A Charming Conversation With Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon About Their Charming Movie 'The Big Sick'

The Big Sick, which hits theaters this Friday June 23rd, was co-written by Kumail Nanjiani (who you probably know as Dinesh from Silicon Valley, or if you're really hardcore, Pindar from Franklin & Bash) and his wife Emily V. Gordon. The film is based on the first year of their own courtship, which included his early comedy career struggles and an unexpected illness which put her in a coma. Directed by Michael Showalter and produced by Judd Apatow, the film deftly juggles a number of different tones, culminating in a truly charming modern rom-com that avoids the obvious cliches of the genre.

We got the chance to sit down with Nanjiani and Gordon this week to talk about balancing the tones of the film, why rom-coms have gotten such a bad reputation in recent years, and what it was like adapting their own lives into fiction. (Spoiler alert: co-star Ray Romano makes an unexpected appearance toward the end.)

But first: before we started talking, I mentioned how I was sitting in the hallway hearing them laughing with the interviewer before me, and compared it to this classic Key & Peele job interview sketch. Gordon mentioned that they had just been making some Lord Of The Rings references, which apparently is a favorite subject for Nanjiani...

So how is this movie like The Lord Of The Rings?

Kumail Nanjiani[who stands up and begins pacing around the room excitedly]: I'll tell you how it's like Lord of The Rings!!

Emily V. Gordon: All right, let's ahhh take it down Kumail.

Kumail: Ummm. Really?

Emily: No, you're good. Get in there!

Kumail: I was trying to get energy... I'll say that the one thing that I learned from Sci-Fi and Fantasy was, I like Sci-Fi and Fantasy where it feels like the world has existed before the movie starts and will continue after that. Lord of The Rings feels like that, Star Wars feels like that. So with this movie, one thing that we really wanted to do is feel like these characters have existed before, but more importantly will exist after the movie is done. So it doesn't feel like their task is done.

Emily: You're so good at this.

Kumail: So that's what I've learned from Lord of The Rings and that's what we've applied to our movie, the sense that there's a history and they'll continue on after this.

Emily: He's so good at coming up with stuff and just like talking about it like he's said it 18 times. Nope. Comaverse, is that what were going to call it?

Kumail: It's called The Comaverse. We have five more movies already green lit.

Emily: There's some crossovers, there's some independent ones.

There's some spin-offs.

Kumail: And Bumblebee's going to be in the spinoff.

Emily: Two TV shows. It's going to be fun.

Kumail: By the way, off the record, have you seen Transformers yet?

The new one? No I haven't. I did watch a video the other day that summarized the first four movies, so that I don't have to see any of the old ones.

Kumail: Okay, back on the record.

Emily: Oh, do they pick up like that? So you need to watch all four before you start the fifth one?

I really feel now that might be true. There's a surprising amount of plot.

Kumail: There's a lot of information.

Emily: But interestingly, can you image a theater that's going to show all of them and then the fifth one?!

Kumail: Off the record: there's a lot of plot, but not a lot of story. Back on the record.

I just love that Mark Wahlberg's character is named Cade Yeager.

Emily: Oh my God.

Which sounds like a really good off-brand beer.

[Laughter]

Emily: Cade Yeager.

Kumail: Yes, Chuck Yeager and then Cade.

Emily: Oh, that's a name.

Kumail: We're in dangerous territory.

So I saw your tweetstorm the other day that you did about Four Weddings and a Funeral and meeting Richard Curtis. I was really touched by that as someone who grew up with Notting Hill as one of his favorite movies.

Kumail: Great movie.

Any time it's on TV, I have to stop whatever I'm doing and watch it the whole way through.

Emily: And it's on TV a lot. He's made me watch this movie several times.

I know someone who was convinced that the movie ends after the "I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy ..." speech.

Emily: Yeah it goes on, it goes on.

Kumail: Yeah, there's the press conference ...

Emily: The press conference is a big deal ...

Kumail: And then the song ["She," sung by Elvis Costello], and then they're on the bench and she's pregnant. Which is the most 'ending' ending ever. She's super pregnant.

Yes it is. Were you guys especially interested in making romantic-comedies? Why is it that there are so few good new rom-coms out there these days? Why does it seem like the genre has such a bad reputation?

