An intensive (care) love story
Real-life couple talk about how The Big Sick came to the big screen
Comedy writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon could have come up with a safer title than The
Big Sick for their funny/scary movie of how their love very nearly turned tragic.
Hollywood convention insists they should have, since negative words like “sick” can be toxic on movie marquees, especially for a romantic comedy. But this real-life married couple wasn’t interested in being conventional.
A film based on the true story of how they coped with Gordon’s induced coma to battle serious illness had to be unique and personal. (The ordeal happened early in their relationship; she recovered fully.)
“We had a Google doc full of hundreds of other titles,” Gordon says, sitting next to Nanjiani in a Toronto hotel. “I thought of The Big Sick as a placeholder title, to be completely honest. I’ve grown to love it.”
Gordon pauses for a second to affectionately chide Nanjiani, who is also an actor, to pay attention to the interview and to stop fiddling with his smartphone like the brainiac he plays on TV’s Silicon Valley.
Nanjiani jokes that he’s reading something very important about the next season of the show: “I can’t tell you what I’m looking at, but I die in a forest. We got a bad review of this season and the writers took it hard . . .”
To get back to The Big Sick’s title, the other names considered by the couple included Love Sick and It’s
Complicated, both of which would have been fitting but not at all original — they’ve been used by other movies.
It became The Big Sick almost by default, especially after Sundance announced it for a world premiere last January. But it was also by conviction, in a strange way.
“Anything else felt too generic,” Nanjiani says. “It felt like it could be any movie. Whereas with this, only our movie could have this title.”
The Big Sick is an exceptional film, technically a rom-com but so much more in the way it addresses thorny issues of attraction, cultural differences (and prejudices) and the universal fear of disease and death.
At its heart, it’s a love story. Nanjiani, 39, who was born in Pakistan and came to the U.S. as a teen, essentially plays himself in the role of a Chicago standup comedian who is trying to balance the arranged-marriage plans of his tradition-minded parents with the love he feels for his girlfriend, Emily. Zoe Kazan plays the role of Gordon, 37, who was born in North Carolina.
“Kumail and Emily worked on this film for four years,” producer Judd Apatow says via email. “It couldn’t be more important to them. They put so much love and care into it. I think you can feel it in every frame of the film.”
Indeed you can, and also in the way the two talk together about their intentions and ambitions for The Big Sick:
It’s very hard to strike a balance in a movie like this, as it moves from comedy to something that starts to resemble tragedy. How did you find the right tone?
Emily V. Gordon: We ended up finding a lot of it editing, some of it in shooting. While we were writing the script, we would say, “We’ve got to make sure we don’t forget about Emily, and that there’s a woman who’s sick.” We found we could condense a lot of scenes we thought we really needed because when you see a hospital you’re instantly reminded there’s someone who’s sick.
Kumail Nanjiani: We also found we could get away with a lot more jokes than I had initially thought. We would try a version with less jokes, try a version with too many jokes, and you can just sort of feel it. When you watch the movie with an audience, no matter their reaction, you can kind of feel like, oh, a joke here would be good. Or they didn’t really want a joke here.
Did you shoot extra footage, so you could have more to edit?
KN: Yes. Our script was only 114 pages, but the movie that got edited, putting every scene in, was about 2 hours and 45 minutes — close to 3 hours. So we had an hour of extra material and a lot of it was jokes — but a lot of it was serious stuff, too.
EG: Our favourite thing was the other people in the hospital waiting room all had their own storylines. They were each actors that had their own personalities and people that they were with, because you do end up bonding with people in the waiting room of hospitals and that stuff was so great and it’s going to be a great deleted scene (on the DVD release).
KN: It was just lovely, because there is this weird community that develops amongst the relatives or friends of the people who are sick. They don’t know each other, but everybody else knows each other. So we wanted to capture that aspect of it too.
The Big Sick was made before Donald Trump became U.S. president, but it premiered in the month of his inauguration and announcement of a travel ban against Muslim countries. It feels like an artistic response to his Islamophobia; are you happy with it being taken that way?
EG: I see a lot of positives in this. Because I do think regardless of who you are, or whose side you’re on, or who you support in America, people are more involved in politics. There have been higher turnouts at local elections, which have always been, like, just very old people voting. I think it’s lovely when people are more involved in local politics.
KN: The Big Sick certainly plays a little differently than it did before (Trump), although Islamophobia has been an issue in the U.S. for a very, very long time. I think we’re in a time when — and it’s always been like this — where certain groups of people are demonized or made to feel like the “other,” and I think our job is just to sort of empathize and try and understand different points of views. I think the best cure for bigotry is just conversations, so I’m hoping that that also is something that will happen. Our movie wasn’t meant to have a political agenda, but in portraying a Muslim family as loving human beings . . . I guess that’s sort of how it’s being received. Which we don’t get to control. I just think just representation makes such a big difference.
Adds producer Apatow: When we started this movie all we wanted to do was to accurately portray the immigrant experience of Kumail and his family. It wasn’t a political statement. Unfortunately our current government and some people need to be reminded that most all im- migrants are just like them. It is sad that something so obvious needs to be said.
Do you think Hollywood is making any progress with issues of diversity and gender?
EG: Baby steps, absolutely, baby steps.
KN: I think it’s way better than it used to be. If you look at the characterizations of minorities 20 or 30 years ago, it’s very different from now. This is a long way to go.
EG: We need more in front of the camera and more behind the camera.
KN: I think what we’re finding is that there is a market for these different points of view, too. These are financially viable decisions.
EG: People want to see themselves if they’re not often represented. But then people like me, white women, we want to see other peoples’ per- spectives, too, because it makes me feel like this universe is this magical place again.
KN: This year especially, it seems like movies written by, starring and directed by people who don’t generally get to direct or get to be involved in these kinds of movies are doing really well at the box office. It’s fantastic. How do you hope people will receive The Big Sick? EG:
We hope that people will see some aspect of themselves or their families in the movie and kind of maybe feel a little bit like, less alone, and feel a little joy when they leave. That would be nice.
KN: This is a big ask, but it would be great if they came out feeling slightly more optimistic, even if for 45 seconds. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.