Sigrid Nunez’s books do not scream movie adaptation, with their journal-like first-person intimacy and homebody settings. In her 2018 National Book Award winner, The Friend, a writing professor takes care of her mentor’s dog after his death. In What Are You Going Through, from 2021, a writer accompanies an old friend who plans to kill herself. Each feels like a conversation with a smart, honest friend, her mind full of quotations, with a natural flow that one worries a movie could botch.
Not so for Nunez, who approved two new adaptations. “I already knew that I was going to say yes, because why not?” she says with her bluff sense of humor and curiosity.
The Room Next Door, which premiered in December, is the latest from Pedro Almodóvar, who adapted What Are You Going Through into a two-hander about friendship and mortality starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. And, opening March 28, The Friend stars Naomi Watts as a writer tasked with housing the Great Dane left behind by her late, philandering mentor (Bill Murray).
Nunez had already “adored” Almodóvar’s movies, recalling a solo trip to see Parallel Mothers as the pandemic lockdown lifted. And she liked a Henry James adaptation by the New York–based directors of The Friend, Scott McGehee and David Siegel.
She was also accustomed to people jumping to conclusions about her work, which resemble the ruminations of, well, a novelist like herself. “It’s a hybrid,” she says of The Friend. “But I never had the Great Dane. My friend never committed suicide. All my mentors were female, not male. None of this ever happened!” she adds, laughing. “It’s all like a child making up lies, right? ‘Oh, I had this great big dog.’”
But the reflections that make Nunez’s books quiver with life, those she holds close: “That is me. There’s no distance between the author and the narrator there.” This immediacy lends real force to the focus of both books—death and the living—and survives in the differently intimate films.
The casts of The Friend and The Room Next Door impressed Nunez, though she says she “never visualizes” characters when writing. And she was admittedly surprised by McGehee and Siegel’s long-held choice for the mentor to the Watts character in The Friend. “Let’s be honest, I would never have thought ‘Bill Murray,’ because in my book, the characters are supposed to be the same age,” she says. Nonetheless, she is “thrilled that he’s in it!”
Nunez, who grew up in New York, visited shoots for both films: a Midtown location for The Friend and, for The Room Next Door, a bouquet-filled end to filming at Lincoln Center. She seemed to welcome the films’ contributions to what she considers to be an ill-served subject.
“As a culture, we do so badly by dying, death, illness, and mourning,” she says. “The grief-counselor thing, the idea that there are these ‘stages.’ Says who?”
Nunez’s latest novel, The Vulnerables, continues her meditations in another direction, through a coronavirus-lockdown setting. Together with the new adaptations, it’s another chance to take a breath and reflect, with the ever eloquent Nunez by our side.
The Friend hits theaters on March 28
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor at Film Comment magazine
