Is The Friend a True Story? Is Iris Dixon Based on a Real Writer? Is The Letters a Real Book?

Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, ‘The Friend’ is an emotional drama film about the bond between a writer named Iris and a dog named Apollo. The film begins with Iris reeling from the loss of her best friend, Walter, whose sudden death throws her into shock. While processing it, she is told that Walter wished for her to take in his dog. Because Apollo has nowhere else to go, Iris decides to fulfill her friend’s wish, even though she knows it won’t work out in the long term. Over time, however, the dog grows on Iris, especially as she realises he is also grieving Walter. This brings the duo closer, but there are still too many hurdles that Iris needs to cross before she can make sure that Apollo stays with her. The journey they take together is a heartrending tearjerker, and it feels so real because there is a very human issue at its core.

The Fictional Premise of The Friend Came from a Real Issue

‘The Friend’ is a fictional film based on the 2018 book of the same name by Sigrid Nunez, adapted for the screen by Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Nunez revealed that she came up with the story after thinking about a dark aspect of life. Over the years, she had met a lot of people who ruminated over the idea of taking their own lives. These people weren’t necessarily suicidal, but they seemed to have given a lot of thought to the way they would go if they were given the choice. This thought fascinated her, and from here, she came up with the premise of a woman grieving the loss of a close friend who has killed himself.

A lot of what Nunez wanted to explore in the story was the thought process of the person who is left behind and all the questions they go through about the thought process of the person who left. The author talked to a couple of people who had tried to kill themselves but had been saved in time. They told her that they had been happy to be saved and had regretted the decision to take their life the moment they went through with it. Nunez wondered how a person who is not saved would have felt in such a moment. She gave a face to these questions in the fictional author Iris, who is mulling over the same things about her friend, Walter, while working on her novel, The Letters, which she hasn’t been able to finish.

With a dog factoring into the story, the emotional stakes are raised. What intensified these emotions was that the directors and the actor had individually been through some grievous losses. Naomi Watts lost her 20-year-old Yorkshire terrier Bob in 2021, and the directors felt it might get too emotionally heavy for her to act out a similar scenario for the movie. However, Watts was determined to play the character. She trained with Bing, who plays Apollo, for several weeks to develop trust with him so the filming process could get easier. Over time, she built a strong bond with Bing, which shows in her and the dog’s deeply moving performances.

Apollo the Dog Initially Didn’t Factor Into the Plot

When Sigrid Nunez started writing the novel, she knew that the story would be about a woman and how she feels about the sudden passing of her friend. However, she did not initially consider including the character of Apollo in the story. The author revealed that she had written over thirty pages of the manuscript when she decided to shake things up by giving the protagonist something from her dead friend. She came up with the scene of Walter’s ex-wife wanting to talk to Iris about something, but even then, she didn’t know what the conversation would be about. Nunez loves animals, and she harboured a desire to write a story about animals.

Before ‘The Friend,’ she’d written a book about Virginia Woolf’s pet, but that was a completely different genre and project. When she gave more thought to the surprise that Walter could have left for Iris, she settled on the fact that it would be a dog. Not only would this present a unique challenge for her protagonist, but it would also allow the author to fulfil her desire to write a story about an animal. The dog’s arrival radically changed the story as Nunez started to look at things from Iris’ perspective, trying to make it as difficult for her as possible. She didn’t want to give a cop out to the character by making Apollo a small dog, so she went with a harlequin Dane, whose size and needs would be a challenge for her.

The writer chose this breed because she became familiar with a real dog of the same breed while regularly visiting a cafe where she would spend her afternoons writing. The challenge of the dog also allowed her to venture deeper into Iris’ psyche by playing around the question of whether or not she should keep the dog. It would serve as such a strong connection to Walter that she would be forced to keep the dog because she wouldn’t want to hurt her dead friend’s feelings, despite the challenges she has to face herself. By throwing in these realistic problems and conundrums for the character, Nunez made Iris a highly relatable character despite keeping her in the realm of fiction.