Samuel D. Hunter's roots in Moscow, Idaho, run deep. Like deep, deep. When I mention I drove down to his hometown to watch a screening of The Whale at Kenworthy Theater, he immediately brings up that his grandfather was an usher there all the way back in the 1930s. The city is in his blood, and traces of it show up on-screen in The Whale, the new Darren Aronofsky film that Hunter adapted for the big screen from his own Drama Desk-winning play.
Set in Moscow, the emotionally taxing drama introduces viewers to Charlie (Brendan Fraser, who's gaining Oscar buzz for his performance), an online collegiate English teacher whose 600-plus pound frame limits his world to that within his apartment. When it becomes clear Charlie is suffering heart failure and refuses to go to the hospital, he spends his final days trying to reconnect with his estranged teen daughter, Ellie, while also sorting through issues with his lone friend/caretaker Liz and a young door-to-door missionary named Thomas.
With The Whale set to arrive in local theaters this week, we caught up with Hunter to talk about his hands-on adaptation process, putting Moscow details into the film, and controversy surrounding the lead character's weight.
INLANDER: How do you feel like Moscow has sort of influenced your playwriting?
HUNTER: I started writing plays out in Idaho really early on. It was my freshman year in college. I knew I wanted to be a playwright, but I was just sort of like, "I don't know where my slot is," you know what I mean? And when I started writing plays set in Idaho, there's just something that like — it immediately authenticated it for me. My family has been in Moscow since just after the Civil War. Like, my great-great-grandfather was the first postmaster in Moscow. So I feel deeply connected to it.
This is the thing though — I don't really think of myself as a regional writer. And I don't really think The Whale is a story that can only happen in Moscow or in Idaho. But there's something about like, within the specificity, there is something universal. And so it's just been really useful for me to return to it over and over. Also, at this point, I love how the plays dovetail off one another and speak to one another. They're constantly feeling like chapters in the same book or short stories in the same collection or something.
The only play that is really specifically kind of Idahoan is a play I wrote called Lewiston/Clarkston, [they] are kind of two companion plays that are set across the river from one another, but those specifically deal with the Lewis and Clark legacy. Even that's more about the sort of post-boom, existential malaise of our current era that is not specific to Idaho.
A writer's involvement can vary wildly once a screenwriter turns in the script, so how involved were you with the production of the film?
I was extremely involved. The short version of the very long journey is that the play was in New York... off-Broadway at one of my favorite theaters, Playwrights Horizons. And I didn't even know that Darren had seen it. But I got a call shortly before the run ended, saying Darren Aronofsky wants to meet with you. And that was 10 years ago. So I met him shortly after that, and that just kicked off a really long conversation that continued over many years.
Darren eventually got more interested in making Mother!, so that took him out for several years. But he kept extending the option because he still had faith in it. He even shopped it around to a few other directors. I'm really glad that that didn't happen, because Darren, I think, had this really unique thing of having so much faith in me and the story that he let me do the adaptation entirely. I mean, of course, I was working on it with him on it, but I [wrote] it myself. So it's very true to the play.
And I was on set the entire time, including three weeks of rehearsal that we did before anybody turned the camera on. And that kind of access and collaboration for a screenwriter is almost unheard of. So I'm very, very lucky.
Three weeks of rehearsal? So it was almost like an extended dress rehearsal of a play?
Yeah. Three weeks is — increasingly so, unfortunately — what a full rehearsal process for a play usually is. I wish it was longer, sometimes you get a fourth.
I mean, most films have zero rehearsal, so credit A24 with giving us the money to be able to do that. It made a huge difference.
Darren — on day one — kind of said, "We're a theater company for the next three weeks." And he taped out the set on this kind of floor of a warehouse up in Newburgh, New York, where we were shooting. And we just treated it like we were making a play. The only difference, of course, being there's no audience we're playing to. So we really did have a really lush, long rehearsal process.
So were you providing specific input to get the Moscow details right? Like making sure that a Moscow pizza place was used and things like that? Because the locals I saw the movie with in Moscow were keenly aware of them.
I'd written in some and then the production designer and the set dressers did amazing work. Stuff that you'll never be able to see on film. Like my favorite prop — and I stole it after we finished shooting — was a flier that's on the fridge. You can't see, but it's an ad for a play at the Hartung Theater at the University of Idaho. And I was looking at it, and I was like, "Did they just, like, find an old Hartung production?" And I googled it, and it's a play that does not exist — somebody like made it up entirely. I think the title of the play was like The Doing is Dually True or something absurd like that. So there's tons of those details all around the set.
