Shreya Gejji

Narrative interviews as a creative research method in screenwriting

University of Auckland, New Zealand

In tertiary institutions that offer creative programmes, many students and scholars are engaging in a dialogue about the relationship between traditional academic research methods and creative work.

This paper is based on my investigation of this while undertaking a cross-disciplinary PhD with
Creative Practice. Using narrative interviews, an ethnographic method that has storytelling woven
into it, I interviewed eight Indian immigrant women in New Zealand to understand their experiences
of working in undervalued labour, how it shaped their identity and impacted the way they
negotiated power in their everyday lives. Their ‘stream of consciousness’ self-narrativization was
recorded, transcribed, coded and decoded to examine trends and patterns. The screenwriter in me
hoped to find anecdotes that would become the foundation for my screenplay. Instead, I was drawn
to “structures of feeling” (Williams, 1954) as the women revisited memories, celebrated their
reinvented selves, yearned for visibility and laughed about past mistakes. Now, characters in my film borrow their cadence, pauses, sharp intakes of breath as I pour these womens’ lives into my
screenplay. Academics have long discussed the role of ethnography as a form of storytelling. This
paper unpacks this idea further to examine its function as a creative method specifically in the
context of crafting a screenplay. I explore the challenges of reconciling this academic methodology in the screenwriting process, particularly since it demands a more interpretive licence, moving away from lived experiences and risking anonymity of subjects. Paying special attention to what these conversations enable and disable, I analyse the ways in which participant voices and narratives emerge in dialogue and reflect in characters. I also interrogate the ethics of ‘harvesting’ their stories for my screenplay and consider how personal violence may be caused when fictionalising life stories.

Shreya is a Kiwi-Indian writer, producer and screenwriting instructor, currently in the final year of
her PhD with Creative Practice from the University of Auckland. In 2022, her debut short film
Perianayaki premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival where it won four out of the
five national awards including the coveted title of Best New Zealand Film. The film travelled to over
20 international festivals including Melbourne International Film Festival and Film Bazaar in India
where it won the Jury Award. She was also one of the writers on the anthology feature Kāinga, the
third film in the Waru and Vai trilogy which screened at several prestigious international film
festivals. Her ongoing doctoral thesis focuses on first generation immigrant Indian women in New
Zealand working in undervalued labour.