Kumail: There was a glut of bad ones in the late 90's/early 2000s, when it was like 'the' genre.

Emily: I think there is a cynicism that I think people associate with them, which is a bummer, because love is wonderful and we all—

Kumail: Whoa! What a stance to take Emily.

Emily: Yeah baby. Love is a good thing. He loves rom-coms desperately, and I like...

Kumail: She likes the really good ones.

Emily: I like the really good ones, but I also used to do a workshop in Brooklyn on how rom-coms are ruining our actual love lives. I think for women they do, maybe for men too.

Kumail: Yeah.

Emily: It kind of sets you up for all these expectations...

Kumail: "Love at first sight."

Emily: All that stuff. It's all quite messy.

Kumail: "Soul mates."

Emily: I love love stories, and I love talking about love, but what I didn't want to do is make a story that I felt had all those tropes in it that I've grown up internalizing that ended up making many of my relationships quite bad. And that's on me. So I think it wasn't that we set out to make rom-coms as much as we were like, if we are going to tell this story, this is part of what this story is.

Kumail: Yeah, and we refer to rom-com tropes a lot but we wanted to show that in those movies, there's a lot of complications, but the relationship itself is pretty clean. There's misunderstandings and all of that, but it seems sometimes a little contrived. With our movie, we wanted to show the messiness of relationships. And that it's not just two people: it's their families, and there are a lot of negotiations that happens in relationships.

Emily: Everybody's got baggage, and not just the classic, "Oh I have so much baggage," but everyone comes with so much context and you're not just dating a person, you're dating all their context too. Part of relationships is negotiating each other's context.

Kumail: And that's why we wanted to do a rom-com that at least referenced those tropes, one [that showed] we were aware of those tropes making it, but that was really about the messiness of love.

It's interesting. There are so many different tones in the movie: it's a rom-com, it's a medical drama at points, it's a culture clash film and a family drama, and then there's even a little bit of a workplace comedy in there. How did you balance all the tones and make sure it was of a piece together?

Kumail: Michael Showalter, the director of the movie, is very good at tone. He's very good at tone. The reference that we had that we could always go back to was: we lived through this, does this feel like something we would live through? We fictionalized it, but as long as it felt consistent with our experience in some way, we knew that we had that reference point.

Emily: In a very nuts and bolts way, we literally had five different colored note cards, and each story line would get its own color. We would put them up on the board scene by scene and make sure that we were addressing each storyline and no threads were getting dropped, that we were paying attention to everything and we were checking in on stories that were important. So we just kept using those and moving those around. We still have that board.

Kumail: And I think when people say that movies have tone problems, I think what it is is that the tone shift is abrupt and the world from one tone doesn't seem to affect the tone in the other world. So we wanted to make sure that when there were tone shifts happening, you could see how these movements were affecting each other. So you could see how sort of the rom-com of the first act affects the medical drama in the second act and the family and the intensity of that, and then you see how if affects the comedy world and so on. We wanted to make sure that these different tones were interacting with each other, were pushing and pulling at each other. So I think that's how you try and at least create a consistent world.

This movie's based on the first year of your relationship. Was there a particular moment when you turned to each other and realized, we need to turn this into a feature film?

Emily: It would be much more cinematic if we did, but no.

Kumail: It happened years later.

Emily: There was never a moment. Most of our big decisions end up coming from us being like, "Oh, let's talk about it, should we do this...?" We have that conversation, what, 18-30 times? Then, at some point at the end, "I guess that's a thing that we're doing."

Kumail: It's always a discussion.

Emily: So it never was a thing that we turned to each other and were like, "this is a movie." It really was a series of slow conversations about whether or not this could ever be turned into something fictionalized, but with a seed of truth. Then when Judd came along, he was the one who was like, "this is a movie." We were like, "Well, if Judd said it, then yes."

Kumail: He's got to be right, he knows movies.

He seems like he has some experience in this world. Considering you guys wrote it, you starred in it, and now you are on a press tour where you are talking about it all the time— has it been therapeutic at all, or weird, revisiting this intense moment in your lives together?

