Unveiling the Untold Secrets of Storytelling: A Riveting Conversation with Walker McKnight

Walker McKnight wrote the original screenplay “Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket” which won a 2019 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had the opportunity to chat with Walker about his background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to him.

Scott Myers: You live in Atlanta. Has that always been your home?

Walker McKnight: Nope — I’m from Milledgeville, Georgia, a smallish city about an hour‑and‑a‑half drive southeast of Atlanta. I stayed through my first two years of college, which I did at Georgia College. It anchors downtown Milledgeville.

From there I went to University of Georgia in Athens and finished up. Then a brief internship with the State Department in Geneva, and on to Atlanta in January 2000 for grad school in international relations, which kicked off a ten-year mini-career in defense consulting and international security (my film MA came later). I’ve been in Atlanta since then, minus three years in DC for work. It’s coming up on 20 years since I first moved to Atlanta.

Scott: Atlanta is an exciting place now, right? There’s a lot of production going on there.

Walker: It is. It’s sort of weird to see it. I joke with people about how when it first started happening…I can’t remember when they passed the tax cut that kicked all this off, but right at the beginning when film shoots would start to show up, and you’d pass them in your car and be like, “Oh wow, what’s that? I wonder what they’re filming?”

Now it’s so common that it’s just more like, “Oh, it’s another traffic backup.” But still good for the city. There’s still a ton of production coming here and happening and you see actors walk in and out of my little coffee shop where I write.

Friends often say, “Oh, this must be great for you as a screenwriter. Atlanta’s really blowing up.” I tell them, “Well, everything’s ‘below the line.’” It’s just production. All the creative is still in LA, for the most part. Things written and produced out there come her to shoot. It’s still nice for the city for sure.

Scott: Let’s jump back in time. In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you mentioned how your parents were a huge influence on you, reading books and…