What aspects of the story changed over the adaptation from the play to the film? I know the original had the missionary character as more Mormon, and now he's clearly a bit more Christ Church-y, though I'm not sure if that's something audiences outside of Moscow will pick up on.
I went to [Moscow K-12 Christian school] Logos for a few years, and I have written a lot about Christianity, probably because of that. I originally made the character Mormon, I think in a bit of active self-protection, because I didn't want to kind of hit too close to home.
Also, it kind of felt like when I wrote this in 2009-2010, Mormonism was not very mainstream, and people didn't really know a lot about it. And so it did kind of feel like the audience was getting this peek into a world that they didn't know. But nowadays, like Mormonism is mainstream. This was before Mitt Romney; it was before The Book of Mormon musical. And I think in rewriting it and making it this New Life Church — which is similar to Christ Church, but not entirely — it did kind of hit way closer to home for me personally. So that was a big change.
And then also there was finding the cinematic language to tell the story. Like, for instance, during the pandemic I had the idea for the second bedroom and Alan's Bible. And I had that idea because the way that that story functions in the play is [the missionary] Thomas is like, "What happened to your lover?" And then Charlie has a big monologue where he tells him what happened to Alan. That's not in the movie at all. And so I kind of replaced it with the visual of the second bedroom to kind of tell that story. I added the pizza boy, I added the bird. So yeah, a lot of those details. Though I will say the spine of the story is the same, scene-by-scene it's the same.
Were there any moments during that cinematic conversion where things that maybe you didn't even realize were in the text ended up shining though because of Darren's directing or the actors' performances?
Oh yeah. I mean, especially in Brendan's performance. I've done screenwriting before, I wrote on a television show (Baskets) for a number of years. But this is my first feature. And it's certainly the first time that I've adapted any of my plays into films.
I adore plays, I will always write plays. And I really do think of myself as a playwright. But the cool thing about [film] is you can get so close. Especially with the 4:3 aspect ratio that Darren chose, you know, it's not landscape — it's human, it's portraiture. And there's so much that Brendan did in the performance. I found myself giving him lines on the fly just based off of stuff that he was finding in the moments. And also taking away some lines, because Brendan can tell the story with his eyes.
And Darren is really rigorous about doing a ton of takes. I mean, there was one scene — I think it was the second scene, where Liz comes over for the first time — I think we had something like 30 hours of raw footage of that scene. So the actors were allowed to find so much within it.
Sometimes I feel like play adaptions struggle on the big screen because their lack of set changes feels limiting. Do you feel like Charlie essentially being unable to leave his apartment helped the adaptation feel appropriately constrained?
It's what I was really hoping. I remember when Darren first approached me about the idea of making it into a film, I had just assumed that he would want to do that traditional thing of opening it up: adding characters, adding locations, adding flashbacks, even. But the more I thought about that, I was just like, I don't see that version. And it was hard because I'd never written a movie before. So I was like, "Is this my lack of imagination as a playwright and a first time screenwriter? Or are my instincts correct, that we really don't want to leave this guy?" Part of the experience of the story is just communing with this person for two hours straight.
But in one of our really early meetings, Darren, without me even saying anything, said, "Let's keep it in the apartment." And I remember just being like, "Oh, thank God!" But also like, "Wow, this is going to be a long process. Because this is going to be a hard nut to crack." So in a certain sense, I'm glad it took 10 years, because it took us 10 years to find the right way to make it — both on script level, but also on the production level and casting level.
I know there's been some pushback from people who haven't seen The Whale about the weight aspects of the film — Brendan wearing a fat suit to play the role and concerns that it's just a film about fat shaming. How do you sort of respond to those feelings being out there?
I mean, this play has been around for a really long time. It's been performed around the country and around the world. I have read dozens — if not hundreds — of reviews with this play. I have not read a single review of the play that feels the experience of the play is one of shaming this person.
You know, I wrote it from a deeply personal place — I have personal experience with self-medicating with food and rapid weight gain. This is one specific story of one specific person. And I understand that provokes some people, just the mere existence of this story is provocative for some people, but I just wrote a story about a complete and fully realized human being. That's all I can do as a writer.
And also I can recognize why people are having the reaction that they're having. Because if you read a one-sentence synopsis... that's scary. Because the history of cinema and its portrayal of people dealing with obesity is really a troubling one. But I think if you engage with this with an open mind, you'll realize that the story is ultimately a call for empathy. ♦
The Whale screens at AMC River Park Square starting Dec. 20.
