Transcript
Speaker 1: You are listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America East. In each episode, you’ll hear from the union members who create the film, TV series, podcasts, and news stories that define our culture. We’ll discuss everything from inspirations and creative process to how to build a successful career in media and entertainment.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Today we have a special episode of OnWriting featuring a panel of Writers Guild Award nominees from the original and adapted screenplay categories. We’re joined by Dana Fox, a co-writer and executive producer of Wicked, the Nickel Boys co-writers, Joslyn Barnes and Ramell Ross, and Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes. I’m your moderator, Kathryn VanArendonk, a TV and comedy critic at Vulture and New York Magazine.
Kathryn VanArendonk: It’s such a treat to be here. This is a panel that I look forward to moderating whenever I get a chance because I think writers are some of the most interesting and insightful people who are able to talk about this kind of creative work. They’re often also pretty weird, which is always an upside. And I think just in general, it is always such an honor and a privilege to be able to ask people questions about the incredible films that we’ve all had a chance to watch. And so I want to ask you to please help me welcome our fantastic panel. We have Dana who is here from Wicked.
Dana Fox: Hi.
Kathryn VanArendonk: We have Joslyn, and we have Ramell who are here from Nickel Boys. And we have Justin here from Challengers. I want to start for just people who may not have been reading avidly every tiny piece of awards coverage that comes down the pipeline, because I know there is a lot of it, but I want to just go down and ask all of you in turn to talk about how you came to each of these projects because I think writers come to these things in a lot of different ways, so let’s start with Justin.
Justin Kuritzkes: I was in the middle of writing a book in 2018, and then I happened to just turn on the US Open because it was on, and I had not been a massive tennis fan up until that point, I played tennis as a kid and I sucked and so I quit. And I didn’t look back. And then I was watching it and it was this match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka in the final. And there was this very controversial call where Serena Williams was accused of receiving coaching from the sidelines. And I had not heard about this rule, but Serena Williams was getting really upset and saying, “I would never do that.” And immediately this struck me as this very cinematic situation that you’re alone on the court and there’s one other person who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do, and that’s the one person you can’t talk to. And so immediately I started thinking, well, what if you really needed to talk about something? And what if it was something beyond tennis?
What if it was about the two of you? And because I’m a writer, I thought, what if it involved the person on the other side of the net and how would you communicate that tension using film? What would be specifically cinematic about that? I got that idea, and then I didn’t write it immediately because I started researching and this thing happened where I became a legitimate tennis fan, like an obsessive tennis fan, and I hadn’t found a new hobby as an adult ever. And so it was this very precious thing to me to watch tennis because all I like doing is writing and watching movies and walking around. And to all of a sudden have this new thing that I was excited about was beautiful and kind of sacred to me. And so I didn’t want to write the movie because I knew it would ruin it, so I took a couple of years avoiding writing the movie. And then finally in 2021, I wrote the movie and it did ruin my tennis fandom, but it gave me a career in Hollywood.
Kathryn VanArendonk: And have you found a new hobby since then?
Justin Kuritzkes: No, no. No, I tried cooking and I’m not very good.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Ramell.
Ramell Ross: That was such a good story.
Justin Kuritzkes: Sorry, I went on and on.
Ramell Ross: No, no, no, it’s great. I immediately was like, I wanted to start, because I like to troll people, but not on the internet, but in person I was going to be like, “And so I was reading a book and then I look up and it’s Nickel Boys on the counter, and I’m like, who gave me this book?” And what if there was a relationship between… I’m doing it by not doing it, but it was good. I was in. I was like, “Damn, Justin’s good.”
Justin Kuritzkes: Serena Williams has Nickel Boys in her bag and then-
Ramell Ross: I remembered my friend Justin, who I’m friends with him. He doesn’t know that I’m friends with him. Joslyn and I co-wrote Nickel Boys. It’s an adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel. And I was fortunate enough to be asked by Plan B, which is a company run by Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner to make an adaption. And I immediately tapped my friend here, Joslyn, who had worked with me on a previous film Hale County This Morning, This Evening, because we have a really good working relationship.
And I think personally when you’re making a film, I found that has a very, from other people’s language, like a left field approach, from my language, it’s just kind of the way that I make things, it’s really nice to have someone that is smarter than you to work with and someone who can fill in your gaps and you can fill in their gaps to have a piece of work that can speak to a wider audience. Because I find very often when you’re in your own head without appropriate feedback, critical solid feedback, you end up making something that’s a bit too esoteric. And it might not be true, but if you all don’t know what Nickel Boys is about… Actually I’ll pass to Jos because she has a different relationship to it all.
