So back in March, the lovely and talented Quint interviewed THE BIG SICK writers Kumail Najiani (who also stars in the film) and Emily V. Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan in the movie) right after the film played at the SXSW Film Festival. So when I was asked if I wanted to talk to them earlier this week in Chicago (the setting of the film and the place where the real-life husband and wife first met), I said yes with the understanding that this interview would work in conjunction with Quint’s, in an attempt to dig a little deeper in some areas or get in a few more questions that maybe they haven’t been asked on their extensive press tour.
So consider this Part 2 of a much longer interview, and together you’ll hopefully get all the supplemental information you’ll need to further appreciate THE BIG SICK, which opens wide this weekend, and is one of the most enjoyable, heartfelt times you’ll likely have at the movies this year. Please enjoy my talk with Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon…
Capone: Is it weird being back in Chicago? I don’t know how often you make it back.
Emily V. Gordon: We don’t come back that often. And I will say…
Kumail Nanjiani: This is not our Chicago.
EG: This is not our Chicago. We're in downtown [now], and it’s gorgeous, but….
KN: I was just driven around and I drove by two apartments I lived in. I drove by and was like, “Oh, that burrito place was so good. It’s gone.” So I’ve actually had a pretty nostalgic morning getting driven around from 7am to 9am, doing these TV interviews. It was really great being in like Lakeview. But the house we lived in, it’s torn down.
Capone: Which neighborhood?
KN: That one was on Clarendon and Irving Park.
Capone: I literally live right there.
KN: On Irving Park?
Capone: Just north of Irving Park and Broadway.
KN: Yeah, that’s it! I saw there was a GameStop there that I didn’t know. There was a burrito place in that little wedge. Is that still there?
Capone: No, there’s a Pan-Asian place around there now.
KN: I used to live right there, and we ate their burritos and fries in the middle of the night so many times.
EG: The things you do. But yes, it’s strange to be back.
KN: It was tough for us to come back for a little while because we had such intense memories, and it took us a little while to get over that.
EG: But we also weren’t coming back here all the time.
KN: No, but when we would come back, I wouldn’t like it, because there were weird reminders, but now I love it. It’s back to being nostalgic; I don’t know if you’re there yet.
EG: I’ve only been here, so it’s hard to know.
Capone: What would you say is the most Chicago thing about you?
EG: Oh, good question. What is the most Chicago thing about me or you?
KN: I know from my time in the Chicago comedy scene, it’s work ethic. I know everybody who does comedy here works so hard. It’s a Midwestern thing, and all of my friends who are comedians who came from New York or moved to New York and L.A. have that. We all work all the time. So I think that’s part of it.
EG: The food here—this is the first big city I lived in, so I really came to appreciate the food here, and it was such a great first big city to live in, because it is a big city, but it also feels quite quaint. I had a neighborhood where I knew everyone who worked in all the stores.
KN: Lincoln Square we lived in. That was great.
EG: I like coming back to that big-city-but-small-town vibe, because I think as a person from a small town, I was a little concerned at first that I wouldn’t get that.
Capone: On the way here, I was reading Rolling Stone, and there was a one-page interview that Judd Apatow [who producer the film] did, and he had a quote where he said, “If you tell the truth, the comedy will come.” That was actually advice that Gary Shandling gave him when he was writing for him in “The Larry Sanders Show” days. I feel like he’s built an—
EG: An empire?
Capone: Certainly the producing part of his empire has been about encouraging people to write the truth and then build comedy around it. Was that the path he sent you down as writers?
KN: Absolutely. Yeah, he was like, “The comedy is the last thing that comes. Just trust that if you write a good story with good characters that in the end, you can make it funny. Do not worry about the comedy at all.” But I will say that each draft was about the same amount of funny, even though he said don’t focus on the comedy there was comedy in every draft.
EG: But I do think that in the early drafts, some of the comedy we had in the movie was like very artificially shoehorned in.
KN: It was trying to figure out how to be funny.
EG: “And now we should figure out how to be funny here,” rather than trusting like what we all experience on a day-to-day basis is utterly hilarious just because we’ve all gone through it. We trusted ourselves more through him to knock out more of the shoehorned-in jokes and just let the comedy come, but that was something he drilled into us from the start.
KN: Yeah, and really something that him and Barry [Mendel, producer] and Mike Showalter, the director, really taught me—trusting the process. I would have something and be like, “This isn’t good yet!” and freak out, and they were like, “This is what it is. You just keep working, keep working, keep working, and then it gets good.”
EG: That’s the first time I ever heard you acknowledge that, that you freaked out all the time. He really did.
Capone: I was lucky enough couple of years ago to meet Michael for his last film [HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS], which I love, and [the sketch comedy troupe] “The State” is like the gold standard for me. Is that the case for you?
KN: For her.
