The Friend, directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee, is an emotional movie about a woman and her dog who form an unexpected bond and learn to deal with grief, friendship, and healing. There are parts of The Friend that read like they could be based on true events, but they are actually based on a novel that mixes fiction with real-life events. Sigrid Nunez wrote the book, which is also called “The Friend,” in 2018. She drew a lot of inspiration from her own life and thoughts on death, friendship and the aftermath of suicide.
The Story of The Friend
In The Friend, Iris is a writer from New York who is having a hard time after her best friend Walter Walter played by Bill Murray. kills himself. As she deals with her grief and a career that won’t move forward, she gets Walter’s big, wild Great Dane, Apollo. Even though she doesn’t want to, Iris ends up becoming close to Apollo as they both deal with grief and the healing process. The dog helps her deal with her grief over Walter’s death by giving her comfort that she doesn’t get from her human friends.
The movie shows Iris’s inner turmoil—how she can’t connect with her fellow writers—how her responsibilities are growing and how heavy Walter’s death is on her. Even though Apollo is naughty and difficult at first, he gives Iris a sense of stability and helps her deal with her feelings of being alone and confused.
Based on Real-Life Real Experiences
The story is not true, but its themes and emotional depth are inspired by real events. A close friend of the author’s, Sigrid Nunez, killed herself—while she was writing the book. Nunez has said that her interest in the complicated feelings that come with suicide gave her the idea for the book. She had met a lot of people who were thinking about—suicide but were lucky enough to be saved. She became interested in what the friends and family of people who were able to end their lives might go through after hearing about these conversations. How would it feel to be left behind, with no answers or ends?
The novel was directly affected by—Nunez’s own grief and her observations of other people’s emotional struggles. There is a lot of confusion and doubt after someone dies by suicide—which is reflected in the ‘book’s main ideas’. Naomi Watts plays the fictional character Iris in the movie. However, Iris’s emotional journey is based on real—universal feelings of loss and the complexity of mourning a loved one who has died by suicide.
The emotional center of the story is the relationship between Iris and Apollo, which is what the movie is mostly about. Siegel and McGehee, the filmmakers, said that keeping the deep feelings and complicated nature of grief was important when adapting the book. The filmmakers wanted to show the honest, personal parts of Nunez’s writing about loss and friendship. The way Naomi Watts played Iris was a big part of making these feelings come to life on screen. Watts also lost a very important person in her life when her beloved dog died in 2021. She was able to make Iris’s journey with ‘Apollo’ seem even more real because of this experience.
Even though the material was very emotional, Watts worked closely with ‘Bing’ the dog who played Apollo—to build a relationship that would show up on screen. Her hard work at building a real bond with the dog helped show how much Iris was hurting and how she was healing, which made the story even more moving.
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