Two years ago, Dan Fogelman started a flood of tears big enough to make the guys at Kleenex happy with his NBC family drama "This Is Us." As if that wasn't enough emotional angst, Fogelman's new feature film, "Life Itself," is equally as moving and touching.
In describing how "This Is Us" tells the story of three siblings through the course of their lives, Fogelman points out the idea was to make a television show that treads in humanity and deals with regular people by looking at the big moments.
The simple way to describe "This Is Us" is life will surprise you. The formula for "Life Itself" is similar as it looks at a family through multiple generations, showing how big and small moments go into creating who they are. The cast includes Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Antonio Banderas and Mandy Patinkin.
"The film explores how generationally the past informs the present," Fogelman says. "I think the film also has a bit more plot in how these little small moments that would seemingly pass over you when you were recapping your day to your wife or husband at the end of the day can have huge effect _ a butterfly effect _ on our lives.
"I am very fascinated by how the stories of our fathers and mothers inform not just the stories of us but the stories of our sons and daughters."
Not only did Fogelman write "Life Itself," he also directed the project. He will be the first to tell you directing is not an area he's drawn to or feels 100 percent capable of doing. Before "Life Itself," Fogelman had only directed shorts and the 2015 feature film "Danny Collins." "Life Itself" was such a close personal project for Fogelman and was so engrained in his own mind he decided to take on the directing challenge.
It was a big test for him because the story unfolds in New York and Spain with a very large cast. Fogelman found the directing process long and exhausting but at the same time rewarding.
Fogelman wrote the script shortly after the death of his mother 10 years ago. He was struck by how strange an experience it was to have so many positive markers in his life happen and not have someone so important to him be there to share the excitement. He often has found himself trying to look at the big picture of how his mother's life has reflected on his own life.
"There's a message at the end of the film that really tries to give a very spoken message to what the theme of film is and frankly, what my take on the human experience is," Fogelman says. "It speaks to the collective story we tell as a family and how even though we can get absorbed in our own narratives sometimes, there is big picture to the story that your life is telling that involves previous generations."
Even when he was writing scripts for animated tales like "Cars 2" or the short-lived TV comedy "The Neighbors," he focused on elements of the importance of family. His script for the 2012 movie "Guilt Trip" was based on a trip from New Jersey to Las Vegas Fogelman made with his mother. Nothing has reflected his views on how the fabric of a family's life continues to be made as when he began developing "This Is Us."
"What I always say about my family, because I write so much about family, is that I had the right amount of dysfunction and craziness in my family to make me a writer because it gave me good material but not so dysfunctional that it put me in an insane asylum," Fogelman says. "That always feels like the right balance for any writer who is going to write about family."
Pass the tissues.