Joslyn Barnes: Well, no, that aligns with my version of the story. And I’m also a producer, so in being invited to produce and direct as a team, it was really nice. Plan B was very generous about including me as a producer. And then Ramell invited me to co-write, and then they accepted that idea. Ramell came up with a proposal of how he would like to adapt the novel. When we read the novel, we were just like, oh, this novel, it’s really good. And we got it as a manuscript, before it was published in Pulitzer Prize winning. But we were just like, it’s really dangerous to adapt a really great novel that you know is going to be fabulous. And then everyone’s going to be like, “Oh, I like the book so much better than the movie.” You know how scary that could be.
But we thought, okay, the only way to do this would be to do something really, really different than the way that the book unfolds to actually make it as cinematic as possible. And I think Ramell had a proposal as to how he would like to handle that with this idea of what he calls the sentient camera or what we call in script point of view. It’s a little bit deeper than just basic point of view, but that was the general premise. And then when he invited me to co-write, we started with a treatment and that’s how we started to proceed. And we handled the treatment as if it were an edit. We thought about it as an edit first, which was unusual about the process, but that was to establish a cinematic grammar. But that’s how it all started.
Dana Fox: That was really cool. You guys were all really cool. I was brought onto Wicked by Jon Chu, who I had worked with on a TV project of mine. It was a show called Home Before Dark that literally nobody watched, but I met Jon and I just thought he was the greatest person of all time. Crazy Rich Asians had not come out yet, but he showed me the trailer and I was like, I want to hire him based on the trailer for this movie that I have not seen. And so he directed the first two episodes of my TV show, and we had an amazing working experience. And so once you’ve had the Jon Chu experience, there’s some people here who know what that’s like, you just never ever want to go back to working with anybody else ever again. I said to Jon, “For the rest of my life, whenever you call me, it’s like the bat phone, the thing, it’s going to be a yes. I don’t care what it is.”
A little while later, he called me and he said, “Okay, I want you to do something with me.” And I said, “Yes.” And he’s like, “Do you want to know what it is?” And I said, “I don’t really care.” And he was like, “Okay, well, it’s a little weird because we’re going to do it with other people.” And so he said, “It’s Wicked.” And I was like, “Oh, I said yes when it was poop on a stick, but now it’s Wicked. That’s crazy.” I was like, “Oh, well yes then.” And he said, “We’re going to do it with Winnie and Stephen.” And so he’s like, “It’s going to be kind of unusual. It’s going to be me, Jon Chu, Winnie Holzman, and Stephen Schwartz brain trusting it together.” And I’m super collaborative. I love other writers, like now I want to work with all of you, just hearing you talk for 10 seconds.
I was like, “Yes, I want to collaborate. They seem amazing. This is awesome.” That was how I was brought into the process. And at that point we started what became 158 hours of zooming before we ever put one word on the page. It became a whole thing, and it was an interrogation of every single word in the play. It was an interrogation of every single line, of every single song. It was like a masterclass with Stephen Schwartz about songwriting. It was all these different things. And we had Jon Chu for all of it, which you never have as a writer, you never have the director that much, so we sort of mind melded. We broke both movies at the same time, and then we split them up scene wise and wrote them at the same time and meshed them together.
And then we started passing movie one and movie two back and forth, so it was this very collaborative experience. It was the greatest thing of all time. It was impossible. It was so hard. I started getting hives all over my body at one point, which I had never had before. I was like, “Am I allergic to talking about Wicked? What’s happening?” But it was very stressful because all four of us felt like a profound sense of responsibility to this project that meant so much to so many people, and it felt really heavy, but in a good way.
Ramell Ross: Wait, can I ask a question?
Kathryn VanArendonk: Please.
Dana Fox: Please.
Ramell Ross: How did you know it was 150 hours?
Dana Fox: Thank you so much. I have asked-
Ramell Ross: Because when I say numbers, I’m like, “Man, I slept for days.” Actually it was like a week, but that’s also a lie.
Dana Fox: Well, because I was like, it felt like a really long time, but I was like, sometimes I lose track of time, maybe it wasn’t as much as I thought, so I asked my assistant to add up all the meetings because they were all in our calendar, so I was just like, “Well, how long was that?” It was 158 hours.
Ramell Ross: You got the blockchain paper trail?
