Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I've been following Kumail Nanjiani's work for a few years now. He was always a welcome sight in his day-player scene-stealer turns in movies like The Kings of Summer or shows like Veep. It was awesome seeing him really hit it with Silicon Valley and watch his screen time grow.
In The Big Sick he not only gets a shot at being a leading man he also gets to play himself. The tale is a fictionalized retelling of the rocky start to his relationship with Emily Gordon and plays super sweet, but not full of typical rom-com bullshit. There's an authenticity to this movie that rings true and makes it all that more touching and engaging.
When I got the chance to sit down with Kumail and Emily (who is portrayed by Zoe Kazan in the movie) at SXSW I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenges of writing something so autobiographical and figure out how much was exaggerated.
Full disclosure: I know Kumail and Emily via mutual gamer friends and have played some multiplayer stuff on Xbox with them both before meeting them in person when they've come through Austin with their podcast The Indoor Kids and TV show Meltdown. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're friends, but definitely friendly... I mean, we were in the shit together. We have fought giant robots in Titanfall and shit-talking 12 year olds in Overwatch.
I bring this up because we start out the interview talking about video games, which leads into some Mass Effect talk (he provides a voice for the new game) and then that gets us into the actual interview. I know it pisses some people off, but I like including this preamble conversation stuff because it not only frames the full conversation a bit, it also shows the interviewees at their least guarded.
Kumail Nanjiani: Are you still playing Overwatch?
Quint: Hell yeah! A new hero is about to come out. Can't quit now!
Kumail Nanjiani: What are you looking forward to coming out?
Quint: I don't know. The new Mass Effect is next week, so I'm sure I'll be playing a lot of that.
Kumail Nanjiani: You know I'm in that.
Quint: Of course you are.
Kumail Nanjiani: (laughs) I asked!
Emily Gordon: He plays the President.
Quint: Can I romance you? Please tell me I can romance you.
Emily Gordon: Oh, that's a good question.
Kumail Nanjiani: Do you want me to tell you?
Quint: Yes!
Kumail Nanjiani: Well, you can't.
Emily Gordon: That made it sound like you could, the way you answered the question.
Quint: Oh. Well, I'm not playing that anymore.
Kumail Nanjiani: A lot of people asked me. I'm not in the crew. I'm one of the people who gives you missions... I'm not a good guy, but I'm not a bad guy. I'm like sort of a guy who you don't know what his deal is.
Quint: Chaotic neutral?
Kumail Nanjiani: Sort of. He's sort of chaotic neutral. But Horizon is great.
Emily Gordon: It's really good.
Kumail Nanjiani: It's sort of a mix between Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Assassin's Creed and Skyrim.
Emily Gordon: I feel like someone was playing Far Cry and was like “I love this game, but I really don't like killing animals.” So instead you kill robots. Robot animals.
Quint: Yeah, that's always weird... The Red Dead games are really bad about that.
Kumail Nanjiani: Oh yeah!
Emily Gordon: And the blood splashes on you. Great job!
Kumail Nanjiani: But I have to! We always have this conversation. I'm like, “Honey, we have to get the rabbit!”
Emily Gordon: I get mad every time.
Kumail Nanjiani: “I need to be able to hold more bullets!”
Quint: If I can just kill that beautiful deer then maybe I can get a tougher coat!
Emily Gordon: I kinda like that it's so grotesque to kill them because at least you don't feel like it's an easy thing you're doing. You're actually having to murder an animal.
Quint: I wonder how many vegetarians are born out of kids playing those games.
Emily Gordon: Probably quite a few.
Kumail Nanjiani: Yeah. Red Dead takes particular glee with the splattering on the camera.
Emily Gordon: Video games are great, you guys. Everybody should play them.
Quint: So, I loved the movie and I wanted to ask you both about the particular challenges that come with writing something so autobiographical. On one hand I can see it being easier than creating something out of whole cloth because you can pull from your own experience, but on the other hand I imagine it could be tougher because it's such a personal story for you both.
Kumail Nanjiani: Right.
Emily Gordon: The challenge at first is you're trying to figure out what belongs to you and what belongs to the story. Then it's just about getting everything out of you, as much as you can. Then, as other people get involved in the process like Judd (Apatow) and our other producer Barry (Mendel) and our director (Michael) Showalter, the challenge becomes letting other people throw in on your story. That's how it becomes “a story” instead of just the story of our lives.
At first there were stuff we wanted to keep to ourselves and stuff we wanted to put out there, then there was some fighting as other people said “I think Emily would do this” or “I think Kumail would do this” and we were like “What? No! How dare you!” then realizing that was all helping to make it better.
So, you go from wanting to service your own history to wanting to service a story.
Kumail Nanjiani: It's hard, emotionally, to get all these things down, but it does help. The challenge is first you have to get all the things down. Then the challenge is figuring out which of those belong in the story.
Emily Gordon: That are actually important.
Kumail Nanjiani: Because all of it seems so important because a lot of this actually happened. Like, the fact that I ate a lot of french fries during this was very important to me. We did put a little of that in the movie, but there was a lot of stuff that felt important, but didn't really belong in the story.