EG: For me. It was a thing that people pass around on VHS. I would hold up a cassette recorder and watch the TV and tape it, so when I was on road trips or somewhere else, I could just listen to it on my Walkman, because I was so obsessed with “The State.”
KN: Who have we not met? Todd [Holoubek] is the only one we haven’t met.
EG: Todd might be the only one.
Capone: You’ve talked a lot about what Judd added to the process of getting this movie made. What did Michael bring to it that helped out that maybe Judd didn’t?
EG: First off, he teaches screenwriting, so he’s such a king of structure, and he also has an exhaustive knowledge of rom-coms. He’s made now two movies that deconstruct rom-coms.
KN: No, more. THE BAXTER, THEY CAME TOGETHER [which Showalter wrote], this one.
EG: Well, if you count ours. I’m saying he’s made two movies before. He has this really great love and knowledge of rom-coms that he’s also willing to subvert at any point in time. He also is just a very sensitive dude. I think people don’t realize because he’s so funny his heart is like fully on his sleeve. He was always very passionate about the script and very passionate about nothing feeling artificial. He cared about these characters enough that he didn’t want to put them in stupid situations, which is really lovely.
KN: But then he also has this really off-the-wall, alt sense of humor that you’ve seen in “The State” or WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER. So it’s a weird mix of two things that most people don’t have. He likes the goofy, wacky stuff, but he really also likes when you get really emotional.
EG: He kept saying when the character Khadija leaves Kumail and is crying and she says, “I watched the ‘X-Files,’ like three whole episodes, and it’s a bad show.” It gets a big laugh. What Mike really wanted was for her to walk a couple of steps, turn back and go, “A really bad show.” It was really funny, we felt it, but you can’t.
KN: “It was really bad.” I was like, I’m already a little uncomfortable with having this in our movie [Nanjiani hosts a podcast about “The X-Files” called “The X-Files Files”], but having a truth-teller character saying “The X-Files” is a bad show, I’m uncomfortable with it. But Glen Morgan who is one of “The X-Files” guys saw it and loved the movie.
Capone: What’s interesting is, you put the more traditional romantic-comedy on pause, and then it becomes a movie about parents, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a rom-com before. Was that something that was always there, or did you build that up when you realized that was really fascinating material?
EG: That was always there. That was a really big draw of the movie for us in writing it because, it’s true for both characters. To know them, to fall in love with them, no one comes alone. Everyone has context and everyone comes from two people, sometimes way more than two people. That’s an important part of falling in love that is never in movies, and it definitely was part of our story on both ends.
KN: Yeah, we knew from the very beginning when we first talked, we knew it was going to be rom-com, pause, parents, back. We knew that basic structure from he very beginning.
EG: Because Kumail kind of falls in love with Emily more by meeting the people who created her.
Capone: I feel like when they break up, he’s on the fence about the relationship in general, more for family reasons than for the way you get along. But there’s something about meeting her parents and getting that context that you’re talking about that really seals the deal for him.
EG: Yeah, and seeing that they’re similar to his situation, that they're mismatched and Beth’s family didn’t like Terry at all, and they still figured out how to make it work, so he ends up learning a lot.
KN: And that they still have their own issues and that you’re never like done with issues. Life is just dealing with issues until pretty much the end. You never figure it out, and for him I think that’s a big thing because he’s afraid of dealing with his issues, but that’s really what real life is. It’s just dealing with the shit.
Capone: I know you’ve talked a lot in other interviews about how great Holly Hunter is, and I agree, but I wanna talk about Ray Romano, because he’s a great stand-up comic, he talked about his life pretty much, turned it into a sitcoms, which was basically a version of his life.
KN: And the biggest hit.
Capone: Yeah, one of the biggest sitcoms ever, but basically playing a version of himself week after week, and then he decides to become an actor—and it almost doesn’t seem fair that he’s good at everything that he does. That has to be, to a certain degree, a goal for you to be that kind of guy who can do standup, take on acting roles. I don’t know how much standup he does anymore.
EG: A lot, actually.
KN: Well he did a bunch with us to promote the movie. I think he’s doing a little bit less. I know he does a show in Vegas every year.
EG: But I think we’ve awakened a bear in him.
KN: Like the other week, he was in New York and he was like, “I did 13 sets in two nights.” I was like “Ray, fuck you. You’re making me look bad.”
EG: We also convinced him to do our little alt show that we did in L.A. at the Meltdown comic book store, and he was terrified to do it, and everyone just ate him up because he’s funny. When you’re funny, you’re funny.
KN: He did it twice.
Capone: And he killed on @Midnight, by the way. It was so bizarre to see him on that show.
EG: He’s a weird guy. He’s like a very fascinating, complex dude, and I do feel like some people might be like “Oh, he’s a dad character.” No he’s not. He’s endlessly fascinating and has lots of layers to him.
KN: We’re like pretty good friends with him. We’re promoting and stuff, and this sounds like showing off, but really we’ve gotten to know him and his wife really, really well.
