John Green on OCD, death and the importance of telling hopeful stories

When the trailer for the film adaptation of John Green’s New York Times bestseller, Turtles All The Way Down (TATWD) first dropped, the internet went into a frenzy. “We’re getting cheesy John Green adaptations again, nature is healing,” one X user remarked. Green’s novels have textured many young people’s teenage experiences, including mine. I remember moving from Ireland to the UK when I was 14 years old, a transition that shocked my system more than I was willing to admit. My sister and I found solace (and heartache) through reading The Fault In Our Stars (TFIOS) in our shared bedroom. 

When TFIOS was adapted into a film in 2014, my friends and I watched it together on the bus while on a school trip to Belgium. The bus ride was filled with laughter, admiration and tight hand-holding as we consoled each other through the grief of losing Augustus Waters. In that moment, as we passed through France, we all felt the same palpable devastation, a shared experience that brought us closer as we journeyed through Europe.

There are lots of big philosophical questions asked in TATWD. One of the most significant is when Aza tells her dream philosophy professor, played by Succession’s J. Smith Cameron, that she doesn’t feel real. It reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (2023), where actor Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) comes off stage to ask his director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), if he’s “doing it right”. The film is very meta, so he’s not just asking his director if he’s playing his character correctly but also if he’s doing life correctly. 

John Green: There’s an innocence to that but also a real beauty to it, too. We should all be asking ourselves that all the time, but in the dreary grind of daily adult life, sometimes you forget how interesting, beautiful, and difficult the world is.

You mentioned in a statement in 2017 that this book was your ‘first attempt to write directly’ about the kind of mental illness that has affected your life since childhood. What was it like to write personally about OCD and see it represented on the big screen? 

John Green: When I was writing the book, I really couldn’t write about anything else. I felt this intense urge to find some form or expression for the intrusive thoughts that have been such a big part of my life. When we were filming it as a movie, it was five years later, and I was in a different place. My life felt quite different, but I still live with OCD. Many days were hard for me when we were making the movie. There were days when I felt like I wanted to intervene, and I would ask Isabella if she was okay. I felt pretty worried about her because she gave such a beautiful performance that it felt so real to me, which made it hard to watch. It was also really powerful and lovely to have so many people supporting the work. When you’re writing a book, it can be pretty isolating and lonely, and then making a movie is the exact opposite of that. There are hundreds of people coming together every day working on it. 

“The struggle for me is how you tell a true story that’s also a hopeful story. I think stories that reflect nihilism or total despair just aren’t true. They tell a very seductive story, but they don’t tell the whole truth” – John Green 

There’s this really interesting point of struggle between Aza and her therapist in the film, where her therapist (Poorna Jagannathan) is telling her to take her medication. In response, she says: “I just think it’s messed up that you have to take a pill to become your real self”. This part of the film resonated with me as someone who took medication for their mental health as a teenager. I remember having had this exact thought and being so angry about it. 

John Green: When you’re young, you’re still coming into your true self. I wanted to write about the anxiety people feel around taking medication because I think it’s very real, and I think there are a lot of causes for it. One of those reasons is stigma. Mental health conditions are still hugely stigmatised, and with any highly stigmatised illness, it can be challenging to convince yourself that you need to take your medication. I wanted to be honest about the fact that many young people struggle with this problem because I wanted the story to be as truthful as possible so that when Asa arrives at this horrible crisis in the book and film, it feels real and honest. But it also doesn’t feel hopeless. The struggle for me is how do you tell a true story, that’s also a hopeful story. But it’s important to tell a hopeful story because I think stories that reflect nihilism or total despair just aren’t true. They tell a very seductive story, but they don’t tell the whole truth. I wanted to try to tell the most authentic story I could about what it’s like to live with OCD and the fear of taking medication is part of it. 