There was a lot more hospital stuff that we actually shot that's not in the movie, other storylines in the hospital. There were pretty recent drafts of the script that had hospital bureaucracy and politics as a big part of the movie because they were a big part of the experience for me and Emily's parents. Then, as you're working on the story you realize what's important, what the story needs and what the story doesn't need.
Mike, Barry and Judd were so good in guiding us through this process, but also very good in trusting us when we said something didn't feel right for our story. First of all, without them this movie would not exist, but they really pushed us to keep working on it until it was good.
Emily Gordon: There are, like, five different versions of this movie you could do. There's the version where it's just hospital bureaucracy and nothing else. There's a version with just families fighting and nothing else.
Kumail Nanjiani: There's a serious version, there's a fully comedic version...
Emily Gordon: Yeah. There are so many different versions because there are so many things that did happen. There's the story of Emily's parents trying to adjust to being in a new city on top of everything else. There are a lot of stories that would be lovely stories to tell, but we had to pick one. We can only pick one, full story to tell and everything else, even if it's cool and a really great moment... like the people who were in the waiting room with us... all of those things have to fall to the side.
Quint: I think it's a testament to what you guys were able to accomplish with the movie that I never felt like anything was lacking from the secondary stories.
Emily Gordon: Oh, thank you.
Quint: I love the arc that your parents have. I love the central conceit of the romance that should have failed, but somehow worked. That to me is one of the most interesting sweet spots in the movie. In any young relationship the line between being creepy and being sweet is so razor thin...
Kumail Nanjiani: Yeah, totally.
Emily Gordon: That's very true. Sometimes it's way easier to walk away and it's actually tougher to stick when you decide it's worth sticking.
Quint: Was that vibe something you guys had to work at perfecting for the movie or was that close to your actual relationship?
Kumail Nanjiani: One of the big things that we really sort of fought for was we wanted the first act of the movie to feel like its own little movie about a couple meeting, falling in love and breaking up. That really had to feel like it's own movie because if that doesn't feel like its own story the rest of the movie doesn't work.
A lot of that is taken from our lives. Our meeting with her heckling me, that's real. There's a scene were Emily lays herself out and says “I'm overwhelmed by you. This is real.” and I don't reciprocate. That's based on real stuff. Not in those words, but real stuff that happened
Emily Gordon: Yuuuuuuuuup. That's right.
Kumail Nanjiani: There were real moments where Emily put herself out there and I didn't quite reciprocate...
Emily Gordon: Nope!
Kumail Nanjiani: The fact that Emily was a secret to my parents...
Emily Gordon: Yuuuuup! I accidentally made a noise once when he was on the phone with his parents and he shushed me and I was like “Oh, I gotta get out of this!” I knew better than to be with a guy who was doing things like that.
Kumail Nanjiani: On paper I was a real nightmare.
Emily Gordon: Frankly on paper I was kind of a nightmare, too. Despite everything we kept sticking it out even though we both knew this was probably not going to end well, but we stuck it out and here we are.
Quint: So, the moral of your story is that people who think they're in a bad relationship just need to stay in it.
Kumail Nanjiani: (laughs)
Emily Gordon: That's not what I'm saying!
Kumail Nanjiani: We did not have a bad relationship. What we had was basically, in spite of all that, a great relationship.
Emily Gordon: We had a really great time. We had fun all the time. We connected on really every level, but there were just these little things that kept nagging me and I think in other relationships I'd let that overtake everything else and be kind of be Seinfeldian, like “that's the reason we have to be away from each other.” But, for whatever reason, I just didn't listen to these things because when I was with him I just felt like I was in the moment and I was not a girl who was not used to being in the moment whatsoever.
Kumail Nanjiani: One of the things that we wanted to convey at the beginning of the movie was that these two people didn't want to be in a relationship, but not able to stay apart. In the movie there are a couple of scenes where we say “This is the last time we're hanging out,” and that's how it was in real life.
Emily Gordon: That's true.
Kumail Nanjiani: I didn't want to be in a relationship because of my stuff...
Emily Gordon: And I was freshly divorced!
Kumail Nanjiani: And Emily was freshly divorced and she didn't want to be in a relationship because of that. That was a real part of it. “Look, we're just going to hang out. It's going to be fine. Come over and watch a movie. I have dirty laundry on the bed, so nothing is going to happen...”
Emily Gordon: Cut to us making out on dirty laundry.
Quint: That's the sweetest thing in the world! Thank you guys so much for your time.
I could have talked to these guys about their movie for another hour if they had the time (we didn't even get to touch on how awesome Holly Hunter and Ray Romano are as Emily's parents), but we had to cut it there.
Once the recorder was shut off Kumail returned to video game talk as I was gathering up my stuff, making sure I gave the new Resident Evil a try. I have a little window between CinemaCon and Star Wars Celebration, so I just might finally get into it.
I really do adore Kumail and Emily's movie and the more I talk with these two the more I adore them as well. So much of their heart and humor is in The Big Sick that I'd be willing to bet all the audiences who catch the movie this June will feel the same way.
Hope you guys dug the chat! Got one more SXSW interview on the docket after I wrap up with CinemaCon, so stay tuned for that!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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