
Screenwriting you don’t necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer.

“It’s really crafting this whole piece from nothing. “Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word,” the native New Yorker explains. Tropper is not a newcomer to the world of film and television: he co-created the Cinemax show Banshee and is currently working on an adaption of David Menasche’s The Priority List for Warner Bros. But every change was made with the author’s blessing, for it was the author, Jonathan Tropper, who wrote the screenplay.

The film version, which opened on Friday, is a little softer and sanitized: Judd, played by Jason Bateman, is not quite as bitter his transgressions are not quite as harmful. They’re all a little bit lost, and they all make some morally questionable (or just amoral) decisions. He returns to his childhood home for his father’s funeral and is coaxed into spending seven days sitting shiva with his mother and three siblings: his older brother Paul who is married to his old high school girlfriend Alice his older sister Wendy who is married to a personality-free banker and his much younger, philandering brother Phillip. The narrator, Judd Altman, is cynical and angry: his father has just died and he recently found out that his wife and boss are sleeping together.

This is Where I Leave You, at least in its original novel form, is not afraid to be dark. ABOVE: (LEFT TO RIGHT) TINA FEY, COREY STOLL, JANE FONA, JASON BATEMAN, AND ADAM DRIVER AS THE ALTMAN FAMILY IN THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU.
