“Grief and love are conjoined; you don’t really get one without the other,” said Jandy Nelson, author of the bestselling YA novel The Sky Is Everywhere, her debut novel, which came out in 2010 and was named a PW Flying Start. A movie adaptation of the book, which explores the ways we cope with sorrow while embracing the love that can be found in the midst of pain, is set to hit Apple TV+ on February 11.
Directed by Josephine Decker (Shirley) with a screenplay by Nelson, the film follows 17-year-old Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman, Man with a Plan) after the sudden death of her older sister, Bailey (Havana Rose Liu, Mayday). A gifted musician, Lennie struggles with her grief, unable to find joy playing music like she used to, worrying her Gram (Cherry Jones, Transparent), Uncle Big (Jason Segel, How I Met Your Mother), and her best friend, Sarah (Ji-young Yoo, Moxie). When she meets Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon, The Society), a charismatic, musically inclined new student, she feels drawn to him, but her complicated feelings about her sister’s mourning boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander, Indignation) begin to have implications on her budding relationship with Joe.
When Nelson sat down to write the screenplay, she was pleasantly surprised at how important voice was, comparing penning the script to a poem. “My background is in poetry,” she told PW. “There is a very rigid structure, every word counts, and it’s very visual.” And she ran into the conundrum of translating Lennie’s interiority to something that can be seen on screen. “I wanted to manifest that inner world visually, so the script has these imaginative departures called ‘Lenniescapes’ that reveal her torrid emotional life and are direct forays into her imagination.” Nelson also credits Decker for her visual prowess. “She is so brilliant, has such a rapturous visual sensibility and she brought the Lenniescapes to life so magically. It surpassed all my expectations.”
Decker, who had read the U.K. edition of the book that included artwork based on the book’s poems, said, “I was so in love with Nelson’s adaptation that I didn’t try to make a ton of changes. She would take a simple boring line of voiceover and turn it into a powerful, searing insight that cracked your heart in half.”
Nelson’s talent for writing comes as no surprise to her editor, Jessica Garrison, who vividly remembers the first time she read the novel as a young editor, though she wasn’t working with Nelson at the time. “I was ignoring my parents to weep and laugh through this fabulous book. I remember I wrote to my friend and colleague, ‘If I am ever lucky enough to work on a book like this, with an author like this, I will die happy.’ ”
Of course, challenges arose that the crew couldn’t predict, having shot the movie in fall 2020, during the pandemic and the California wildfires, “one of which forces you to stay inside to avoid horrific air pollution, and the other forces you to go outside if you want to be with other people and not get Covid,” Decker said. Which led to some unexpected additions to the film: “It looks like fog but it was actually smoke from the wildfires,” Nelson recalled.
But not all surprises were bad; one in particular holds a special place in Nelson’s heart. “This was such a strange thing. I wrote the novel because I wanted to explore grief after I lost a dear friend of mine. All over the memorial and her house, she had these little blue stones,” Nelson recounted. “When I got to Bailey’s grave in the movie, it was covered in those blue stones. It’s not in the book. It’s not in the script. I talked to [production designer Grace Yun] and asked her ‘How come?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know, they just felt right.’ ”
One thing about adapting your own work “is that you don’t have to worry about the author being upset at you.” Nelson said with a laugh. “When I was writing the novel, I had a really hard time figuring out what had happened to Lennie and Bailey’s mother. [It] bothered me so I ‘killed her’ in the movie and was really happy with how that changed the story.”
Excitement for the movie’s release has been mounting for those involved. Garrison remembers sitting in a meeting watching the trailer for the first time, “I know I just had this entirely goobery smile all across my face,” she said. “I got a little misty, I won’t lie.”
Nelson is excited to revel in the actors’ talents. “I honestly felt like each member of the cast walked right out of the novel,” she said, telling PW of a recent encounter she had with Kaufman. “We had coffee—I feel so close to her because she is Lennie. She does the comedy so well but also does the drama. She’s just incredible at both.”
Fans will be pleased to hear that Nelson is deep in revisions for her third novel. “It’s this multigenerational saga of a northern California wine country family, and it takes place in different times periods and has many narrators. It’s a really exciting project with lots of food and music and heartbreak and love stories.” Complete with a soufflé as one of the stars and recipes for any intrepid bakers reading along.
Garrison said she hopes the movie will “sweep people off their feet,” while Decker wishes that those going through tough times “find some comfort in Lennie’s journey.”
“Lennie figures out in the movie that Bailey’s gonna die every day for the rest of her life,” Nelson said. “The grief is forever. But that doesn’t stop her from choosing to live. Grief is a measure of the love that’s lost; you wouldn’t be feeling this grief if you didn’t love so much and so hard in life. And life is about celebrating that love, about living to the fullest. A broken heart is [also] an open heart.”
