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...