This Is Us Creator Doesn't Want To Just Make You Cry With New Film Life Itself

If you are a fan of NBC's saccharine family member drama This Is Us, then Life Itself is likely already on your radar.


On the surface, the film, starring Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde, among several other well known faces, has a lot in typical with the network tearjerker. Both tell multigenerational stories about love and loss, weaving with each other numerous families and timelines in a dizzying display of pure, unfiltered sentimentality. Most importantly, although, both have the same man at the helm: director and writer Dan Fogelman. And he wants you to know that he's not actively attempting to prepare you cry all of the time.


"The show and the movie are certainly eliciting giant emotional responses from people, nevertheless that's what I've routinely been interested in. What else are we doing this for than to elicit emotions from people?" He told MTV News over the phone days soon following the film's debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. "[It's] not just crying, although also there is a lot of laughter throughout this film along with a lot of romance and big, romantic gestures. That's the sort of stuff that draws me to a movie."


For a taste of the film's particular sort of black humor — the story of those two families is a hell of a lot darker than that of the Pearsons — check out an exclusive clip from Life Itself below.


"If folks are getting emotional from something you've worked on, it's not a trick, as much as people would some days like to define it as that," Fogelman mentioned. "It's very hard to prepare people emotionally connect with characters on that level. It means you're doing other stuff right also, not just the sad stuff. Never get emotional in the event you don't connect with something."


Ultimately, Life Itself has a lot more to allocate than tears. (Though, if Jack's death made you weep on This Is Us, then you might wish to grab several tissues as the hot dad in this one doesn't fare much better. For what it's worth, the writer says he has nothing against dads.) It also boasts a soundtrack that's almost exclusively all Bob Dylan songs — the result of Dylan's 1997 album, Time Out of Mind, being Fogelman's muse while writing the screenplay. Certainly, for some that might only add to the film's emotional wallop.


"I would argue that it's not just people crying all of the time," Fogelman added. Although it's the narrative that's taken hold, and you also sort of just have to go with it." And he is. The screenwriter gets "a lot of personal tissue boxes" sent directly to his office.


"The movie is meant to be a reminder that you could explore this very heavy story where a family member endures a lot of loss and also a lot of tragedy, yet that very same film is also full of love and romance and beginnings," he mentioned. "We can't lose sight of that as a culture and fall prey to all the darkness and the scariness and the cynicism now


Life Itself hits theaters September 21, 2018.