Student Spotlight – Isabella Reish
Isabella Reish (Kilachand, COM’24) has been writing their whole life but only started diving into the craft of writing screenplays last year, when they came to BU for a degree in Film and Television. Isabella has started their career off strong by winning Best Short Screenplay in the NYC International Screenplay Awards for their script Unfinished Business –Isabella’s very first script!
Kilachand staff member Megan Kagstrom sat down with Isabella to congratulate them on the award, learn more about their script Unfinished Business, and discuss Isabella’s writing process and inspirations.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Q&A with Isabella Reish
Megan: Tell us a little bit about yourself! Where are you from? What are you studying? What are some of your career goals?
Isabella: My name is Isabella Reich. My pronouns are they/them and she/her. I lived in Chicago until I was 12 and spent the rest of my growing up in a town called Murfreesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville. Now I live here on campus, and I’m a sophomore majoring in film and television.
I’m really planning on becoming a comedy television writer. If not that, something else with writing and film and television. If not that, then probably something related to sound design.
What about comedy writing specifically do you enjoy?
Comedy is just – I feel like it can bring people together and is such a universal medium in a way that some other forms aren’t. When you look at really long running programs like Saturday Night Live, that people across America will tune into and watch – there is just something so great about the power that comedy has to talk about difficult topics in a way that everybody can engage with.
How long have you been writing screenplays, and what got you interested in this style of writing and storytelling?
I haven’t been writing screenplays for long at all. I’ve been writing my whole life. But there’s no film education or anything like that for high school students, where I’m from so I kind of had to wait to learn the very technical aspect of things until I was here in school [BU]. So, I guess I started last year in FT310, the storytelling class that we take.
I’ve always liked things that are kind of supernatural, but funny and have heart to them as well, which is why I wanted to write a story about a ghost – but one that was warm and not scary.
You’ve led us right to my next question – can you tell us a little bit about your script “Unfinished Business” and give us a summary of what it’s about?
Yeah! It’s about a ghost that lives in this house all alone, trapped there in the way that ghosts are when they die – can’t go out or leave the place that he’s haunting until he completes his unfinished business, and we don’t really know what that business is until a man moves into the house. Throughout the course of the story, you realize that this man is this ghost’s son and this ghost’s unfinished business is to make this man a bowl of his favorite childhood tomato soup. When he does that, he is able to leave the world and is not stuck haunting this place anymore.
What inspired the story?
I was just writing a list, honestly, of things that I like and find entertaining. And well, I like ghosts. I like stories about family, non-traditional stories about family especially. I like soup.
And I think [of soup] weirdly as a symbolic food. So many cultures have some kind of soup as a central part of the meal and just the ways in which that specific food can bring people together. Which is why I went with that in particular, I don’t know why that seems very important to me.
What does your writing process look like when working on a screenplay, or when writing in general? Did you work with a mentor or faculty member to edit and refine the script before the final submission? Did you hold table readings of your script to help in the workshopping process?
My writing process in general, no matter what I’m doing is pretty much the same. I’ll start with some kind of basic outline – not even an outline at first, just a list of ideas of things that could be fun together and that could create something interesting. Then with a screen play in particular, what I try to do is identify who in my story is the main character, what their goal for the story is, and why that goal is going to be important to them. So, a little bit of character back story. From there, I try to identify a few obstacles that are going to keep them [from] getting to that goal. And then I have a story that I can work on.
With pretty much anything I write, once I have the outline I write the beginning and middle as fast as I can just get it down, and then I always have to sleep on the end. I never know what to do there. I just give it a few nights and then I’ll just be like, “That’s so clear to me now.” So, just making sure I give that space.
Since this [story] was for a class, we have workshops in the class. I think twice my idea and concept was looked at and people would give suggestions or things that they particularly liked or didn’t like. It was really good to hear that because you can get really stuck in your head when you’re reading your work over and over. I think it was also really useful for me to see my classmates going through their writing processes and providing my critiques for those. Because then, [when] they were doing something that was really great or not as great I could identify that within my own work too. So yeah, I don’t think that my script could have been where it was without the workshopping process at all.
My background is in theatre, and I’ve worked on new scripts and premier productions – I’m curious for you, what was the process like of finding the voice for these characters? Where do you get inspiration from and ideas about how these people talk?
What’s funny is this [script] actually has very little dialogue in it. I placed a challenge on myself to write as much as I could without the characters talking. A big pitfall for a lot of beginning screenwriters is filling the whole thing with dialogue and having the characters explain what’s going on rather than having it based in action. So I tried to write a very physical script, kind of picturing this as something animated, with a ghost ping ponging around the walls not really saying anything until towards the end of the script when they had to, to explain some of the context.
But for other things that I’ve written, a lot of my inspiration comes from honestly, B horror movies, like slasher films. I love those kinds of things. Vampire movies, especially. Also shows like the Addams Family, things that are monstrous and weird, but also funny. I love that combination so much. And then also just looking at my own family, which is a family of very, very funny people. Sometimes I’ll write dialogue for someone, and I will be like “That sounds like how my grandpa talks and I’ve just transcribed it into this.”
You mentioned that this script started as a class project – did you know when you started writing it that you wanted to submit your screen play to the NYC International Screenplay competition? Did you submit the script to other competitions?
This was the only competition I submitted this script to. I got an email one day from the department that had [listed some contests we could] submit to and said “by the way, we reimburse up to $100 of submission fees every academic year.” And I was like, well I have 2 scripts, I might as well enter one to one competition and one to another. I didn’t even think I had a chance of winning, it’s just that they give you feedback as well. I was wanting that feedback mostly when I submitted it; [feedback] from non-academics and people who aren’t my peers or my professors. [I wanted people] who don’t know me at all to be able to look at the work.
But then my feedback came back, and they didn’t say a single negative thing about it. I was like, “That’s kind of weird, I’m a little disappointed now. I don’t know like what to change or fix.” And then I got an email that said, “You won!” – Like what!? So, I emailed my professor from that class just to let him know, which was really nice to get to do that. Yeah, I was like “My god, I don’t know what to do with myself.”
So, what’s next? Do you have plans to produce this story in any way outside of the script form? Are you working on anything new? What’s on the horizon for you?
This script, although I do love it, I think is just going to remain in my portfolio as a bit of written work. Unfortunately, although I do love short films, they are not very profitable, so trying to produce them would probably be my own endeavor and not someone else’s and I currently do not have the funding for that. But I’m happy to have it in my portfolio because I do really like it a lot and [I am] very proud that it’s really the first script I’ve ever written and I’ll cherish that just for what it is.
Currently I’m in a production course, so I’m learning about a side of things that I had never even considered pursuing as a career until now. I’m really enjoying it and next semester I’m looking forward to taking as many screen writing classes as I can get into, maybe some more in production, and just honing my craft and always writing about mythical creatures or monsters or whatever it may be in a humorous light because nothing makes me happier.
My last question, which of course I have to ask, how has being a part of Kilachand influenced you or your work? Have any of your KHC classes stood out to you so far?
I think one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken was a KHC class that I took last year. It was EN103 with Professor Bozek, the Poetry as Activism [course]. It’s a really, really great class. I was finding some of the skills that I was learning in screen writing to be transferable to poetry, even though they’re such different mediums, in terms of writing. Screen writing has this very rigid structure that you have to follow, and poetry can do whatever you want. It was freeing to have that absence of the structure for a little while, but also just those core concepts of theme and character and motive were really, really helpful when trying to write my own poetry.