One thing Jason always has is an underlying intelligence that’s expressed through an acerbic wit. Of the cast, what is it about Jason Bateman that equates Judd Altman? I just had to convert the whole family to Judaism, because they weren’t when I started writing the book, and then kill the father. I had to come up with a plan: when you’re going through everything Judd is going through, why would you stick around that family for more than 20 minutes? I needed something that would keep him home for a while - a shiva.

As soon as I started writing about his siblings and his mother, the book started coming to life. So I wrote a chapter where he goes home for his father’s 70th birthday, and that’s where I began writing about the Foxman family. It started out with Judd coming home and finding his wife in bed with his boss - the premise of it was, if you’re a suburban man and you lose your wife, your job and your home, do you actually exist? It was just supposed to follow Judd as he figures out his life, after it’s been totally upended.īut I was a hundreds pages in, and the book just wasn’t exciting I really liked the character, but I think I needed a further humiliation for him. I wasn’t trying to write a book about shiva, I was just trying to write a book about a man who is sent into a reexamination of his life. The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Tropper about staying true to the beloved book, deciding against the use of voiceover and converting the entire family to Judaism to further humiliate his heartbroken protagonist.

I feel very free to go off and try different things.” You’re not limited the way you are in screenwriting. That’s something that isn’t in the movie at all, because it was tonally askew for what we were doing in the movie,” Tropper says of the sections that reveal how Paul stayed in his hometown instead of going to college on an athletic scholarship after he’s horribly injured while helping Judd.Īnd of the hilarious and heartbreaking chapters that take place completely in Judd’s mind, Tropper says, “One of the fun things about book writing, which is why I’ll never stop, is because you can indulge in all the flights of fancy and take on a dream sequence if you want to have a three-chapter tangent. “It was hard to get that right, tonally, to hit all the right emotional notes without being too dark.

This is where i leave you novel