‘Sing Sing’ Screenwriters on How to Write a Movie About Prison

Crafting the script of Sing Sing — about a real-life theater company, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in upstate New York — proved an incredibly delicate needle to thread for screenwriters Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley. “We held the program, and what they were doing, as sacred,” explains Bentley, who adds that the stakes were high. “If we had not done a good job in making this movie, it could have really jeopardized [currently incarcerated people’s] ability to function in prisons.” In this scene, a dress rehearsal for RTA’s upcoming new play, the film’s protagonist, based on the real-life figure John “Divine G” Whitfield (played by Colman Domingo), has a breakdown onstage after learning his parole appeal has been denied.

Kwedar and Bentley first became aware of Sing Sing’s RTA program through an article in Esquire, which led them to volunteer at the facility. They centered their story on incarcerated actors Divine G and Divine Eye, and the filmmakers invited the pair into the process to write alongside them, which made the script feel “alive in a way it never had been before,” says Kwedar.

The dialogue of the play within the film, Breaking the Mummy’s Code, remains unchanged from the actual script Brent Buell (the RTA volunteer portrayed in the film by Paul Raci) wrote. “There was something magical about the seesaw of the playfulness of the work juxtaposed against the environment it was set within,” explains Kwedar. “Early on, we met Buell, who invited us to New York to have breakfast with some alumni of this program. The real Divine Eye (actor Clarence Maclin, who plays himself in the movie) and the real Divine G (John Whitfield) were there. ‘If we can capture the feeling of this room, it could be special.’ ”

This scene sees Divine G after a parole hearing where evidence proving his innocence is discarded and he learns he’ll remain incarcerated. While in real life his distress at this news didn’t play out in exactly this way, “this scene was built upon a real emotional state,” says Kwedar. The process, adds Bentley, involved talking through different scenes with Whitfield and Maclin, “making sure that this is what the script needs emotionally in this moment. What would that look like? And never wanting to go to a place where something felt false to who they were, even if it looked a bit different than what physically happened in real life.”

Domingo’s dialogue in the final cut of the film doesn’t sound exactly like what’s written on the page. He adds a line — “You tell us to trust the fucking process, right? Well, the process is fucked” — in the height of his pain. Says Bentley: “I think we couldn’t write that line — ‘The process is fucked’ — because it felt like a step too far. But that’s what the scene is about. Coming out of Colman, it clarifies the scene. He was really a storyteller with us.”

Throughout the film, Divine G has been encouraging Divine Eye to let down his emotional guard. “The character of Divine Eye, and what he represents, is somebody bringing a threat of violence into this program that is a sacred space,” says Bentley. “To see our character of Divine G go from someone who’s really advocating to leave violence in any form out of this space at all, to be somebody who is now posturing in that way — it felt very important to show that depth of despair.” 

This line is a callback to the beginning of the film, when Divine G coaches Divine Eye through a monologue from Hamlet, explaining that while anger is the easiest emotion to play, hurt is more complex and interesting. This line doesn’t actually appear in the final cut. “We spent a lot of time making sure this scene not only got across all this myriad of feelings that Divine G is going through, but also that it called back to earlier things in the script,” explains Bentley. 

While large chunks of the script went through extreme evolutions between drafts, a few choice lines carried through from the very beginning. “I’ve worked with Clint for 14 years. He has that gift of being able to say something truly from the depth of who a character is,” effuses Kwedar. “There are some amazing moments that Clint wrote in his first pass, like the very button on that scene of: “Are you done?” “No, I’m not, isn’t that hilarious?”

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.