Once you’ve seen the new film “Don’t Make Me Go,” it won’t come as a surprise that its writer, Vera Herbert, spent years penning episodes for and producing the recently concluded hit NBC drama “This Is Us.”
Debuting this week on Prime Video, the movie about the complex relationship between a father and daughter who go on a road trip shares the ability the series had to tap into your emotions without falling into the realm of the overly sappy.
“Interestingly,” Herbert says during a recent phone interview, “the script much predates the show. I wrote it and initially sold it 10 years ago.
“This movie just took a long time to get made and sort of went through a lot of different directors, different casts — trying to get all the people lined up.”
Herbert, too, has had a winding journey to this point.
She’d already lived in Texas, New York state and even South Africa before landing in Youngstown, Ohio, for her final two years of high school. Her parents, Robert and Barbara Nykiel-Herbert were college professors; her late father eventually went into university administration and became the provost at Youngstown State University, where her mother joined the English department.
In “Don’t Make Me Go,” John Cho’s Max is given a terminal diagnosis and struggles with the decision of whether to undergo a procedure that likely would lead to his immediate death or to spend what is estimated to be about a year of remaining life caring for daughter Wally (Mia Isaac) and trying to set up a future without him.
Although the film is far from what you’d consider autobiographical, Herbert’s father died, unexpectedly, about a month before she graduated from Ursuline High School in Youngstown.
“That was definitely the impetus for writing the script, like four or five years later — just sort of still kind of figuring out as a young adult, how was I going to live my life without my dad? And we had been really close, especially in high school, especially those Youngstown years.
At the time, her mother, she says, was involved in a university exchange that saw her work at a university in Taiwan.
“She was gone for months at a time teaching, and so there was a lot of just me and Dad one-on-one time that involved trips to visited colleges and that kind of stuff,” she says.
Herbert went to college at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and spent her senior year completing her coursework remotely from Los Angeles, where she’d scored a position with the MTV series “Awkward.”
She then spent time trying to develop shows. And although none went forward, a studio she’d worked with, which was then 20th Century Fox Television, thought she’d be a fit for a show it was greenlighting, “This Is Us.”
“They were like, ‘We think you’d be really great as a writer on the show,’ so they sent me to Dan Fogelman, who created it,” she says. “He read my sample, and I met with him and it was a really great meeting.
“It was really a sensibility match, that I already was writing the kind of stuff that was the same tone as the show.”
Herbert — whose episode “The Trip” won the 2017 Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Writing for Episodic Drama, while another she wrote, “Still Here,” was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2018, according to the production notes for “Don’t Make Me Go” — says working under Fogelman was beneficial.
“(His) being able to (turn) dramady and emotional, heartfelt stuff into a really commercially successful show that everybody watched was really inspiring,” she says.
In “Don’t Make Me Go,” Max has been feuding with his increasingly rebellious teen daughter when he gets what amounts to a death sentence, news he can’t bring himself to deliver to her.
He decides to attend a college reunion many states away, insisting Wally come with him. As a sweetener, he promises to let Wally drive, but, unbeknownst to her, he also plans to visit her mother, who left them when Wally was very young.
The film is directed by Hannah Marks, who helmed the indie comedy “Mark, Mary & Some Other People” and co-directed another indie, “After Everything.”
“I was so excited when she came on board because she’s like me — she’s a young woman,” Herbert says. “And so it was sort of like, ‘Here’s someone who understands the story and specifically understands the Wally part of it because she had been a teenage girl.”
Herbert and Marks faced the challenge of making sure Wally remained likable even while regularly giving Max a hard time for his well-intentioned, if often-restrictive dadding. They had a not-so-secret-weapon in that endeavor.
“Mia, the actress, is so inherently charming and likable,” Herbert says, “and when we were able to cast her, it was like, ‘Oh, this is what’s gonna make this movie work.’
“I think when it was filming, she was really 16 or so, and so it was, like an authentic teenager who was warm and vulnerable. Because it’s her first movie, she does have this innocence to her that is just perfect,” she continues. “And she and John developed a relationship … that was sort of father-daughter. Like, he really wanted to show her the ropes and help her have this first film experience that was really great.”
Cho, a prolific actor and veteran of the “Harold & Kumar” and “Star Trek” franchises, imbues Max with a gentle quality and what Herbert calls “earnest humanity.”
“(Max) is a real guy who’s going through this real situation with his daughter, and he’s inherently likable and he’s charming,” he says. “(Cho) has this great comedic timing, but he also was able to underplay moments.”
“Don’t Let Me Go” begins with — and eventually returns to — a moment that Herbert did pull from her time with her dad.
“My father took us to a nude beach when I was 16, not knowing what type of beach we were going to,” he says. “That felt like it would be really funny to see on screen.”
That said, she didn’t blow up on her father as Wally does.
“We sort of had an opposite, very subdued reaction of, like, both kind of trying to pretend that’s not what we were seeing, and we sat on a log or a piece of driftwood for a couple of minutes and just sort of looked straight at the waves and the clouds,” Herbert says. “And then a naked man ran up and tried to sell us weed, and my dad was like, ‘Oh, no, no, we’re OK.’ And then he said, ‘We should go.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, we should probably go.’”
Without saying too much about how “Don’t Make Me Go” concludes, know that Wally warns in early narration that we won’t like how the story ends.
“I’ve always wanted the movie to end with a sense of hope, and I think tragedy is something that comes for all of us at one time or another in our lives,” she says. “For me, the message of the film was always that when something bad happens, you have to find a way to carry on — (with) the love from the people in your life, whether they’re still with you or not.”
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