Q&A: THE WOMAN KING Screenwriter Dana Stevens Reflects on Her Thirty-Year Career
From the film that made her want to work in cinema, to how her screenwriting craft has evolved over the years, to THE WOMAN KING's Oscar snub, we cover it all
I had been a fan of screenwriter Dana Stevens for many years, but I’d never had the good fortune to do more than email with her about Writers Guild of America matters. After seeing THE WOMAN KING (2022) (written by her, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, and starring the goddess mere mortals refer to as Viola Davis), I decided it was time to do something about that - the result of which is the far-reaching conversation about screenwriting, being a female artist in Hollywood, and the role of cinema in our culture that you’re about to read.
Early on in the chat, I asked Dana if there was a film that essentially ignited her cinematic imagination. The title she answered with is as steeped in the past as it is in the inevitability of change…not entirely unlike much of what the two of us would go on to discuss.
From her first produced screenplay BLINK (1993), to films such as CITY OF ANGELS (1998), SAFE HAVEN (2013), and FATHERHOOD (2021) and creating TV series “WHAT ABOUT BRIAN” for ABC and “RECKLESS” for CBS, Dana has somehow done it all in a business that rarely permits longevity as a writer. There’s much to learn here both on a craft level and from the permutations of her career, including the road to and the achievement that is THE WOMAN KING.
COLE HADDON: Let’s start with a question every filmmaker I know seems to have a different definition of: what is screenwriting?
DANA STEVENS: Screenwriting is telling a story through dramatic action and dialogue. It is a story meant to be told on screen with characters that move in space - the things they say and the actions they take move the story forward, the meaning of dramatic action. It is a rhythmic exercise, akin to poetry. Reading a screenplay is meant to give the reader the physical and emotional experience of watching a movie or television show, so you can break rules and use language to take them on that ride viscerally.
CH: “A rhythmic exercise, akin to poetry.” I love that because I rarely hear screenwriters acknowledge the obvious artifice — the symphony — of a great screenplay and, consequently, film. That you are crafting a visceral, emotional ride, the same way a brilliant composer does, rather than just crafting great scenes full of conflict or action or whatever. But while it’s one thing for both of us to say all this aloud, how conscious are you of that when you’re working? Do you break an outline to begin shaping that experience, or do you focus on the story and, later, wrestle a sense of that rhythm from it?
Reading a screenplay is meant to give the reader the physical and emotional experience of watching a movie or television show, so you can break rules and use language to take them on that ride viscerally.
DS: I definitely outline, but that is a phase that is not nuanced to the right rhythm. It’s just one-liners for each scene. Once I feel comfortable with that road map, I start writing. And as you surmised, that’s when I feel and play with the rhythm. Some scenes from the outline never make it into the movie. Some producers have asked, “Don’t you have, like, a 200-page version of this you started out with?” The answer is no. As I’m writing, I’m working on the mood and rhythm from scene to scene. I want to find one or two specific images or descriptions that tell the reader about a place or person – that’s the poetry part. Few words, a lot of specificity. And when it’s getting too long, or a certain character isn’t using his or her unique voice – I have to attend to those problems. When intuition is telling me to change it up or get faster or slower in this section, I listen to that and sometimes even re-outline.
CH: These days, where do you find the most joy in your process? Is it the blank page, breaking the outline, rewriting? Myself, I used to love the blank page, that sense of discovery as I worked, something coming alive I didn’t anticipate. But these days, I look much more forward to editing, to ripping things apart, to wrestling every line into submission.
DS: I’m so impressed and a little jealous that you could ever say that you love the blank page. I think I may now make it a goal of mine to try to love it.
CH: I’m trying desperately to fall in love with it again. I miss it.
DS: For me, the blank page stage, what I call the initial composition, is one of the hardest legs of the journey because you are constantly wondering about all the different places you could go and which ones are “right.” Once you’ve written the first draft, you can start to solve the puzzle. This is what I have - now, how do I make it great? Once you have raw material, you can start seeing literally what the movie is. It can sometimes be surprising. I much prefer the editing and rewriting portion because I feel clearer about the demands of the story and characters.
CH: Okay, that back-and-forth was a bit of an amuse-bouche. Craft talk is often the easiest part of chats like these. Let’s take a detour back in time. Can you recall the first piece of art, of any kind, that captured your imagination and, however briefly, inspired you to think, “Yeah, I want to do that!”?
DS: That moment came when my friend and her mother took me to see THE WAY WE WERE.
DS (cont’d): I had just turned ten. Her mother was very beautiful and Brazilian and always late to everything. So, we came into the theater in the dark, and settled into our seats just as a drunken Hubbell is welcomed into Katie’s apartment. She’s cooking him dinner and she goes to get him and finds a trail of his clothing leading to her bed, where he’s naked and passed out. And she decides to also undress and get in bed with him. I can’t even tell you how exciting it was to see this scene and the rest of the movie. At the time, I didn’t know about writing movies, but I definitely became obsessed with film at this point and wanted to be an actor.
