David Foster Wallace for the Masses: A Q&A with Donald Margulies

The End of the Tour is, on paper, a movie about two men in a car. On screen it plays like a duel: David Foster Wallace, at the peak of Infinite Jest mania, and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, circling each other through five days of the 1996 book tour. Playwright Donald Margulies — a Pulitzer winner for Dinner with Friends — adapted Lipsky's transcript-memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and he's candid about the tightrope involved.

Margulies says the source book solved the biopic problem before it started: no cradle-to-grave arc, no explanation of genius — just two intelligences negotiating envy, fame and junk food across Illinois. His job, he says, was shaping five days of talk into dramatic movement while resisting the urge to make Wallace quotable in ways he never was.

He is unsentimental about the controversy: Wallace's estate opposed the film, and Margulies understands the discomfort, but argues the movie is finally about Lipsky — about what it does to a writer to sit across from the thing he wants to be.

Jason Segel's performance as Wallace, first dismissed as stunt casting, has become the film's calling card since its Sundance premiere. Margulies' verdict on the debate about making the film at all is characteristically dry: 'Discomfort is not a reason to avoid a subject. It's usually the reason to write it.'