[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Do you know how many screenplays are submitted each year to Nicholl Fellowships?
R.J. Daniel Hanna, Writer/Director: I know the year that I won it was over 8,000. I think that now they only allow you to submit one. Before you could submit multiple scripts, you could submit a few and now you have to pick one. I think that will be for the foreseeable future. The most submissions that they ever had would creep up a little every year, but that was 8,000-8,300, something like that.
Film Courage: What happened the first time you submitted?
Daniel: First time I submitted I was rejected. Somewhere down the line I made quarterfinalist and semi-finalist with a script.
Film Courage: How many times have you submitted a screenplay to the Nicholl Fellowships?
Daniel: I’m sure 10 times or more. I submitted a few. It was something a friend of mine told me early at USC that I should try and go for. I started then when I had one script. I’d submit different ones over the years and made semi-finalists a few times with different scripts.
The script that won was the feature version of the shelter short film. It made Top 50 one the year. I felt like it was really close and I actually did all this rewriting and all this other stuff in between and then submitted again randomly one year. I didn’t submit every year but submitted…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
About:
Maybe it was growing up in Arkansas as a Canadian, or the summers in rural Ireland with his grandparents, but Daniel has always been drawn to out-of-place characters, strange environments, and the unique rhythms of how people talk. He just completed post on his horror film “Succubus,” starring Ron Perlman and Rosanna Arquette, to be released in 2024. Crossing over 500 screens in the U.S. and beginning its run in the U.K. is his feature “Hard Miles,” starring Golden Globe-winner Matthew Modine and Oscar-Nominee Sean Astin, which has won multiple awards and screened at prestigious festivals including Chicago International, Heartland Film Festival, and Cinequest. Prior to that, Daniel directed the true-story feature “Miss Virginia,” starring three-time Emmy-winner Uzo Aduba, Oscar-Nominee Aunjanue Ellis, and Vanessa Williams. The film was listed as a New York Times and USA Today Must-See Fall Movie, won the Audience Award at The Naples Film Festival, and received a limited theatrical release, cable premiere on BET, and streaming deal with Netflix. As a writer, Daniel is a winner of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, as well as the Slamdance, ScriptPipeline, and Screencraft writing awards. He also explores storytelling as an editor, with ten features under his belt, including horror film “What Lies Below,” starring Mena Suvari, which hit #1 on Netflix, and “Supercell” starring Alec Baldwin, Anne Heche, and Skeet Ulrich, which hit #1 on Hulu. Daniel hopes to continue telling cinematic, character-driven stories long past the time any sane person would have retired. He lives on the east-side of L.A. with his excessively-vocal cat “Dottie.”
MORE INFO ON HARD MILES MOVIE:
https://linktr.ee/hardmiles_movie
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