DS (cont’d): What was your moment of falling for film, Cole?
CH: I have a memory of sitting in my parent’s bedroom, which I have to say is impressive because I remember so little of my early childhood. I couldn’t have been more than five, and there was an Avon party happening in the living room. I’d been exiled away from the adults, basically. KING KONG, the 1933 original, was on, and I watched it on this tiny B&W TV. Image grainy, jumping around. But Jesus. I think that was it for me. That’s when the compulsive cinephilia kicked off, at least in terms of me as a viewer.
I don’t know for sure when the storyteller in me took over, when I began to realize, “Holy shit, I want to do that,” but I can say the intermission of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA stands out in my mind like few others as a teenager. “Who are you?” shouted over and over. It so clearly meant something, the whole film meant something, and I not only wanted to find out what – but I think something in me knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life asking similar questions.
DS: Fabulous. The black and white TV, the parents laughing and chatting in the distance. By the way, those details, the Avon party — those are the poetry-esque specifics that bring me right into that scene of you watching TV. Your answer transports me back to those times. Also, KONG and LAWRENCE take us to exotic far-off lands. Many of us become writers just because we want to live in another world, magical and historical. Imagining those lives is a big reason I am a writer.
CH: Let’s talk more about that. You started your Hollywood journey in the arts as an actress before you transitioned to screenwriting, but what was the role of writing in your life before that? Were you a female Hubbell Gardiner in the making as a child or did your love affair with the written word develop with more, as we call them, complications?
Many of us become writers just because we want to live in another world, magical and historical. Imagining those lives is a big reason I am a writer.
DS: Love of writing starts with love of reading, I think. I loved reading, and moved quickly up the ladder to grown-up books, and wanted to read books that were seminal or important. I also loved these childhood records I had which were like radio plays of the different Disney movies or Dr. Seuss or PETER AND THE WOLF. These were little dramatic plays with score and sound effects.
CH: I grew up with the same, though by the eighties, things like STAR WARS had joined the mix.
DS: I think they influenced me a lot, the way they created story through characters affecting each other. In fifth grade and then again in high school, I attempted to write a novel. I never succeeded, but the desire led me to teachers who thought I should start smaller, with poetry and short stories. In high school, I had a short story win an award, as well as some poetry published in some kind of regional teenage journal. The encouragement of teachers is huge in making one think one can be a writer. The other more mundane thing is that being an actor means you have to wait around for someone to put you in a show. When you are a writer, you just start creating. Once I seriously pursued acting in school and after, and I saw people all around me writing plays and movies, I wanted to do it, too.
CH: You’ve been a professional writer for an awe-inspiring three decades now – in fact, this year is the thirtieth anniversary of your first produced film, BLINK. You’ve written more scripts than you can probably count, worked on even more, and had numerous films and TV series produced. What do you wish you could go back in time and teach yourself in the nineties?
DS: The thing I would go back and tell myself in the nineties is to go ahead and reach for the brass ring of directing. Do it earlier rather than later. Don’t think of yourself as a “good student” who does the notes well and turns in good assignments – think of yourself as the creator. They need you to make things and you can be strong and assure them that you will bring the vision to life.
CH: Do you think being a woman played a part in you taking the “good student” approach?
DS: Well, I’ve come to feel that being a woman, at least in my generation, sets you up to be people-pleaser. I don’t think men judge themselves as harshly. I also think there is a huge boys’ club mentality. The stats bear it out. Very few women screenwriters get nominated, even in this century, and they have won far less than men. I think executives can be afraid to say no to a man, but they are comfortable saying no to a woman.
CH: Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote a pretty scathing editorial in part about this after THE WOMAN KING was snubbed at the Oscars despite its critical and commercial success. I’m a huge fan of hers, have been since LOVE & BASKETBALL, so I, for one, was furious on her behalf, yours, and the whole team’s. How did you feel about what she wrote?
DS: I thought it was brilliantly written and spot-on. I admired her clarity and courage. This kind of piece needs to be written. We need to stop being “nice” and shrugging. In the world at large, women’s rights are being rolled back. In terms of Hollywood folks and the awards, Gina’s piece spoke about how voters would come to our screenings and express surprise that they liked the movie. I experienced this, too, with some in the industry telling me they didn’t want to see it. These are mostly white voters, and many men. Perhaps men thought it would be anti-men, or white people thought it would make them feel guilty. The movie was not a judgment, a tirade, or a lecture.
It was shocking to see [THE WOMAN KING] ignored by the awards voters.
CH: I completely agree.
DS: Like many, many movies before it that starred men, it was a thrilling war movie about a part of history and a part of the world that you might never have seen in a movie. It just so happened that this hero’s journey was about women and what they face in conflict and war. It was about Black women who were historically powerful. A beloved actress put all her influence behind getting it made, and she opened the movie to big numbers. Think of all the times male stars have done this and been rewarded with nominations: Redford, Beatty, Costner, Mel Gibson. It was shocking to see it ignored by the awards voters.