There’s a pertinent part of the film where Daisy confronts Aza on her selfishness and how, at times, Aza’s OCD can make her so self-absorbed that she neglects their friendship. I think it’s challenging to talk about the way caregivers or those who have relationships with disabled people struggle because it can make disabled people feel like burdens when they’re not. We live in a society that does not provide adequate support for disabled people, which means that both the disabled person and their caregivers suffer. What was it like translating this particularly tricky subject matter from the book to the film?  

John Green: We spent a lot of time on that scene precisely because of what you’re saying. It’s really delicate. I had a therapist tell me once that OCD is a family disease. It’s a disease that doesn’t just affect you; it affects your friends, family and everyone you love. That doesn’t mean they don’t love you; it doesn’t mean you’re a burden. It just means that you’re not the only person affected by this. Finding that balance of understanding that the people who love you, love you and that you deserve love. Everybody deserves to love and be loved deeply, as Daisy says at the end of the movie. 

But at the same time, as you say, it can be tough for caregivers because there isn’t enough support for them, and it can be challenging. I wanted to find a way to write about that but in a way that’s honest to teenagers. It’s one thing for you and I to have that conversation, and we can maybe have it at a level of remove, but they can’t because they’re both in the middle of it. They’re both in the middle of finding themselves. So I wanted there to be a real intensity to it, and I wanted to reflect that Aza hasn’t paid the kind of attention to Daisy that she would have liked to. That’s not Aza’s fault entirely. But it’s still real.

We’re approaching the 10th anniversary of The Fault In Our Stars (TFIOS) movie in June. How does it feel to know that a decade has passed since the release of a film that impacted the lives of so many young people? 

John Green: It feels like it’s been six months and 30 years simultaneously. You know, I’m very grateful for that whole experience. It changed my life in profound ways. It gave me great friendships. I’m really proud of the movie. But it’s not an experience I would want to repeat if I’m being honest with you. I’m not well suited to real celebrity. At the time, it felt pretty overwhelming. I remember asking my agent, ‘When does this stop?’. And her saying, ‘I don’t really know’. I felt like I was on a magical, wonderful train, but I didn’t know where it was going, and I didn’t know how long I was going to be on it. So it was a lovely experience but also overwhelming at times. I’m grateful to have my quiet family life in Indianapolis now. 

“I had a therapist tell me once that OCD is a family disease. It’s a disease that doesn’t just affect you; it affects your friends, family and everyone you love. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t love you…It just means that you’re not the only person affected”  – John Green 

TFIOS deals with death and dying, and so does TATWD, Looking For Alaska, and a number of your other works. Sometimes, it can feel a bit surprising to be discussing death while focusing on young people – because when you think about youth, you’re thinking about living. But your work normalises death and dying in a way that I find comforting now that I’m older. Is this your aim when you incorporate these topics in your writing? 

John Green: I feel compelled to write about grief, loss and death because I think it’s so important. I think it’s such an important part of being a person, and they’re not only an important part of being an old person or an adult. Death is all around us, and children are exposed to it in all kinds of different ways, from the loss of pets to the loss of grandparents to the tragic loss of their peers. It may be that I write about it partly because it’s something that happened to me when I was a kid. I lost a good friend when I was in high school, and I worked as a chaplain at a children’s hospital. So I was with a lot of families as their kids died, and I was with a lot of kids as they died. It’s a big part of my life, and maybe that’s why I write about it so much. 

But I also think it’s important to talk about it. There’s an urge, I think, to avoid it because it’s sad and so painful. But that only makes the people who are living with loss or those who are dying or sick seem more distant from other people, and that’s not the case. We’re all equally human and only here for a little while. So, I think it’s crucial to include loss and grief in our conversations about what it means to be a person because those feelings and experiences don’t in any way make life less valuable. 

What do you hope viewers who may not be familiar with the novel will take away from the film adaptation of Turtles All The Way Down?

I hope they take what you took away from it: a feeling of warmth. But most of all, I hope that people feel less alone. And I hope that people with mental illness and those who support them feel less alone and more understood.

Turtles All the Way Down is available on Sky Cinema from 26 May