#571 - Sigrid Nunez on The Room Next Door and The Friend

Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with author Sigrid Nunez. With her novels The Friend (winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction) and What Are You Going Through, New York–based author Sigrid Nunez has supplied the extraordinarily rich source material for not one, but two films in the NYFF62 lineup: Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Spotlight standout The Friend, starring Naomi Watts as a writer mourning the complicated loss of a beloved mentor; and Pedro Almodóvar’s Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, which follows another writer (Julianne Moore) as she reconnects with a friend from her past (Tilda Swinton) who approaches her with an unusual request. We were honored to welcome Nunez for a special conversation about her prismatic literary meditations on grief, friendship, and the passage of time; the experience of seeing her creative work adapted into other mediums; and cinema’s alchemical capacity to both translate and transform a novel’s meaning. This conversation was moderated by A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review. A New York Times Critic’s Pick, Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door is now playing at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/room NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO.