La Libertad: Where are you from?
Michael: I’m from Glasgow - the big, old one, in Scotland - not one of the ones in the U.S. And, although I grew up there, I was actually born in a town called Falkirk, half way between there and Edinburgh. I was officially the first Jewish birth in [the] Falkirk Royal Infirmary; I seem to have managed to retain that sense of being an "outsider."
La Libertad: How did you get your start in writing?
Michael: My business degree at Glasgow’s third-best university, Glasgow Caledonian, "catapulted" me into a job, in publishing, in London, at which I started moonlighting as a stand-up on the then burgeoning "alternative" comedy circuit. BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] producers on the look out for new comedy writers would go to gigs, and indeed, I was spotted and engaged on a couple of radio and TV shows. My "break," however, came when I met Gary Sinyor, then a budding producer at film school. He had the remnants of an idea for a film, and, having seen me on stage, suggested we co-write it. To cut a long story short, our script Leon the Pig Farmer got made, won a handful of awards, and launched a career that I didn’t think was possible.
La Libertad: Of what accomplishment are you most proud?
Michael: That’s difficult to answer without sounding overly dramatic, but I arrived at LAX with a two-year work visa, a backpack of clean underwear over my shoulder, and a shoddily written screenplay in my hand, naively thinking that Hollywood would snap it up. Three years and an extended visa later, I was again at LAX, this time going home, but with three reels of a feature film, Dirty Laundry safely checked into the luggage hold, ready for screening at that year’s London Film Festival, before popping up on TV sets all round the world, as it still does.
The feeling on that flight back to London would never have occurred had it not been for the L.A. earthquake of ’94. I literally bumped into Robert Sherwin, a filmmaker out of NY, at a post-quake garage sale. He was a producer looking for a script; I was a screenwriter looking for a producer. Synchronicity! Maybe serendipity... Two-and-a-half years later, and re-write after re-write in Venice Beach’s Novel Cafe, we were shooting Dirty Laundry in New Jersey.
La Libertad: Where did you get the idea for your new screenplay, The Holy Cow?
Michael: When I first started writing The Holy Cow, the story was set in Glasgow. My body and soul
can’t last a week without Indian food… a throwback to student days when Sunday evening meant we Jewish boys would go to The Koh-i-Noor or The Shish Mahal, in the West End. The Chicken Tikka Masala had been voted "Britain’s Favorite Dish," and I read an article about a Glasgow curry house laying claim to have invented the now famous recipe. The first drafts were called The Kanpur Curry House, but they were messier than The Shish’s tablecloths. I wanted the story to have more gravity - more intelligence - more cultural resonance. I not only had to change the concept of the story, but [I] also had to find a setting in which there was an Indian heritage. I’d shot Dirty Laundry in New Jersey, years earlier, and had remembered from our location scouting that there was this place, Edison, in which there was a restaurant strip called "Little India." A feature film project about food, family, and sub-culture will surely have more chance of finding interest and finance if it’s set in the U.S.; that’s sort of a fact, particularly when you think of films like The Big Sick, Today’s Special, and Chef. So I had my location, and, with it, I weaved a story about an Indian-American family, the Agarwals, and their restaurant, The Holy Cow. A spoiler alert isn’t necessary when I tell you the decrepit, down-on-its-knees Holy Cow was once a famous institution, NJ’s first Indian restaurant, now in need of saving and restoring to its former glory, but whether its new owner, Anwesh Agarwal is up to the task is another question.
La Libertad: What would you like to tell our readers about your other projects?
Michael: I have two other feature film projects on the go. Set in London, The Visa is a highly contemporary and socially relevant story that traces the relationship between an immigration lawyer and an illegal immigrant. She wants a baby; he needs a visa. "All" he has to do to stay in the country is get her pregnant! It’s a quid-pro-quo that [could get them], respectively, disbarred and deported.
And, set on the west coast of Scotland, Fly Me to Dunoon is a project that nearly got made a while back but for the death of the great Rod Steiger, who was to play the lead. Based on true events, the backdrop starts in 1938, when hundreds of fleeing Eastern-European Jews, tricked and conned by the shipping line, were deposited at the docks of Glasgow, thinking it was New York, the destination on their tickets. The film will tell the story of that shameful slice of history; and traces the present-day misadventures of a young American who discovers a family (the ancestors of that ill-fated voyage) alive and well, in a Scottish, seaside town, but with perilous plans for their long-lost "son."
La Libertad: What inspires you?
Michael: Quite simply, I’m inspired by the brains behind a really great film, and, by that, I mean the kind of alchemy that occurs when you combine a writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and composer to make something like Paris Texas, Butch Cassidy, The Graduate, The Small Back Room, et cetera, et cetera...
La Libertad: What are you most looking forward to, in 2024?
Michael: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and someone telling me they’d like to produce The Holy Cow.
La Libertad: What are your overall career goals?
Michael: My career goals are what they have been, and what they will continue to be - to turn ninety pages of script into ninety minutes of film.
La Libertad: What links would you like to share?
Michael:
Website - www.michaelnormand.net
LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/michaelfnormand/
Instagram - mfnormand
Interview by Josh Mitchell
Edited by William Mortensen Vaughan
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