“Unveiling Secrets: Jon Gunn Reveals the Hidden Truths Behind Storytelling in SYS Podcast Episode 532!”
Jon Gunn
Yeah, and I’ll tell you, it’s funny, deadlines can be our greatest friend in many situations when it comes to writing. I’m pretty diligent and disciplined about writing. I’ve been doing it for a lot of years. When this particular project came, it was an interesting moment because I was about to direct another film that got shut down because of COVID. So, I found myself in my home with nothing to do and we had a development deal with Lionsgate and it was like, we need another project, something that we could shoot in quarantine. And that book had just fallen on my desk and I was like, I just read The Unbreakable Boy. I actually think it would be a perfect project. And my partner, John Irwin at the time was like, do it, write it, just start tomorrow. Like, let’s see if we can get something written because everyone in the filmmaking community was trying to figure out how to make anything during quarantine. And so this was a small enough story that we thought we could pull it off. So, I literally started right away. I think I wrote the script and I probably spent two weeks just thinking about it. Like, how am I going to break this down? I loved the idea right away of telling it through the voice of Austin because his voice in the book was so unique. And every time all of his dialogue and all of his thoughts were so interesting that I wanted to put them all on screen. So then I thought, oh, this is cool. I’m going to use the kid’s voice to narrate the parent’s story. So then I just took and laid out all the stories from the different chapters and told my favorites and then tried to figure out how can they all fit? Like, how am I going to span 20 years in one story? So I started to come up with a structure. Like the first act could be the love story that where they meet, they fall in love, they find out they’re pregnant, they have a child. Then when are we going to learn that he has autism? And then let’s move through the various years of his life to get him to the age where our kid will be for most of the film. So how can I crunch those stories into that window of when he’s a toddler and when they find out he’s got brittle bone disease? And then when he age him up to 13, so we can now live with the 13 year old through an extended piece of the story. And then it was about like, well, what happens when he’s 13, where’s the shape? And because I had a father who was struggling with alcoholism, that gave me a real good rock bottom that I knew would be a good end of act two, right? So, we’d sort of plant this brokenness in the parent, explore the brokenness and the struggles and the highs and lows through falling in love, having a child, learning your child that has brittle bone, autism, struggling yourself through all of those things. And then finding redemption from that rock bottom with the support and love of your wife and your family. And then to recognize that as a parent, we often feel like we fail and we often feel like we have to fix our kids if they’re struggling. And in this particular case, this child and his incredible spirit and optimism would help to heal the father. And so I gave myself a pretty solid structure there. Like I think I understand how I’m going to tell this story from act one, act two and act three to give emotional shape to all that and then find whimsy and levity and then the depths and the brokenness. And so you sort of start looking at, these are the themes I’m exploring. This is the shape of the story. Here’s the highs and lows and points I want to sort of balance so that it’s never too sad. It’s never too earnest, but it finds a good combination of happy and weird and funny and sad. And then that becomes this mix hopefully of a very beautiful emotional experience.