Dana Fox: We have receipts. I was like, oh boy.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Two of these films are adaptations. And I wanted to ask, I think they come at adaptation from a couple of… They treat the idea of it in very different ways. It seems like Wicked, a lot of the pressure is the tension with faithfulness and where you have room to do other things. And with Nickel Boys, it seems like the impulse was let’s try to be very different, or at least to have a completely different language about how we approach this thing. And yet of course, any adaptation is a dance of both of those things. I’m curious, what about the adaptation process went how you thought it would go and what about it was not at all what you assumed an adaptation was going to be like?
Dana Fox: I feel like you guys go, I like your vibe. I think you guys should just crush. Go.
Ramell Ross: That’s really kind. The adaptation, it’s a strange process. I’ve never adapted anything and I’ve never written a script, haven’t really read so so many scripts, but I’ve watched a ton of movies. And my life is basically what you mentioned. And so I think the approach that we took was trying to, I think… And I’ll pass to Jos because we can both talk ad nauseum about it, so I’m trying to be succinct, but to adapt the book in a way that first distilled Colson’s narrative to its minimal elements because the ecosystem of his text is very succinct. If you don’t do the… If anyone’s read it, if you don’t do the encyclopedia, then you’re going to lose the way that he uses A across the film in all of his comments because he got an encyclopedia from a thing when he was working in the kitchen. And it’s just so perfect and complex that if we were to choose things, then our system would be incomplete and it would feel incomplete.
And so we wanted to build our own. And through that, we took a more open-ended approach to a story that’s extremely familiar, which is to lean into the absent poetry of the times. I’m sure we know well, the visual lexicon of Black people’s relationship to photo history and cinema history from even the 1850s to 1960s, it’s predominantly from the white gaze, and most of the images even made by people of color are like uplift images that are civil rights oriented, and we’re trying to prove things. There is an absence of literal lyricism ambiguity in poetry that most cultures whose urge emerge isn’t to prove existence have. And so that’s an archive that’s missing that we thought could contribute to the story that we thought could really bring a type of life to the trajectory of Elwood that would be not only universal, and not that that was our aim, but would be just so enriching to spend life in their lives as opposed to organize their lives narratively towards Elwood’s death.
And it’s a spoiler alert, like Elwood is shot at the end of the book. Sorry guys. Has everyone read it? Don’t raise your hand if you’ve read it. Perfect. Everyone’s read it, so I’ll pass to Jos.
Joslyn Barnes: Spoilers.
Ramell Ross: Yeah.
Joslyn Barnes: And I think that Ramell’s desire to use the perspective that he chose to use in the film was really important in how we thought about writing it. Because as he has said, it’s not so much about entering someone’s experience, life experience, it’s really more about aligning the viewer’s subjectivity with the experience of the characters as they go through it. And that’s a different comment because you can’t understand necessarily if your life experience isn’t the same, like more deeply, what does it mean to enter into the gaze of young Black men? It’s more about aligning your subjectivity so that you’re then open to it in a different way, and it’s about letting go of yourself in a particular way, which is actually not that easy, and it causes a tension that’s interesting. In the first, I don’t know, 15 minutes or so, people have described this feeling of tension and being on the edge of their seat until they slowly start to relax into that experience.
And that’s really, it’s an invitation. It’s a broader invitation to participate in the making of meaning inside of the film to actually start putting it together. And when you start to understand as you watch it, when you start to understand that this is very much film about memory and the time moves both forward and backward inside of the film, what becomes more important than knowing is actually recognizing. And that starts to resonate with your own life experience kind of the way poetry does. You can read a poem from anywhere on the planet and have that experience of having shared something with the writer or from your own life, your own experience. It transcends cultures, it transcends time. And that was, I think part of the challenge of writing was to try to figure out how to do that because it’s, usually with a script you’re describing what the viewer’s just going to see.
And in this case it was thinking about that, but also thinking about literally how they were going to see is different from… And also he wanted to shoot in oners, which meant scene duration was something to also really keep in mind. How do you write scenes where there’s no coverage, where there’s no opportunity for coverage? That also is something about… The architecture was, we also were writing a story that was based on a true story. We’re standing on Colston’s shoulders, but also he’s standing on the shoulders of the young men who survived the Dozier School for Boys and also those who didn’t survive. And so we had to do research about that school, and we encountered the people that had actually done the exhumation of the graves and looked at images, and some of those images are in the film and are integrated into the film.