EG: Let’s go with the real question: Is that kind of what you want to do?
KN: I would love to. I would love to do more dramatic stuff.
EG: You’d like to be an action star.
KN: Well, yeah. I go back and forth on that one, but yeah, for a while, it was action stuff, but doing this, doing dramatic stuff, is so exciting and so fun and freeing. It’s freeing, because with comedy you’re always thinking, “Is it funny? Is it funny?” With comedy, there’s a bit of a rhythm to it, whereas with dramatic acting, there’s no rhythm to it, so it’s a lot more freeing. As long as it feels real, you can go anywhere, whereas with a joke, you’ve got to hit it. With drama, you don’t have to hit it. That’s what was cool seeing Ray and Holly both do the freeing drama stuff but then also hit the jokes.
Capone: Speaking of standup, I want to ask you about the stand-up scenes in this. Again, a very bold move on your choice to have almost every time we see you on stage not be your best performances.
EG: It was killing him, actually destroying him inside.
Capone: Talk about pulling that audience together and that use of the comedy stage in the film. And I feel so bad Kurt Braunohler. I feel worse for him than I do for you.
EG: That is actually true.
KN: He’s getting crapped on the whole movie. So here’s the thing. We set up a show in New York right before we started filming, and I did like a half hour for Mike to watch and pick out material for the movie, right? And I did it, and it was great, and I did well, and he was like, “You can’t be like that on stage. You’re too comfortable on stage. This has to be a few years ago, so you have to be uncomfortable on stage.”
So the biggest thing I did was, I used to not take the microphone out of the stand because it was like this barrier between me and the audience. I felt safe. It was like a shield. It was a crutch. Now I take the microphone out of the stand, and it’s much more freeing. So I went back to leaving it in the stand, and at the end of the movie is the only time I take it out. So yes, that was tough. And the audience was extras, but it was a real audience. They were really reacting.
EG: He kept apologizing to them in between takes. “I’m really better. You should come see me any time I’m performing. I’m actually better than this.”
KN: Same thing with Kurt. Kurt first did his set that we recorded, and I was like, “Kurt, if I’m going to do this, you’re going to do this. You can’t be so funny.” The big thing we did with standup in our movie, and I’ve seen this in reviews where people are like “Am I supposed to feel that the standup is good or bad? Because I don’t think it’s that funny.” That’s the one thing that I think standup movies and TV shows that fall into this trap, any comedy, where they’re dictating the reaction with the audience, where they’re like “This is really good,” then you’re watching it and you’re like “That’s not that good.” In our movie, it doesn’t matter. We don’t present it as being really good or really bad, we just show it, and then the audience can decide whether it’s good or not. It’s not like “This guy’s a genius. Watch him.”
EG: That’s the thing, there’s no one set that’s like, “This set changed his life for the better.” Because then you have the pressure of not only do you have to write the whole movie, but you also have to write a stand-up set that’s incredibly killer.
KN: Yeah, so we approached standup, with my standup specifically, sometimes it reflects where I am, obviously, specifically the stand-up set at the end, but we never wanted to dictate the reaction from the audience. I wanted to be like, this is the standup, and whether it’s good or bad is up to you, and it doesn’t really affect the movie.
Capone: What about the meltdown scene? Was the audience prepared?
EG: No.
KN: This is interesting. We shot the standup for two days and we had the same audience, we got to know them and people were performing, me, Aidy [Bryant], Kurt, Bo [Burnham], Ed [Herbstman], they were all performing and it was actually fun. They were laughing, and it was cool. And then at the end of the second day, we shot the meltdown scene last of that setup, and I was like “I think we should not tell them. Just introduce me, go out and just do it, and get their real reaction.” So it was real interesting the first time we did that. We didn’t prep them or anything. I just went out and I just started talking, and it was interesting to see the different times at which different people in the audience were like “Oh, okay. This is different. This is something else. This is making me uncomfortable.” So it was cool to get that actual reaction, because you only get one shot at it. Because after that, we did that scene 15 times.
EG: You asked extras to act a little concerned, and they’re like, “Ahhhh!”
KN: Yeah, so then you just do it and be like, “See? You feel awful.”
Capone: Did I hear you guys have written an “Amazing Stories” episode?
EG: We’re working on it, yeah.
Capone: I didn’t even know that was coming back, so that’s exciting.”
KN: Bryan Fuller is running it.
EG: Bryan Fuller’s a genius.
Capone: I loved the original. I think I still have VHS tapes of some of the originals, just ones I recorded
KN: Nice. Do you still have them?
Capone: Somewhere in my basement, yeah. I’m pretty sure.
KN: Do you have a VCR still hooked up?
Capone: Definitely.
EG: [to Kumail] We need to do that.
KN: You’re against it. I tried to hook up a Sega Genesis and you’re like, “Kumail, we have so much.”
EG: Well, video game systems are a little ridiculous in our house, but a VCR I would do.
