When British author Jojo Moyes read about a rugby player who wanted his parents to help him end his life, after an accident left him a quadriplegic, it shocked her. “The story wouldn’t leave me,” she says. “I felt it was a story I had to write.”
Loosely inspired by this tragic real-life tale, her novel Me Before You sold more than five million copies and has been translated into 32 languages.
Now comes the film adaptation, a romantic drama that, for once, has the guts to keep the difficult subject matter of the source material intact. Put that down to the fact that Moyes adapted the book herself – a rarity in film. That’s not to say, however, that she was slavishly faithful to the plot of the book.
“What was so impressive was she let go of the book very, very quickly,” says the film’s director, Thea Sharrock. “There was never that sense of, ‘In the book this happened, so we have to do it this way.’”
Fans of the novel should not be alarmed, though. Moyes and Sharrock worked diligently to keep Me Before You faithful to the original novel. Set in Britain, it tells the story of happy-go-lucky Lou (played by Emilia Clarke, best known as "Mother of Dragons" Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones), who is hired as a carer for wealthy Will (Sam Claflin), who was paralysed in a road accident and is confined to a wheelchair.
Desperate to end his torment, he asks his parents to take him to Dignitas, the Swiss-based facility for assisted suicide.
Recalling the real-life rugby player that Moyes read about, this bleak shadow hanging over the story adds a very real layer to Me Before You.
“When I first got the role, I went online and started reading some forums that were enlightening and heartbreaking,” says Clarke. “And then you have to temper it. You have to realise the story we’re telling, and try to make that as truthful and sensitive as possible.”
In spite of Will’s determination to die, romantic feelings develop between him and Lou.
"It's very recognisable, a very easy story for anybody to understand," says Sharrock, whose credits in the theatre include productions of Equus, starring Daniel Radcliffe, and The Misanthrope, with Keira Knightley.
“Essentially it’s a love story, about watching two people who have nothing in common – who come from the same place but from the other side of the tracks.”
For Clarke, the chief attraction was playing a character she found instantly recognisable.
“I got sent the book first and I thought, ‘Someone has written me down. Someone has got me – Emilia – and put it in a book’,” she says. “And so much of the beautiful optimism of the story is what I think anyway. It’s wonderful to exercise it, especially in a movie.”
Yet it’s not just a case of Lou arriving to lift Will’s spirits. She also benefits.
“They save each other,” says Moyes.
Playing Will, Claflin was left with a tremendously difficult task as an actor, to deliver a performance while sitting in a chair, unable to move even his hands.
“I was using muscles that I’d never used before,” he says. “Of course, I can never fully understand what it is to live life like that – but at the same time it gave me a greater understanding of the pain and the uncomfortable nature of what someone like that might be going through.”
The physical demands were one thing but Claflin, who shed weight for the role and spent the entire shoot in his specially-designed wheelchair, admits it was emotionally draining too.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been pushed to those extremities before,” he says. “There was a scene towards the end where the two of us are laying on a bed. And I just remember there was a moment in between two takes … I just broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably.”
He wasn’t the only one overcome with emotion. Moyes also found herself in floods of tears on the set, despite already knowing these characters so intimately.
“My big fear was that I wouldn’t be moved,” she says.
Clarke, too, couldn’t hold back when she saw the finished film.
“I found myself getting tearful at the story, at what the movie was showing me just as a viewer,” she says. “It was crazy. It messed me up a bit.”
It all suggests that Me Before You is set to be one of the biggest film weepies of the year. But if it makes you cry, it's simply because it's a love story with a very profound issue at its heart: whether people who are suffering have the right to end their own lives.
“For some people, it’s an option that they wish to take,” says Claflin, “and I think, in my honest opinion, it should be there and available.”
While it’s clear the filmmakers don’t want the film to become an issue-driven story about the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, it’s a subject that cannot be ignored.
“Hopefully,” says Moyes, “we’ve put in enough opposing points of view from characters to show there is no right answer.”
Clarke agrees.
“The thing you take away from the movie is that it’s a choice,” she says.
• Me Before You is in cinemas now
artslife@thenational.ae