And some of those images really stayed with us in particular things like a marble and a penny and things that were found in the pockets of the children that were buried there. And it reminds you what’s actually at stake, and it reminds you that these are children and that they were children. There’s a lot of layers of things to really keep in mind. That’s why we had to really come up with a different kind of grammar, I think, to make it cinematic. It wasn’t so much a desire to be different from the book as it was to actually translate it into something cinematic that could be experienced in a different way that would be as rich as the way we experience reading the book.
Kathryn VanArendonk: That’s beautiful.
Dana Fox: We had sort of a unique thing that I had never encountered before, which was that we knew when I was brought on that we were making two movies and that we were adapting a play that was adapted from a movie that was adapted from a book. There was a lot of source material going on in that story, and we knew it was going to be two movies and there’s a framing device in the play that frames the whole play, but that bookend doesn’t now have an ending at the end of the first movie because they’re not together. And there are songs that reprise, but they’re going to reprise a year from now. Am I going to feel the feelings I felt when the first song happened? Because it was a year ago, so there were all these interesting questions that we had to ask about how are we going to make movie one feel like if you’ve never seen the play, it’s its own thing, and you could leave and be like, I’m done. Goodbye. See you later.
And how are we also going to make movie two feel like its own thing completely hermetically sealed, awesome, that’s a movie. We all love it. And then also, how are you going to make them work as an experience together? That was really the thing that was on our mind all the time, so we did a lot of stuff where it would be like if there was a lyric that made you feel something that gave you chills, we would sort of go, okay, but does the movie give you enough lead up to that chills moment? Are you seeing enough moments that make that lyric really hit? We would go into that and then we would go, oh, but we’re going to reprise that song in the next movie, so does it feel tied off here in this first movie, or do we need something musical to tie off the idea?
Stephen Schwartz is a complete genius. And so when I would watch now the first movie, I’d be like, you put, I’m Not That Girl all over that thing, didn’t you? Like, oh my God, that’s amazing. And then you led up to it and it’s like, For Good is all over movie one. He musically put For Good everywhere in movie one. And I was like, “Dude, that’s so smart. It’s like you’re just making me want that second movie so badly.” And so he did a lot of musical tricks to make it all feel really cohesive. And that was just a bizarre problem because most of the time when you make a sequel of something, you don’t know that you’re going to make the sequel unless… Because you made the first movie and you had to wait to see if it was going to be successful.
And in our case, it was like, don’t fuck this up, because it was like we were shooting them both at the same time, so the first movie has to work because we’ve already shot the second movie, so it was sort of terrifying the entire time. And that was a new piece of the adaptation. The other thing I would say is just you would think it would be easier to have all that source material to have L. Frank Baum. We didn’t have the rights to the movie, so you’ll notice that all of our references are actually from the book because the movie is owned by other people, so the ruby slippers can’t be ruby because in the book they were silver. And so we were trying to make all these Wizard of Oz references, but we had to make sure they were from the book. We couldn’t use anything from the movie. And we did a few little cheeky things, don’t tell the legal department, but you saw them.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Wait, name a cheeky thing right now.
Dana Fox: Well, one thing that we didn’t get away with was when she first goes to Shiz, we have the Wicked font come up, and in the font was The Wizard of Oz font was a little too much like The Wizard of Oz font and they were like, “Take that swirl away.” And we were like, “But we like the swirl.” And they were like, “It’s too swirly.” And we were like, “Oh, fine.” And so we had to change it just a little bit, so there were a lot of things like that. There were some negotiations on fun things like that. And so you would think it would be so wonderful to have all that source material, but it was also more complex because we felt such a profound sense of responsibility to do right by the legacy of The Wizard of Oz, which is so many people’s favorite movie.
And then we felt we had to do right by the musical, which is so many people’s favorite musical. And it was like, ah, it was a lot of pressure. What we tried to do is we tried to figure out how to… And this sort of reminds me of what you’re saying a little bit about the book and the soul of the book and making sure the soul of the book sort of comes through. We tried to make sure that the soul of the musical was untouched, that if you were a massive fan of the musical, you would feel like you were watching, you were having that same experience that the one you had when you were a child and you first saw it, or when you were 20 and it changed your life or whatever. And so then we would take these little diversions and dig deeper into the characters over here and then come back into what you were used to.
We didn’t change a lot of canon because we were like, people are going to be so mad. And then at the premiere, anytime one of the singers would do… Ariana and Cynthia are just extraordinary. And anytime they would do anything that was one note different from the musical, people were like, ah, lost their minds. And so we were right. We had to be really careful with it. Did that answer the question? I literally, these guys are talking, they’re amazing. I’m like, I’m in college again.
