DON McKELLAR on The Sympathizer with Hoa Xuande, Robert Downey Jr., Park Chan-wook

Books & Writers · The Creative Process: Novelists, Screenwriters, Playwrights, Poets, Non-fiction Writers & Journalists Talk Writing, Life & Creativity

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding?

Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner.

He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook."I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had."

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Photos courtesy of HBO
Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar
Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO
Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO