The Big Sick: How to Adapt a True Life Story

The Big Sick: How To Adapt a True Life Story By Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be talking about The Big Sick by Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani. I am excited to talk about The Big Sick not just because it was a successful film, but also because it allows me to talk about a topic that I have wanted to discuss for some time: How to adapt a story from your life. There is a wonderful scene in The Big Sick, one of the scenes that actually doesn’t get talked a lot. Kumail (for those of you who haven't seen the film) is a Pakistani-American Uber driver who has fallen in love with a white American girl. And in one of the really lovely scenes in their romance, he invites her to this terrible play that he has created about Pakistan. It is meant to be a one man show but it comes out more like an extremely detailed and dry history of Pakistan. The scene has a lot of wonderful little jokes for the audience. But the joke for the character is that Emily shows up for her boyfriend’s show and it is the worst thing ever, and everybody knows it is the worst thing ever, and now she has to pretend that it is good. If you are an artist and you have artist friends, you know what that experience is like. You know that there is often a desire, when that happens, to protect the person whose work we have gone to see: to tell them things are good that aren’t good, to protect their ego rather than their art. Emily, in the film, does actually a much more loving thing, actually a much more brave thing. She doesn’t trash the play, but she does tells Kumail the truth. She says, “I learned a lot about Pakistan, but I didn’t learn a lot about you.” And this sets up a beautiful structure in the The Big Sick, which is really a story about Kumail learning what it is to tell the truth.   In fact, in a way, it is a story about all these characters learning to tell the truth. Emily’s father, Terry, played by Ray Romano also has to learn how to tell the truth, how to not be a coward. What makes Emily’s mother, Beth, played by Holly Hunter, so wonderful is that she always tells the truth-- even if it means that she is going to attack a racist heckler in the middle of a performance. So all these characters are eventually going to go on a journey about telling the truth. And the biggest journey about telling the truth is Kumail’s journey. Kumail is a character who is afraid to tell the truth. Kumail is a person who is trying to please everybody in his life. And because he needs so badly to please, he isn't saying what is real. He has convinced his parents that he is going to accept an arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman, even though he isn't taking any of his potential dates seriously. He has convinced Emily that they are in a relationship, even though he doesn’t believe he is ever going to marry her because he is afraid of being disowned by his parents. And as an artist he isn't yet able to tell the truth with his writing. Ultimately, he is going to go on a journey in relation to his one man show, in which he learns to tell the truth about himself. And in that way earns his happy ending; he earns his happy ending by telling the truth. When we are adapting a true life story, our job, like Kumail’s job, is to tell the truth. And oftentimes we have a lot of different urges pulling against us. What is interesting is that Kumail and Emily’s story is based on a true story-- is based on their true story-- the true story of how they fell in love, how she fell into a coma and how, during the time that she was in that coma, he realized that he wanted to marry her no matter what his parents thought. So this is a movie based on a really beautiful true story. And like most true stories, at first glance we might think that it isn't enough to be a movie-- which is how a lot of us feel when we first write a true story. I remember the first class that I was hired to teach-- before I created the Studio. The dean of the school (which will go unnamed), who is a very lovely man, during our orientation sat me down and said, “Okay, look Jake, you do whatever you want. We don’t really have a curriculum. The only thing is: don’t let them tell true life stories, because you know it is just going to suck.” And I remember asking him, “What makes you think it is going to suck?” And he said, “Well there won’t be enough for a movie there.” And a few weeks later he came into my class and he saw the work that was happening, and he said, “How did you teach these people to do that?” And I said, “I didn’t teach them to do that, I allowed them to do that. I allowed them to tell the truth, I allowed them to tell the stories of their lives.”   Because the truth is that every movie you write, whether it is fiction or non-fiction, whether it really happened in the real world or whether it only happened at the world of your mind, every movie you write is an adaptation of a true story. It is an adaptation of your true story. There is a common piece of wisdom that you are supposed to “write what you know.” And I think this is actually a very confusing piece of wisdom, even though it is quite wise. The reason that it is a confusing piece of wisdom is that, oftentimes, we feel like “writing what you know” is very limiting. We start to get nervous: “What if I didn’t live a really interesting life? What if I grew up in the suburbs with a nice family? What if my story isn't valid enough?” “And what if I want to write a fantasy or a Sci-Fi or a horror movie? What if I want to write a movie that isn't based on real life things? How am I supposed to write what I know if I want to write in one of these genres?” “Or a Western! I have never lived in a Western, how am I supposed to tell that story?” But the truth is that every story is an adaptation of a true life story; it is an adaptation of your true life story. If we look at a movie like The Lord of the Rings, which was based in a book by J.R.R. Tolkien (which is actually even stronger than the movies)-- I think we can all agree that J.R. R. Tolkien never saw a hobbit, never fought a dragon, never saw an ogre, never confronted The Dark Lord Sauron or had to throw a ring into a magical burning river. I think we can all agree that the world of Middle-earth wasn’t a world that he knew. But the world of Middle-earth and the war between good and evil in Middle-earth isn't really what The Lord of the Rings is about. The Lord of the Rings is about a guy who is addicted to a ring. You lose this in the movie, but it is very clear in the book. Frodo, as he gets closer to destroying the ring, wants to put the ring on his finger. There is an incredible draw to put the ring on his finger. He wants to put the ring on his finger even though he knows it draws the Dark Lord closer, even though he knows the ring makes him invisible.   And ultimately it takes an even bigger addict-- Gollum, has to bite the ring off of Frodo’s finger for him to let go of it. And then, it is really interesting when you read the series of three books, and you get to the middle of the third book and they have destroyed the ring and you are like, what is going to happen in the rest of this book? Isn't it over? But it isn't over, because it isn't a book about destroying the ring of Power; it is a book about letting go of an addiction and then having to go home to the real world. And what ends up happening when Frodo goes home is he has to confront the fact that his neighbors suck, that people will hurt you, that mundane life is hard to take. In fact, Bilbo can’t take it. Bilbo ends up leaving Middle-earth, because the other thing that is happening is that all of the magical creatures are leaving Middle-earth. And this is woven into the movie, but it is kind of lost and confusing we don’t really understand why. But in the book, the magical creatures are leaving Middle-earth because the age of magic is ending and the age of man is beginning. Because the age of addiction is ending, the age of escape is ending, and the age of being a real human being with real human problems is beginning. So this gets lost a little bit in the movie because they change the ring. They change the ring because they have a technical problem: they have a problem that the ring makes you invisible, and invisible is really hard to shoot without it looking cheesy. And so rather than turning Frodo into Casper The Friendly Ghost, they decide, “all right, well he can’t want to put the ring on because if he wants to put the ring on, then we are going to have to shoot him invisible, because there is no way to see him want to put the ring on if he doesn’t do it, not in a movie.” So what ends up happening is, instead of having him want to put the ring on, they make the ring heavy. And Frodo is whining to Samwise-- you probably remember this scene, “It so heavy...” But you aren’t crying with them, you don’t really feel it, because that isn't really what the movie is about. And by reversing it, they end up actually losing the theme-- that theme of addiction that tied the novel together. I don’t know that much about J.R. R. Tolkien’s life, but I would guess that either he had an addiction or there was someone profound in his life who struggled with an addiction. (Some have argued that he was writing about human-kind’s addiction to the commercial-industrial process). But whatever the experience, you can see that The Lord of the Rings is actually an adaptation of that experience. Not what actually happened literally, but what happened emotionally—what it felt like. Our job as screenwriters is actually quite simple; we use fiction in order to tell the truth. Sometimes using fiction in order to tell the truth means creating a metaphor like “the ring,” creating a fantasy world like Middle-earth that can represent the internal world, the internal experience,