Interview (Written): Donald Margulies

A WGA.org interview with Donald Margulies, screenwriter of The End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, directed by James Ponsoldt.

The author David Foster Wallace was widely considered “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” as the Los Angeles Times published, and very often one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, according to publications like Time. Were you a fan before penning the screenplay for End of the Tour?

I have to confess that I was not a fanboy. Many years ago, I read his essays. I did not succeed in reading all of Infinite Jest many years ago. I was certainly aware of him and I was aware of his untimely death. He had this meteoric kind of rock star entrance onto the literary scene, but until I read David Lipsky’s book, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of his genius and what a loss his death was to our culture. In a sense, I was an imperfect reader of Lipsky’s book, but that lack of overriding familiarity or affinity allowed me to pursue adapting the book as a story of two writers, not those two writers specifically. Moreover, I saw it as David Lipsky’s story of encountering someone who was not that much older than he was and who had achieved everything that he would ever hope to achieve as a writer. I just thought there was something very compelling in that dynamic.

There’s very little fawning over these characters. They’re presented, instead, as human beings, grappling in occasionally ugly ways with the same existential, ethical, and moral questions we all do — plus some fairly intense concerns about pro tennis, the Die Hard films, and Alanis Morissette.

I approached the material as a dramatist. I waited to take this treasure trove of material that was the book — almost a transcript, albeit edited of course, of a five-day road trip wherein Lipsky and Wallace talked about, well, kind of everything — and carve out some kind of narrative where there had been none. I wanted to really mine the subtext of these conversations for real content, real rhythm. I hope the audience feels this sort of subversive tug as they follow along on this road trip.

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Proving yet again William Goldman’s old saw about nobody knowing anything in Hollywood, many people — even within the entertainment industry — have figured End of the Tour is your screenwriting debut at the age of 60.

It’s been funny, a lot of people who see the movie have assumed that I’m a first-time screenwriter because my career has been pretty much about writing plays, but I’ve actually written 26 unproduced screenplays! I’ve had this stealth career as a writer of screenplays that do not get produced! For me, End of the Tour was just a sublime experience. It was a meeting of so many aspects of my creative and personal life — from my friend and manager David Kanter giving me Lipsky’s book to James Ponsoldt being a former student of mine at Yale — and the themes of dealing with success in one’s chosen field and the conundrums that can bring, these are all things I have considered in my own life.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

For my interview with Margulies, go here.