Emily: I think its gone past therapeutic in a fine way. There's no more that we're getting out of doing the press. It's not like this painful, "Oh God" unburdening thing. It's not like that anymore. Now the movie kinda stands on its own as a separate thing from us, that's the thing that we're excited to come talk about. Because that's the thing that Barry Mendel worked on and Mike Showalter worked on and Judd Apatow and Holly Hunter and Zoe Kazan worked on with us. So it's less about therapeutic stuff now as much as we're just trying to do justice to this thing that we all worked on together.

As you were writing and creating it, how did you decide when you were going to stick closely to what really happened versus fictionalizing it?

Emily: I think Judd was really, really helpful, and Showalter too. [They both] were helpful bringing up things I hadn't thought about before. If you know who [Kumail's] character is, and you know what his challenges are, who are the worst type of people for him to be paired with? Who's going to challenge him the most? And it should always be about the character, more so than being like, "Oh this is just like my parents." There can be seeds of who my parents are in there, though they aren't that much [like my parents] honestly, but they need to be people that challenge the character we created. So what's the most awkward situation for him to be in...

Kumail: While still being realistic. That was the thing. We could crank it up as much as we can without losing the reality level. And we had that reference because we lived through it.

Emily: Yeah, we'd written so many drafts where we dialed it up a billion notches and had to take it down a couple of notches. In reality, Kumail and I did not break up when I was hospitalized, but that was another suggestion of like, it's one thing to have a casual boyfriend at your bedside. It's another thing entirely to have your ex-boyfriend at your bedside that you're still pretty pissed off at. So all that stuff, the decisions were made to make the story better.

In real life when you came out of your coma, did you have any idea of what had been going on? How long did it take to get out of the daze of the illness?

Emily: People had to explain things to me a few times.

Kumail: Yeah, and I think still the first few days after you came out, you don't really have any memory.

Emily: That's the thing, I consider that I was totally coma [during that period], because I had no awareness of anything. My eyes were open but I don't remember any of those days, so for me I was actually in a coma for longer than they say I was in a coma, because I don't know anything that happened and I wasn't there—but [to them], if my eyes were open, I was there.

Kumail: Well, the medication that they put you on to put you in the coma, that they then had to wean you off of, causes amnesia. So she actually doesn't remember getting put into the coma, and she doesn't remember the days when she was still being weaned off it. She was awake and recognized us and everything, but she was obviously very drugged up.

Emily: There's like the emotional upheaval, but then there's also literally that you have a lot of drugs in your body and it's hard.

Ray Romano[suddenly opens door and sticks his head in, before coming inside]: We need you over here!

Kumail: Who's this?

Emily: Hello!

Kumail: Hey Ray, you really...

Ray: W-I-U.

Kumail: Wiu?

Ray: Wrap it up.

Laughter

I was just about to ask them, I have written down here, "Ray Romano and Holly Hunter: how are they so good?" Though I guess that's more of an existential question...

Ray: How are they similar?

[almost shouting] How are they so good?

Ray: Well, Holly scared me into being good.

[Laughter]

You should work with her a lot then.

Ray: Yeah, really, we just all held on.

Kumail: That's how I felt. Just hold on to Holly, don't let go, you'll be good.

Ray: Yeah. By the way Colbert was good.

Emily: My parents said you did great on the Today Show, they told me this morning, you were really good.

Ray: Oh, yeah, that was over like that. [snaps fingers]

Kumail: Yeah. But it was okay, the Colbert thing?

Ray: Yeah it was...[Ray starts talking about someone without naming them, then realizes...] oh, is he recording?

Off the record, off the record.

Ray: We'll talk later. Go ahead, I'm only kidding, do whatever you gotta do.

Kumail: Sorry, is that going to be in the thing?

It's a nice little moment. I really was going to ask about working with Ray Romano and Holly Hunter, because I thought they were really fantastic.

Kumail: It's amazing because Holly clearly is a legend who has been great in everything. So getting her, we knew we were getting the great actor. With Ray, it was Judd's idea but we knew it would be so interesting. They would make such a cool looking couple, with such different energies. And in a way, they would also weirdly mirror me and Emily since they are also a couple with big differences. When Judd suggested it, we were immediately on board.

Emily: You know what was also probably true, he was also probably thinking about the stand-up tour when he wanted to cast him.

Press Person:[who has entered the room to tell us we're out of time] What's funnier than Ray Romano?