I would give that would hopefully be able to get someone at that level to jump in is to set a lower bar for yourself, or at least to not decide not to pursue something just because you’re worried about it not being this perfect thing. We tend to be too precious and we tend to be overly protective of what we worry our creative output has to look like.

I think oftentimes, you need to exercise a muscle that can otherwise atrophy, and what that means is that the means to an end often isn’t the product but it’s the actual practice of exercising that muscle. All of this is to say, write a bad script. That’s fine. That’s better than not writing a script because you’re worried it’s going to be bad.

I’d rather you just write a bad one because then all of a sudden, when inspiration strikes and you have something that you actually think has a lot of potential, it isn’t the first time you’re writing down a scene in months because you’ve held off for too long because you’re worried about what you’re going to write being bad.

I think that that idea of setting a lower standard for yourself in service of outputting more often and in service of engaging in artistic practice more often is something that I’ve definitely done. For a while, I was worried it wasn’t going to work out because I was worried that what that meant was that I was just going to be writing a bunch of garbage my entire life.

But it seems to at least have worked out in this one specific way where, again after I finished the short, like I said, I was banging my head against the wall, getting to this midpoint of this half-baked version of this. I went and I wrote two other features.

I don’t think those two other features were great, but I don’t think that this feature, then when I decided to write it, would have even been close to what it ended up being had I not then made a bunch of mistakes with those other two that I had written in the meantime.

If I had just been waiting to write this perfect thing, not to even say that this is remotely perfect, but if I had been waiting to write something that I felt like was going to be at a really high standard, it probably would never get there because in order for you to get to that point, you need to be practiced. In order to be practiced, you need to fall pretty often. That’s my long-winded piece of advice.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Part 5, here.

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