Ramell Ross: We were in.
Dana Fox: I’m at college at a lecture.
Dana Weissman: That’s so much pressure though.
Dana Fox: That’s what I think the Hives were about.
Dana Weissman: That’s like seeing the sequel and calling at Rosebud or something.
Dana Fox: Yes, exactly. That’s what the Hives were about.
Ramell Ross: That’s why you’re so happy you did it. And you’re like-
Dana Fox: Well, I was like, we survived.
Ramell Ross: Exactly.
Dana Fox: Exactly. But oh God, you guys’ movie too.
Kathryn VanArendonk: No, it’s going to be great.
Dana Fox: More Hives.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Justin, I wanted to ask you about timeline, which is such a incredible feat that Challengers pulls off, but also seems so hard to do in a way that plays seamlessly where you’re tracking everything where you’re playing with tension about… I am usually a TV critic, and I watch a lot of TV pilots where it’s like 24 hours earlier, and I’m always like, I want to just stay in the place. And often it is this infuriating experience of being like, you’re dangling the thing in front of me. I know I’m trying to get back there, and it does not feel that way at all. And so I’m just wondering if you could talk about how early did you get into the timeline process of it and how did you develop it?
Justin Kuritzkes: I’m really touched by all of that. That was very nice. I think it’s important when you do something like that, that it’s not a gimmick or that you’re not doing it because it would be a cool structural thing or something. For me, the way that Challengers is structured came very much of a piece with the desire to write the movie in the first place, which was that I was watching a ton of tennis and becoming this mega fan. And I started asking myself what felt like an existential question, which was, what could I write that would possibly be as good as tennis? And then the next question was, what would make tennis even better? And for me, the answer to that question was it would be better if you could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody. And not just on the level that a commentator could tell you or could speculate, but if you could know the truth, if you could know what was really at stake.
And if that could feel like being led in on a secret that only the characters know and that the audience in the film doesn’t know. Because of that, I always knew that the structure of the movie would be that we would be dropped into this present-day match and then gradually be led in on the secret of why this thing mattered so much. Even though on the surface of it it’s nothing. It’s this bumfuck tournament for no money, for no ranking points in the middle of nowhere. No offense to New Rochelle.
Ramell Ross: That’s what I was going to say.
Justin Kuritzkes: But the thing about New Rochelle, I’ll tell you why I set it in New Rochelle because when I was a playwright, my survival job was that I was an SAT tutor and they would send the newbies out to Long Island and to Westchester to go teach on the weekends. And I had a lot of students in New Rochelle. And these challenger events, which are, they’re professional tennis, they’re the big leagues, but they’re the lowest rung. And you have guys playing for less money than it costs to travel to the tournament. And so they necessarily happen in places where they’re wealthy enough that they have good tennis courts, but they’re sleepy enough that this event would be something worth going to. They tried to do them in New York City and nobody went because we were like, either it’s Nadal or fuck off, I don’t care. I always knew that the structure was going to be that we would be dropped into this match and then gradually have the context filled in.
I realized really early on that the structure of tennis really directly mapped onto the structure of a story or a screenplay, and that there’s three sets and there’s three acts. And that I could just make a movie that fit within that container, and that would be the closest thing to capturing the energy of sports. Because that was really my desire with it the whole way through, which was that it would feel like watching a great sports match and that a lot of sports movies, I think make the mistake of thinking that the way to capture the energy of the US Open is to make a movie about the US Open. And the truth is the US Open is always going to be better than that, so I knew I had to find a structure that would allow the stakes to not be official, but personal. And that’s where that time jumping thing came in.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Were there moments of the time jumping where you felt like, I’m frustrated by the structure of this thing or were there needs to skip back and then forward interrupted energy or momentum or a kind of personal arc that you were wrestling with?
Justin Kuritzkes: No, never. But it always had to be the… It’s a weird thing when you make a movie with a structure like that because in a way, whatever’s happening in the present has to inform the past just as much as the past is informing the present. And you have to be very careful not to make the logic of the movie the logic of editing, because you still have to think, well, that happened years ago. What helped is I always knew roughly the container of the time that we were going to span, because I started to think of an athletic career as a mini life where you’re born essentially when you’re 18 and people can start making money off of you and you’re dead when you’re useless when you’re around my age, like 34, 35, if you’re lucky.
