Author Sigrid Nunez on Watching Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and Naomi Watts Bring Her Characters to Life

In Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, about a woman caring for her dying friend, the author references Belgian director Chantal Akerman's 2015 documentary No Home Movie. Nunez writes, "Akerman documented conversations with her mother during the last months of her mother's life. We should all be great filmmakers."

It's a line that feels particularly striking now that two of Nunez's novels are being adapted for the screen. What Are You Going Through serves as the basis for The Room Next Door, directed by Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar. Simultaneously, her 2018 National Book Award-winning work The Friend is now a movie starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, directed by the duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Both films are playing at the Toronto International Film Festival after debuting at Venice and Telluride respectively, making Nunez perhaps the hottest writer of the fall movie season, three decades into her career which has produced 10 books, and accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

"I just feel like the luckiest writer in the world right now," she says in a phone interview just shortly after she had seen The Room Next Door for the first time, the day before TIFF began. "Those books were obviously very meaningful to me and I have these two beautiful interpretations, creations, works of art that I didn't have to do anything [on]. My vision gave some other really gifted people a vision. I'm just thrilled." 

Nunez's two stories are thematically similar. The Friend follows a writer, named Iris and played on screen by Watts, grieving the loss of her friend (Murray), a mentor figure who died by suicide. In his absence his third wife (Noma Dumezweni) asks his dear confidant to take care of the dog he left behind, an enormous Harlequin Great Dane named Apollo, who is also in mourning and who is not allowed in her cramped New York apartment. Both the film and the novel tackle how people cope in the face of great loss, and how we interpret and anthropomorphize animals who also seem to project human-like emotions. Apollo is played by a Dane named Bing, in a truly remarkable feat of animal acting. ("He is Apollo," Nunez says.)

Almodóvar arguably took some more liberties in transforming What Are You Going Through into The Room Next Door, including adding a surprising conclusion, but the contours of the narrative mirror those of the book. On screen, Julianne Moore is Ingrid, a writer who begins visiting her friend Martha, portrayed by Tilda Swinton, who is dying of cancer. Martha's daughter is absent from her life, and that strain weighs on her. Eventually, Martha comes to Ingrid with a request: She is planning on ending her own life with a euthanasia pill procured on the Dark Web and she wants Ingrid to accompany her to a rented home upstate where she will do it when the time feels right. She would like to have someone there when she dies, she explains.

Read more: Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

Nunez's books are internal, written in first person and often grappling with the very act of writing. The characters all go unnamed in her prose, which is highly referential to other works of literature, almost acting as criticism in addition to fiction. All of those stylistic flourishes, naturally, are more challenging to convey visually. Nunez explains that she always thought The Friend has a "straightforward" tale at its heart of this woman and dog that would make for a seamless transition to film.

As for the Almodóvar picture, she knew that What Are You Going Through was in his wheelhouse given that his most recent films, including 2019's semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory, had been "death haunted." She also credits her Spanish translator, Mercedes Cebrian, for getting her work to him. 

While Nunez says that What Are You Going Through very much emerged from The Friend, and they act as companion texts, she doesn't see the films as connected in the same way. "They are their own solid works," she says. And, indeed, each film feels very much the product of a different vision. For instance, The Room Next Door is an Almodóvar film in every sense, from its color scheme to its pacing. 

Nunez decided she didn't want to be actively involved in the creation of either film, and isn't credited on the screenplays. She knows some writers who have demanded inclusion and were still disappointed with the results. "I think that my instinct was just so right," she says. "And my luck in getting these particular directors and actors." 

But all three directors didn't completely exclude her. After they first cast Bing as Apollo, McGehee and Siegel sent her a video of the pooch interacting with a donkey at trainer Bill Berloni's Connecticut property. Almodóvar asked her a couple of simple questions throughout the making of the film including, "What would you bring to read if you were in Martha's situation?"

Perhaps the most revelatory part of the process for Nunez was seeing the actors embody the people she wrote. Nunez says she never visualizes her characters when she's composing them and has no idea what they look like. "From now on I will always see Naomi Watts," she says. "The way she managed to play that role with this combination of super vulnerability and dignity, that I just found thrilling." 

In The Room Next Door she found that Moore and Swinton also embodied what she was writing about. "I never pictured those women but the way they relate: That is exactly what I was feeling," she says. "There's a place in the book, which is really based on something someone said to me once, that watching someone die is like falling in love. It's that kind of intensity, all this emotion. That was the most striking thing besides the amazing visual miracle of that film."