CH: Thinking back, what do you think you’ve lost as a storyteller since those first years of your career that you wish you could get back?
DS: I miss the loose, easy writer of my youth, who didn’t judge herself and could loosely create and break rules. I loved writing in the old days. I went through a phase where it was so hard, like banging my head against the wall. Starting with THE WOMAN KING, I started to feel more free again. I’m trying to maintain that. And to always learn new things — see new and different kinds of films.
CH: What led to the creative dark times? Had something changed in your life or had the business just worn you down?
DS: I was lucky enough to get a few films made early in my career and that was very fulfilling. The “dark phase” was a time when nothing was getting greenlit, when I was replaced on projects, when I could just tell that people weren’t responding to the drafts the way I wanted them to. I do think the business was going through a change as well - personally, I really started loving indie films. Those unique voices were the ones people respected, but I was still writing “Hollywood” movies, for want of a better term. Nothing wrong with Hollywood movies, but they have now been influenced, in a good way, by a great Sundance-influenced wave of indie and auteur cinema. I needed to catch up to that and be more unique. Come at it more from my heart, or through the lens of someone with a more specific point of view that I could create on the page.
I loved the research and portraying a world people had no idea about. It was freeing to write about women in powerful positions, badass women battling back.
CH: What do you think changed with THE WOMAN KING?
DS: Number one, I was working with one of my favorite actresses, writing the role for her — knowing that made it very exciting to attempt to write a character equal to her greatness. I loved the research and portraying a world people had no idea about. It was freeing to write about women in powerful positions, badass women battling back. I was so ready to write a movie like that. I started the script in 2018, in the throes of the Trump horror show. Women were smarting from the Hilary Clinton loss. We wanted to fight back. I wanted the Agojie to win. But also, I wanted to have deep emotion and complex characters. That’s the challenge when writing something I might define as “epic”. It has to have it all — action, emotion, stakes, a splash of humor. It was fun to cook up something “big.” The producers and TriStar were so game and they gave me a lot of freedom.
CH: We’re coming to the close of our conversation, which is usually when I try to ask some profound question about, say, the future. But instead, I think I want to jump backward in our conversation, back to THE WAY WE WERE and you seeing it at ten. I can understand how that would’ve blown up your consciousness in some exciting way at that age. It’s such a literary film and one that is having such a conversation with Hollywood and artistic integrity. But when you watch it today, having worked as a screenwriter in the business that Hubbell, with all his flaws, embraced, how do you react to it?
DS: Wow, good one. I’ve never thought about this until now. Hubbell choosing to write movies is something looked down upon in the film. If you can write, you should be writing novels. It’s meant to be a judgment. It’s a common trope for novelists and literary folks to look down on screenwriters. But I firmly believe that screenwriting is a skill unto itself, and not everyone can do it. Novelists are mostly terrible at adapting their own work. I am proud to be a dramatist, telling stories with actors, giving actors the right setup and words to get them to the emotion that moves us. Dramatic storytelling is deep in our human DNA – going back to Greece and Rome and even before that. Very young children act out stories and play. During the pandemic, I came to appreciate how much we needed to lose ourselves in shows and movies to get us through that tough time.
CH: You’re touching on an existential issue I dwell on a lot, which is that films especially — but certainly TV, too — are a sacred part of our lives just as the stage used to be and still is to a lesser degree. The sheer power of it, its agility when it comes to how it moves across the world, provides us a way to communally share in something, both locally and globally, and be restored in the process – but also to provide us a mirror to consider who we are and who we’re becoming, even if we don’t notice it happening on our screens.
The best stories involve us and then make us think afterward and reflect on what they say about us as humans and as a society.
DS: Yes, it is a powerful mirror and I like what you’re pointing out. Stories don’t need to preach. The best stories involve us and then make us think afterward and reflect on what they say about us as humans and as a society. I loved the ending of Adam McKay’s movie DON’T LOOK UP. It was a movie that addressed climate change and the media and politics with humor and satire, but in the end, the only answer to disaster, the only way to spend one’s last moments, was in community with other human beings. Just sitting at the dinner table together. Going out to the movies and sitting in the dark theater with other folks who are excited to watch it — or watching a show that everyone is talking about and wanting to join in the conversation — these are hopeful, common experiences that might help bring us back together in this time of polarization and division.
CH: And there it is, all the same: you still managed to end on something profound about the future.
DS: I just love the movies. I want them to survive. I think they offer a night out, a time to laugh and cry and they start conversations - like this one! We writers spend a lot of time alone in silence, so it’s nice to speak together about what we do.
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Another fantastic Q&A. These are always so insightful and yes, profound, inspiring for someone starting out like me.