Can You Know the People You Love? – A Conversation with ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ Creators Laura Dave and Josh Singer

Limited series The Last Thing He Told Me follows Hannah (played by Jennifer Garner), a woman who must forge a relationship with her 16-year-old stepdaughter Bailey (played by Angourie Rice) in order to find the truth about why her husband has mysteriously disappeared. Based on the acclaimed bestselling novel, the series is created and adapted by Laura Dave, alongside series co-creator Josh Singer. Garner also serves as executive producer alongside Hello Sunshine’s Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter.

The question of can you truly know the people you love is a driving force behind Laura Dave, author of the source material, and Josh Singer's new AppleTV+ series The Last Thing He Told Me. Trust is also big driving theme in the series of relying on yourself and others to do the right thing. The characters in this series are proactive, rather reactionary to their surroundings - which gives each episode a sense of urgency filleded with notable twists and turns one would hope for and expect in a thriller. 

Both Laura Dave, who is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and Josh Singer, whose notable credits being the likes of Spotlight, The Post, and Fringe, recently spoke with Script about the adaptation process of Laura's book, building out their writers' room, writing to theme, and so much more. 

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Adapting your own work into a TV series, what was that process like for you?

Laura Dave: I think I might have had a unique experience with getting into that, because I was living with my co-writer. And it was in sort of the heart of the pandemic, and so we were writing together at night after our child was asleep, because no childcare. We had a lot of these really wonderful 10pm to 5am sessions, which just brought me back to when I started writing in graduate school and staying up all night. And so, in that way, it was just really sort of special time.

And then we had this wonderful group of writers that came in, and we worked with them on the other episodes, and I learned and I think, to talk about graduate school for a second, very early on, I learned to kill my darlings and to not be precious about anything. And that television is really a totally different medium than a novel. And I think because I had so much trust getting to work with Josh on this, that it was an enjoyable process. That's what I mean, when I say it was sort of specific, I didn't have any anxiety around it.

I had a wonderful teacher in grad school - he had something adapted, and he said, when people would ask him, ‘Aren't you worried about someone ruining your book or hurting your book?’ He would say, ‘My books right there on the shelf.’ So, I always have that in the back of my mind. And now that the series is done, and I get to watch it now, I get to look at it, and it's better than I could have imagined. I love the second life these characters got to have.

Sadie: Josh, with your background working on stories that have a lot of twists and turns that are also very character driven, but in terms of working in the framework of television, what was the process like in knowing where and when to include specific twists in specific episodes?

Josh Singer: It's funny, because with Spotlight, for example, Tommy [McCarthy] and I had to do a ton of research and sort of figure out what the procedural moves were, which was incredibly challenging. Here, the book is so strong, and the procedural in the book is so strong, that it was actually not all that difficult. And in fact, one of the things that when I went in, I wanted to make sure that, I talked about this with the writers’ room, we wanted to be faithful and keep that alive, keep that movement alive. And also keep alive the wonderful, unique emotional wisdom that Laura has in her writing.

And so really, it was just about sitting with our writers and saying, ‘OK, where can we push? Where can we expand a little? What does that look like to give a little more stakes? Let's have some scenes with Hannah and her grandfather and see what that was.’ But essentially, to me, what was great was the hard work had already been done.

Laura: Says my husband. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] Thematically, I'm curious about what that North Star was for you – I sense it was around this idea of who do you trust, and that coming from Hannah, Bailey’s and even Owen’s perspective.

Laura: I love what you just said about who can you trust? Because sort of the central question that we kept asking ourselves in the writers’ room was, can you know the people you love? And the answer that we wanted to come to was yes. But we wanted the yes to be rooted not in the details of our lives would shift and move and alter, but in something more soulful. And once we move toward that, what are we saying? What are we saying then about family? What are we saying about found family? And in that way, then we get to tell two love stories: the love story between Owen and Hannah, and the love story between Hannah and Bailey. And whereas those love stories may not move in the direction of a typical happy ending, we like to think that it moved in the only direction it could toward something like salvation. And so that was sort of how we approached it.

Sadie: Without spoiling the ending, that question is answered in the best way possible and I think that’s thanks to the character development. What was the process behind that and keeping voices distinct also having these characters being proactive rather than reactionary?

Josh: I would say that for starters, again, go back to the book, and the book is very strong on that axis. Laura's character writing is really terrific. And so, there was definitely a true north compass in the book, that then we also had in the room. There's nothing better than a true north.

Beyond that though, we had wonderful actors, and we had actors who were dedicated. Jen [Garner], who I think has given one of her best performances, and that's saying something right - Jen, came to our backyard, and we would read the scripts: I think we read through all seven scripts, two or three times once, just with Jen; and then once with Jen and the other cast members; and then again, I think just with Jen, just so she could get used to the words so we can make tweaks and changes, so we could hear what was working in the scripts, and really sort of pushing on those scripts to sort of get them in the right place. The actors really take these words on a page and bring to life in a way that you can feel that sort of character development. And again, it's why, for me, it was always a seven-hour movie and looking at Hannah's arc and the way Jen plays that she's so restrained. So that by the time she gets to five, six and seven, she really can get more emotional, which is what the character does. So, it's really kudos to the people around us.

