hi I'm Elise Chaffin and I'm here today with John gun the director and co-writer of the film The unbreakable boy coming to theaters on February 21st thank you so much for speaking with me today wow thanks for having me it's nice to meet you Lise nice to meet you as well uh can you talk a little bit about what Drew you to the story and how you connected with uh Scott lorett yeah this story was brought to me by one of our producers Peter fanelli who's also an actor in the film um I was doing
a slate of films for Lion's gate at the time uh when Co hit and shut us down on a number of projects and I was looking for something to write when I was locked up in quarantine with my family and I was experiencing a certain amount of gratitude at the time just for all the things I had in life as we all had this self-reflective moment of being locked up and this book uh you know came across my desk and I read it and was so Charmed by it by the voice and point of view
of Austin this kid who had brittle bone disease and autism and such an exuberance for life um and as a parent I really related to the struggles of being a parent and feeling often like you're failing and how your own struggles in Brokenness can maybe impact your children and it was a it was a wonderful balance for me at the time of a story that had that had joy and suffering and comedy and levity and heartbreak and it just was I was delighted by it and so I was looking for something to write that we
could make when the world was sort of shut down and so this was a small enough story I wrote it very quickly it immediately got green lit Zack Levi read it on a Friday accept it on a Saturday and we just all fell in love with Austin and with this family yeah um obviously taking like a full Memoir and then kind of turning it into a film could be difficult can you did you work with uh Scott on the adaptation and ke just talk about the process of like making decisions about what makes it into
the film and what doesn't yeah I mean that's always the challenge and I've written a lot of adaptations and a lot of true stories um yeah and in this particular case I wrote it I had met Scott and spoken to him and his family um when I was starting the adaptation but I actually you know the book had so much great material in it that I wrote it pretty quickly on my own and then I just reached out to them and connected with them whenever I needed like to hear their voice or to ask questions
um and then once it was done they got a chance to read and they could give me comments and and and Feed me more material you know it's so great to have that source of inspiration of the real family uh so they've been very involved in in the process they were on set visiting us when we were shooting it you know they got to watch every edit of the movie as I went they're just huge fans of it so it was a wonderful collaboration but the book really gave me most of what I needed in
the adaptation right on so obviously you worked with Scott it sounds like the whole family was involved so you have the like perspective of the parent of an autistic child uh were you able to work with autistic people as well in the creation of this film to give their perspective definitely I mean I actually have a number of people in my life with autism and a number of friends who have children with autism um the real Austin himself you know Scott's actual son right right and and then we also uh had a number of autism
Consultants both in the process of writing and also in on production on set every day and so you know it's interesting autism so many people are impacted or have somebody in their life who's got autism and you know there's a saying that like if you know one person with autism you know one person with autism like there these are all just different people with their own personalities and their own experiences and their own worldviews some people with Autism are non-verbal and some are very verbal Austin happens to be very verbal I love that about him
because I'm very verbal and he has such a great voice and I love the way he talks and I love the way he thinks um and so it was a joy and I thought early on like I want that voice in the story so what if he narrated The Story of his parents you know and so yeah I've been very hopeful that that you know that the autism community and the people who are impacted by autism and have autism would love this story because it's such a love letter um and and I think in many
ways autism hasn't been represented very well in Media or very often and certainly not with a point of view and a narration from a person with autism so I'm hoping that it's uh that it's received the way that we want it to be but I will say that we took great pains to make sure that we brought in as much uh perspective as we could from uh authentically from people with Autism yeah absolutely you talked about this a little bit um I think one of the interesting things is when you're talking about autism there can
be a lot of push to fix and we have this whole thing of a a child with uh osteogenesis imperfecta so you have this breaking kind of thing that does need to be repaired but then you also have autism that is a thing that is just part of who a person is and isn't necessarily a fixed thing and so can you talk about just kind of like balancing those two uh like perspectives yeah that's such a great question because it's so much what we explore in the story and it's also important to keep in mind
the context like this was a movie that was that took place in this story from the '90s into the early 2000s and a lot has changed in the last 30 years about people's understanding of autism and perspective about it and so you know you're right these parents early on were like oh is there something wrong with my child this is something that I need to fix and the lesson learned I think in so many ways by Scott is that he was Scott himself as a parent was broken in a lot of ways like you know
um his he struggled with alcoholism and depression in many anyways um and his ambition to sort of have a better career often left him unsatisfied with the life that he had and then he had this boy that he was pouring his attention into thinking what's wrong with him do I need to fix him and eventually learned there's nothing that needs to be fixed about my son but the gift is that there's things about me that need to be fixed and I gained so much healing from the point of view and the perspective that my kid
has on the world this particular child with autism happens to be a kid with an exuberance for life and happens to be a kid with a with a with a perspective that every day can be the best day of your life and so that helped to heal Scott in so many ways um and I think that's also a trap about stories about autism autistic people aren't people that are magical talismans that are meant to fix you know non neurotypical people it's it's just that in this particular case Austin did so much for his parents and
helped them to see the world in a way that was really beautiful and I loved that about his the essence of who Austin is yeah um can you just as we're kind of like wrapping up here what would you what's the primary message that you would want audiences to kind of take away from this film for me this is a story about gratitude and in this particular case you know a family well struggling first of all because they got pregnant when they weren't prepared right they didn't know how to be parents and Scott was dealing
with you know as I said struggling with addiction in a lot of ways but and and and trying to figure out how to be good parents and in the process of doing all of these things they have a child that that that helped them to see that every day can be the best day of their life and so I hope people watch this film because it's filled with joy it's filled with laughter it's filled with charm and even in the difficulties and the breaks and the Heartbreak there's so much gratitude at the heart of this
film and so that's what I hope people take from me absolutely well thank you so much for your time I really appreciate you taking a minute to talk with me today thank you Elise it's been a pleasure I appreciate it yeah absolutely have a great day