That’s a really blessed athletic career. And so I started to think of that as a cradle to grave mini life. It’s very brutal. I knew we would always stick within that container, so I never was like, we’re never going to see Art and Patrick when they’re 12 or something. That was not within the bounds of this story.
Kathryn VanArendonk: These are three very different films in a lot of ways. And yet I did realize that they are all actually the same movie. They’re all about two friends who meet at school.
Dana Fox: That’s amazing. Great point. That’s awesome.
Ramell Ross: You are a critic.
Justin Kuritzkes: You’re good.
Dana Weissman: Well said, well said.
Justin Kuritzkes: Wow.
Ramell Ross: And insightful.
Kathryn VanArendonk: And they are all playing with this initial introductory character. And there is, I think, not necessarily for an audience who’s never seen the works before, but you know that there is this other character who is going to come probably. You, certainly the writers know. I think watching the movies, you have this awareness that some other energy will be interrupting becoming the other foil or the partner for this person. And I was really interested by trying to sit down and think about when you introduce this other person, how you introduce this other person, how long do you delay it? What is the ground that you lay beforehand? And then as a way of thinking about point of view, which is so crucial too, I think all of these movies, how do you negotiate the balance of them? I don’t know who wants to tackle that first, but it’s like I was just so pleased with myself.
Dana Fox: It’s really smart. It’s really, really smart.
Justin Kuritzkes: Fantastic.
Dana Fox: That was a very hard section of the movie for us because we start in Glinda’s perspective. She’s speaking from the future from the end of movie two, which doesn’t exist yet in your mind, but she’s telling us a story about Elphaba. We know that she’s lying about what she’s saying, so she’s an unreliable narrator introducing us to a character. Then we have to go back in time and not only meet her again as who she was back then, but we have to have a POV handoff so that the movie can fundamentally become about Elphaba’s journey.
The first movie is Elphaba’s of character journey in terms of the sense of we are tracking her emotional arc. The structure tracks her emotional arc. And so you have to have this handoff so that you really start caring about this person who you’ve objectified up until then and who everyone’s talking about. You have to actually now become her and care about her. And so that was the hardest part of the movie. It took us six months to write Glinda getting to Shiz. We wrote 500 different versions of her getting to Shiz. It was because of that handoff that was so difficult, so thank you for noticing how hard that was.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Can you talk, how did you feel like the version that you landed on solved the problem of the handoff that you were struggling with?
Dana Fox: I think I always just have to compliment Jon Chu because he is so constantly thinking about their emotional states and their emotional relationship to each other. No matter what we were doing, we had the script laid out in cards at a certain point, and the whole thing was on cards. And then he had green Post-Its for Elphaba and pink Post-Its for… I don’t know if I’m betraying some secret. I don’t know. Sorry, Jon, if that was your special thing you didn’t want anyone to know about. But he had green Post-Its for Elphaba and pink Post-Its for Glinda that was just about their emotional state in whatever scene was happening, so that would run alongside each of the scenes. And so I think it really came down to cinematically… He works with Alice Brooks all the time, who’s this extraordinary woman who I’m obsessed with. I’ve worked with her too. She’s amazing.
They work together to try to really make that handoff feel visual and seamless. And there’s an interesting moment where when Elphaba finally sings her first song, I think you finally feel like, oh my God, the movie’s really starting guys. And PS, it’s pretty late in the movie. There’s always times where it’s like, is there any way we can tighten that up a little bit? Because we always knew, oh, it really starts when Wizard and I is going to happen. And it’s pretty deep into the movie. Sorry guys, but that’s because we couldn’t get rid of anything. We were just in love with seeing Elphaba as a baby because everybody calls her a witch and says horrible things about her and nobody is born wicked. And you had to see her be born.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Did you sing a lot when you were writing this? Did you walk around the house singing all the time? Did you?
Dana Fox: I got this job during the middle of the pandemic, and I had had never seen Wicked, so I was like, “Yeah, of course Wicked is my favorite play.” Who doesn’t love Wicked? Wicked’s incredible.
Kathryn VanArendonk: This is a writing tip for everyone. That is the move.
Dana Fox: I was like, Wicked is amazing. We love it. Then I got on YouTube and I went to every janky ass, shaky camera, bullshit. Germany, places that weren’t in English. I watched the whole play in tiny little snippets, foreign languages abound, the whole thing, so I was like, I got it. I see what they’re doing here. I was like, “Yes, obviously I love Wicked, it’s amazing.” And then when finally the pandemic stopped, I’m out there with the mask, I’m like, “Fuck, I got to go see this play.” Because I’ve been working on it for a while.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Did they know?
