Vera Herbert’s screenplay for “Don’t Make Me Go” had a charmed start, but it still took a decade for audiences to have a chance to see it.

The 2007 Ursuline High School graduate wrote the script, which stars John Cho and Mia Isaac and debuts today on Amazon Prime, when she was working as a writer on the MTV series “Awkward” after graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

“One of my agents, who worked more on features, said, ‘You should write a feature. We should have that as a sample,’ so I sort of combed my brain for what I wanted to write and came up with this story,” Herbert said during a Zoom interview. “It’s sort of my first (screenplay), other than the features I wrote in college, my first fully completed professional screenplay. It’s exciting it took off.”

The movie tells the story of Max (Cho), a single father who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The odds of surviving surgery are slim, and he has maybe a year to live without it. He decides to take a cross-country road trip with his daughter, Wally (Mia Isaac), under the guise of attending his college reunion. The real purpose is an attempt to reconnect with Wally’s mother in hopes that she can take care of their daughter when he’s gone.

The script drew inspiration from the road trips Herbert took with her father, Robert K. Herbert, while she was scouting colleges. Her father, who was provost at Youngstown State University, died in a drowning accident in Costa Rica during a family vacation the summer after her high school graduation.

“Even though it’s a very fictionalized version of my relationship with my dad, we had that sort of bickering-but-very-loving, poking-at-each-other sort of relationship,” Herbert said. “I think for me, it’s fun to see that kind of relationship on screen because you don’t see a lot of strictly father-daughter movies, especially a teenager and a dad. It was fun for me to go back in my memories and touching to now see a bigger version of it on screen.”

Herbert’s script made it onto the 2012 Black List, a survey of movie industry people about their most liked but unproduced screenplays. Many successful films have been made from scripts that first got notoriety on the Black List. Many more never made it to the screen.

“Early on, I was really optimistic, I hadn’t become jaded yet — ‘It’s on the Black List, a producer’s attached and it’s going to get made.’ No, it’s going to be slow and it’s OK. As long as people are going to try to keep pushing it forward, maybe one day it will happen.”

The movie’s prospects improved when Hannah Marks became interested in directing it. Marks started as an actor (her credits include “Awkward,” but she was on the show after Herbert’s stint as a writer) and she continues to act, but she’s also directed the indie features “After Everything” and “Mark, Mary & Some Other People.” She both directs and acts in the upcoming “Turtles All the Way Down,” based on a novel by John Green (“The Fault in Our Stars”).

“She had a really strong vision for it,” Herbert said. “She got excited about John Cho, and once he got excited about it, yeah, this can be a reality. We got a great star, the pieces all fell into place, and it all started to make sense.”

Then the movie was disrupted by the same thing that’s disrupted everything since 2020 — COVID-19. The pandemic forced production of a movie about a road trip through the American South even farther south, all the way to New Zealand.

“It was an interesting pandemic challenge, but we wanted to get this movie made,” Herbert said. “If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.”

Marks, Cho, Isaac and one of the producers traveled to New Zealand and went through its strict quarantining and protocols in order to work there. The crew and the other actors were hired down there with New Zealand locations doubling for Texas, New Orleans and other American locales.

“I was in L.A. watching the footage at the end of the day,” Herbert said.

Herbert also had other projects to keep her busy back home in California. She is a four-time Emmy nominee and a Writers Guild of America award winner for her work as a writer and executive producer on the NBC series “This Is Us,” which concluded its six-season run in May.

Many screenwriters have trouble recognizing the finished product compared to their original script after it travels through other writers’ computers, producers’ notes and director’s vision, but Herbert said “Don’t Make Me Go” survived largely intact. Some filler was cut, some changes were required by shooting in New Zealand, and the Iggy Pop song “The Passenger,” which plays an integral role in the story, originally was a Tom Petty song that turned out to be “very expensive.”

Her favorite moment in the completed film is a dance between father and daughter before he has told her that he is terminally ill.

“This dad knows he’s never going to get a father-daughter dance at his daughter’s wedding, and she doesn’t know but she still — even though she’s sort of stubborn and awkward about a lot of things with him — she lets him have this moment and then really learns from it. Seeing the two of them on screen, because they have such great chemistry, for me became one of my favorite scenes.”