Sadie: When building out your writers’ room, what you were looking for in terms of writer’s voice and just what they were going to bring to the table and shaping out your world that you already built?

Josh: It’s interesting because Lauren Levy Neustadter at Hello Sunshine - and they were incredibly helpful throughout here, because I'd never run a show, we'd never run a show, and so while I've had a lot of experience in television and features this is something entirely different - and Hello Sunshine was wonderful with sort of saying, ‘OK, here's who we should hire for a line producer. And here's how you crew up and create this into a show.’ They said to us early on, Lauren and Ashley Strumwasser, who is incredible over there, said to us early on, ‘Find people who will bring voices that are not yours that will bring other things.’ And so even though we had a book that was very clear and great, and we had Laura in the room, we wanted to find people with different voices.

We wound up finding Isaac Gomez, who had gone to UT, which is incredibly helpful, because while Laura had done research down there, we didn't know the campus the way he knew it. And he said, ‘Oh, right next to the football stadium there's this Performing Arts Center.’ And so and we're like, ‘That's a great little story beat!’ So, stuff like that, which was really helpful. We had wonderful female writers, Erica Tavera, and Allegra Caldera, and Jamie Rosengard, who all had dealt with very interesting things in terms of loss and grief, and parenting. And then Harris Danow who is just a pro. And so, it was really about, how do we get lots of different voices that are going to complement what we already know to be true about this story?

Sadie: Larua, being an author, and now having had adapted your own work for a TV series, what took you by surprise as a writer in how you shape a story on the page for a screen versus what you're writing for a novel or maybe something that you really enjoyed about that process and that you'll be taking with you on to the next project?

Laura: Well, that's a great question. And I had the privilege of getting to watch Josh work for all those years. So, I had an inkling of the responsibilities for screen and how it was a little bit different in theory. But in practice, I think what I was so surprised by is that writing a novel is such sort of a private, introverted process - I go days without talking to anyone except for my family. And the nature of working in television is so collaborative, and so communal, and so many people that are bringing different skills to the table and looking at things from different perspectives. And I just loved getting to work with our production designer and our wonderful wardrobe department, and so many people that thought so specifically about different visions, like where Hannah Hall would buy her tiles if she's in San Francisco, she'd be getting them at Heath, and making sure that every tiny detail was so nuanced. And that was just so joyful.

What I'm trying to stop myself from doing now is because when I'm writing a novel, I never think about what it's going to be like on the screen. It's just sort of not a calculation for me. But two things are happening. I'm writing the sequel to The Last Thing He Told Me, and whereas I never imagined, but my characters have always been amorphous - Jennifer Garner is now Hannah Hall for me forever. And so, when I'm looking when I'm writing, I see Jen's face, not a terrible face to look at when you're writing. [laughs] But that's a very different experience.

And then the other thing that's happening is I just finished another novel, and in that novel, I can hear our wonderful line producer, Merri Howard, in my head being like, ‘Oh, did you have to have that scene after midnight on the edge of a cliff somewhere in Carpinteria?’ [laughs] So, I'm trying to not do that. But I hear that a little bit as I'm working on new things.

Sadie: Well, that's the beauty of movie magic - anything's possible right?

Laura: [laughs]

Josh: [laughs] That's right.

Sadie: And for you Josh, advice for those adapting a novel?

Josh: This is the first work of fiction that I've adapted. But I will say that there are some similarities to most of what I've done has been true life stories…and I tend to go deep in research. It's a little less of that here. And yet by the same token, I think there was nothing better than having an Isaac Gomez who had real knowledge so we can go deep on UT and what that would be like and learning more about the bats in Austin and specific elements like that, which I think adds so much to the reality of the moment, and thinking about, ‘OK, these are the things we want to shoot in Austin.’ Going up to Sausalito and seeing the houseboats - I always do like a writer’s scout [laughs] and it's so useful, oddly, because you get a real feel for this is how this is going to look. And this is what I want to write to on the page.

Beyond that, I will say in terms of then bring it to life, it's so important who you hire around you, because I feel like there's the myth of the auteur and auteurs are great, and I've worked with some real geniuses, but it's always a team effort, right? And so, in this case, we had four fabulous directors Olivia Newman, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Daisy von Scherler Mayer and Lila Neugebauer, who all were terrific, and you see their work throughout the show and how much they enhance it. We really get a sense of Sausalito, and that's thanks to Olivia. And Deniz has beautiful, mysterious shots of Austin, which really helps sell the weirdness of that journey. I wanted that fifth episode to be a freight train, and Daisy makes it a freight train. Lila comes from theater, she's wonderful with actors. And I think the performances in Episode Six are just bar none some of our best performances and I'd hold them up against performances, and almost anything else on television. So, it's really about the team. Make sure you have good people around you and make sure you know some good people.

The Last Thing He Told Me will be available on April 14, 2023 exclusively on AppleTV+.