Dana Fox: I was vague about it. There was a light touch with… I didn’t lie. I don’t lie. I am not a liar.
Kathryn VanArendonk: This is another tip.
Dana Fox: Again, hives. I didn’t ever lie, but I was always just for a second, pretend I’m someone who hasn’t seen the musical because I think there will be that audience member, so I’ll just be that right now and that’ll be helpful with the process. And they were like, “Yeah, that’s helpful.” And then I did see it, so I was like, now I’m on board. But the music was incredibly helpful because I had the play, the text of the play, and I had the music, so I would read the play over and over again, and every time the song would come on, I would press play and I would listen to that. And that was really, really helpful because the music, it’s basically an opera. There’s not actually that much dialogue in the play. And what is there is wonderful because Winnie’s a genius and she was so much a part of creating the songs too, so the songs really tell the story. That was very helpful to me, a lot of singing.
Ramell Ross: That’s funny. I would’ve pitched to Jon. I’m like, “Look, so I’ve seen all these little bits on YouTube. What if we strung that together? And so it’s like multicultural, Wicked.”
Dana Fox: Oh hey, I love that. Hey, wait a minute, listening.
Ramell Ross: I get an editor credit too. Come on.
Dana Fox: Listening. But there was a funny thing that came out of me on my weird YouTube deep dive, which was that I found a clip of Idina and Kristin, I think they were at the Emmys. Again, not a super fan, I don’t know. But I think they were doing a performance at the Emmys, and she was going up into the air at the end of Defying Gravity, and the camera stayed on Kristin’s face and you can’t do that in a play. And I saw her looking up at her, and it was this moment and I wept hysterically, just hysterically crying. And I called Jon and I was like, “I understand why we’re making this movie.” I was like, “Because we could get in their faces.”
Ramell Ross: He’s like, “We’re shooting tomorrow.”
Dana Fox: And he’s like… He’s like… Exactly.
Ramell Ross: We’ve finished the scripted… All right. I’m with you.
Dana Fox: I’ll keep typing, I’m sorry, I just needed a cry break. But it was like that ability to get up in their faces and see the emotion that growing up when I would go to plays, I did not have a lot of money. I was so far on the back, I did not get to see the emotion on these poor people’s faces. I’m too far back. But to be able to, in a movie, just be right up in there and see what Glinda feels when she’s left behind like that. And to be in her face, it’s just torture. When you asked that question about what was surprising about the adaptation, for me that was the biggest surprise was how emotional it became when it became a movie. It became like 900X emotional for me when we got in there.
Kathryn VanArendonk: Joslyn or Ramell, do you want to talk about the lead-up too.
Ramell Ross: And the question just to remind because the journey you took us on.
Dana Fox: I’m sorry.
Kathryn VanArendonk: 100%. It was a fantastic voyage. No, I was just thinking about the introduction of your second character.
Ramell Ross: Well, it’s interesting the writing processes of each of us, like genuinely learning from both of you two, so thank you because nice to hear for such good films like the cerebral process behind it. I think as a filmmaker, at least as it relates to Nickel Boys, I was more interested in spending time in individual moments and having these individual moments be both symbolic, metaphoric and experiential. And so I feel like a lot of the writing process for Jos as it relates to time and as it relates to eventually getting to Turner was to fill individual moments that aligned with the perception of the audience because we’re shooting point of view that had something that’s so ephemeral and so experiential that it kind of like you are almost filled with awe that you were witnessing this with the character. And that process is separate from getting to Turner.
But if we could do that in as many moments as possible before we got to Turner, and which we eventually see Elwood for the first time because we switched perspectives, then we’ve given the character essentially those emotional cards that you’re talking about. But the emotion that we were going for was more about allowing the audience to identify, to use what Salamishah Tillet said about the film, to identify with the character is possible emotional space in that time and keep it ambiguous. We wanted there to be strategic ambiguity of life where the film is deeply interested in, as I mentioned, the poetics of Black image reproduction. And within that it desires non-conclusive imagery. This theorist, Michele Wallace said that, and there’s many ways to corral meaning, but she said, you can almost summarize Black people’s relationships to the US with one word, consumption.
Most images of Black people over time have just been easily read. And if most of us are from the states, we’re always peddling in the US’s unarticulated visual constitution when we’re reading images. Very Eurocentric, very western imaginary. And so how do you make images that allow for the person who’s watching it specifically inside the eyes of the characters to be completed by you, to be finished by the audience? It’s something that Godfrey Reggio, this really amazing filmmaker who made the Qatsi trilogy said, “The viewer completes the film. If the film is not finished, it’s incomplete until you and your imagination collide with it. And that meaning is singular to you in the film.” And so we organized the film, of course narratively like getting to Elwood, unfortunately, getting in a car and then going to Nickel Boys, and then he meets this character Turner. And from the way in which we’ve used the language of the camera in the writing process and where Elwood looks and what’s happened, you understand that he’s been activated by Martin Luther King.
You understand that he is the type of person that is interested in the awe of the human experience. And then you meet Turner. Turner sees him, and then you see what Turner looks at. And the way that Turner uses the camera essentially and looks around the world, which is one that is way more cynical. He’s not looking at butterflies flying across the sky, he’s not looking at the grass. He’s trying to manipulate the system and looking how to self persevere in moments in which he could be fighting for others, but he’s more inclined to be interested in his own self-preservation. But do you want to add anything to-
Joslyn Barnes: Yeah, no. I think that’s really well said, the way that you talked about it. I think we had this… We felt it was really important across the film that rather than organizing the film by plot, we would organize it through its emotional coherence. And so the relationship, we premised it around this idea of selfless love that Dr. King called Agape, and this transfer of love from the grandmother Hattie to Elwood. Elwood’s then experience of the Civil Rights movement, teachings of Dr. King, and then passing that along to Turner. And it takes him a very long time, Turner, to come into himself. And then as Ramell has given away the spoiler already that it inspires a selfless act with Turner. But Turner then goes on to live for Elwood and assumes his identity and this aspect of trying to keep Elwood alive as long as we could inside the film, as well as to try to understand why Turner does that and how long it takes him to actually learn to allow himself to be loved.
And at that point, he comes into himself and assumes his identity as Turner and is then able to give witness, all of which feels incredibly relevant in the moment that we are living right now, I would say. But this was the organizing principle, so that moment of where they actually meet as scripted, it happens once that suddenly you realize you’re in someone else’s point of view when Elwood says, “I’m Elwood.” And then you realize, my God, we haven’t actually seen Elwood this entire film except in brief reflections at different ages. And for us in writing that on the page, it was like, wow, we just thought, wow, this is going to just blow everyone… The desired effect would be, you’d be really impacted by that. And then we kept working on it in the edit room and it wasn’t landing exactly as intended.
And then the editor came up with this brilliant idea to repeat it, to actually repeat the scene in Elwood’s point of view, in Turner’s point of view, and then Elwood’s point of view to actually drive it home in this particular way. And then you really understood, wait, what is happening here. I’ve never seen that in a film. What is that? And then there’s other echoes and glitches that happen inside of the film that remind you, you come to start understanding that this is his memory and this is actually how memory works. And that memory is very much about every time you call something to mind, your brain is actually overwriting it, so in a way, every time you remember something, you’re actually getting further and further away from your original experience of it in literal neurological terms. And there’s something about also the way time works that way, that time is a construct and isn’t actually real.
It’s like a measure of perceptible change as a physicist has said. And so there’s a way in which all of these things start to converge inside of the film. They were thought through but of course we wanted to make it dramatic and emotional, really emotional more than anything that it would land emotionally. But that was super important to work out in that moment. And in the book, it’s interesting, the way that Colson deals with it in the book is very different, but there is a sleight of hand inside the book, it feels to us anyway, in reading it, that that shift happened during the boxing match and we thought, wow, it’s such a brilliant idea to put it in the boxing match when you’re distracted by a third character, you’re not actually paying attention to your two lead characters, you’re actually thinking about the guy in the ring. And that that character, that’s where it happens, became also really interesting in this idea of what it means to be a spectator as opposed to being a witness was something we also thought about with respect to the audience too. Sorry, long answer.
Dana Fox: No, no. I’ve learned so much from all of you people today. I’m so fascinated, this idea of following the emotional cohesion instead of the actual structural, whatever. Amazing. This one over here about editing, but don’t think about editing. I’m like, I’m always thinking about editing. I’m not supposed to be thinking about editing.
Ramell Ross: This guy’s like a sage or something.
Dana Fox: I was like, whoa. Fuck, I got to go home you guys. I’ll see you. I have to write some stuff down. Sorry, go ahead.
Justin Kuritzkes: I’m humbled to put that way.
Dana Fox: Amazing.
