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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Hi, I'm Sean Levy, the director and executive producer
00:08 of "All the Light We Cannot See",
00:10 a new limited series based on this man's
00:13 Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller,
00:15 "All the Light We Cannot See".
00:17 - And hi, I'm Anthony Doerr.
00:18 I wrote the novel "All the Light We Cannot See"
00:20 that Sean made this amazing series out of for Netflix.
00:23 - This material is sort of hard to summarize
00:25 because it's quite epic and the sprawl of it
00:28 is part of what appealed to me
00:30 and I think to millions of readers.
00:32 Set in World War II, the story follows the path
00:36 of two young people, a blind French girl named Marie Laure,
00:41 who with her father Daniel have to leave Paris
00:45 when the Nazis invade France and they go to live
00:48 with family in Saint Malo, a coastal town in Brittany
00:52 on the edge of France and it intercuts between Marie
00:56 and the young German boy named Werner,
00:58 an orphan who is taken from an orphanage as a young kid
01:03 and recognized to have a genius with radios
01:05 and of course, he who controls the airwaves
01:08 controls a lot of power and so while the Nazis
01:12 want to indoctrinate him and use his talents,
01:14 he resists and tries somehow and succeeds
01:18 to keep his soul pure and it's about
01:21 these intersecting narratives.
01:23 - Oh gosh, I think there's so many relevant things
01:25 about this project that I hope as readers watch,
01:28 I'm sorry, as viewers watch what readers felt
01:31 in the novel about this new technology
01:34 coming into the world, radio, and how it was used
01:36 both as a tool of control and disinformation
01:39 and as a tool of resistance and creativity.
01:42 I think you can see both characters exploring that
01:45 and I hope viewers will feel that's what we're dealing
01:47 with right now, all these new technologies
01:49 really disrupting power structures in the world
01:52 and how do we address them.
01:53 I think it's also about seeing into the soul
01:56 of your enemy and understanding that there's humans
01:59 on both sides of conflict, that it's too simplistic
02:02 to say, oh, this side's wrong, this side is right,
02:05 that in a huge conflict like the Second World War,
02:07 there are so many little stories about humans,
02:11 these kids that just want to be curious,
02:13 they just want to learn, that are swept up
02:15 in this enormous thing beyond their control.
02:17 - I think it's also, I mean, certainly we see now
02:20 with social media the fact that technologies
02:23 that connect people can also divide people.
02:26 And this book, this story is very much about that idea
02:29 and I think we've seen that very evident
02:32 in our current era.
02:34 We're also, we were making this in Hungary in 2022
02:39 when once again, tragically history repeated itself
02:43 and a neighboring country invaded Ukraine
02:47 and we dealt with millions of people fleeing
02:50 for their lives and reacting to a circumstance
02:54 not of their choosing.
02:55 And so the dark side of human nature,
02:58 it never leaves us and we need to look at it
03:01 and I think we need to let the light in
03:04 if you'll allow the analogy, which is fitting
03:07 for this title, but just looking at the persistence
03:10 of hope and hopefully the persistence of humanity
03:14 in the face of inhumanity.
03:17 Adaptations are hard, right?
03:18 We can kind of start with that reality.
03:21 It helps when you have a partner as we did with Netflix
03:25 where there was no mandate on number of episodes,
03:28 running time, literally we were able,
03:30 thanks to the flexibility at Netflix,
03:33 we were able to say to Stephen Knight, our screenwriter,
03:36 it can be three episodes, it can be eight.
03:39 Make it as long as this story wants it to be.
03:42 And ultimately it ended up being four episodes
03:44 and I think that our goal and our kind of metric
03:48 in what to keep and what to lose was do right by this novel
03:52 because there's a lot of book fans, I think you're one.
03:55 I'm one.
03:56 I came to this as a fan.
03:58 So I was gonna be goddamn sure to honor this source material
04:03 and that meant character rich, epic tapestry,
04:08 authentic to the times and as rich with ideas and feelings
04:13 as Anthony's book was.
04:15 There were things like the character Friedrich
04:18 that didn't make, who were in early drafts of the script
04:20 and ultimately I should add, the other thing we wanted,
04:23 the other thing that was always on our mind
04:24 was Anthony's book with its short chapters
04:28 and cross-cutting of these two narratives, it's kinetic.
04:33 And I didn't want one of these shows,
04:36 and we've all seen them where it's longer
04:38 than it needs to be, less relentless and captivating
04:42 than we want it to be.
04:44 I wanted it to be dense storytelling
04:46 and anything that didn't serve that engine was suspect
04:50 and some of it survived but most of it didn't.
04:53 - Sean and his set designer Simon
04:56 did such an extraordinary job with the details
04:58 of the period and that was so moving to me
05:01 'cause so much of the research of writing a novel
05:03 is like what does the kitchen look like?
05:04 What's in her dresser?
05:06 Does a blind girl have any support in France in 1938
05:09 when she's growing up?
05:10 And every set, when you walk into them
05:13 and when you see them on the screen,
05:14 you're just transported into that world.
05:17 Like Madame Monnique's kitchen is just so alive.
05:19 You can see just the decades of black char
05:23 on all of her pots and that stuff is so moving to me
05:27 'cause it takes so much effort,
05:28 such a keen eye for detail that Sean
05:31 and his whole team brought to the sets.
05:32 - And you do that, by the way, for two reasons.
05:34 You do it for the viewer
05:35 because they can feel that authenticity
05:37 but you're also doing it for your actors
05:39 because when your actors are sitting in these rooms
05:42 that feel of that time, it transports them to that time.
05:46 And so it just helps the reality
05:47 of what all of us are working towards.
05:49 Yeah, early on in pre-production,
05:51 I had to make a choice about how to approach casting
05:55 and specifically the casting of Marie,
05:57 who's a character who is blind.
05:59 And I just had this very strong feeling
06:02 that it should be played by someone
06:05 who has lived that authentic experience.
06:07 And so we sent out a global open casting call.
06:11 I don't think I've ever done it quite that wide
06:14 and quite that loudly
06:16 because you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
06:18 It's not like there are agencies
06:20 that represent hundreds of low vision and blind actresses.
06:24 - Multiple countries.
06:25 - Yes, we looked in multiple countries
06:27 and we got hundreds upon hundreds of submissions,
06:30 one of which was from this PhD student,
06:34 this Fulbright scholar who laid down a reading.
06:39 And it's not just her acting debut.
06:40 This was her audition debut.
06:42 Aria has never even auditioned.
06:46 And somehow there was a presence to her
06:49 and an intelligence to her
06:52 that came through in the midst
06:53 of a numbing number of auditions.
06:56 And I brought her in again.
06:58 And then I talked to her over Zoom again and again.
07:00 And I think that Aria just, she loved the book.
07:04 This book was, as I'm sure you know, Anthony,
07:06 very meaningful to the blind community when it came out.
07:08 And so Aria had been a fan of the book.
07:10 And the day that I told Aria she got the lead in this
07:13 was a day I'll never forget.
07:16 The portrayal of blindness, and please jump in, Tony,
07:18 if I fail to touch on something important,
07:21 the book does it really, really well.
07:24 And the book was based on your own experience and research.
07:28 But when you cast a blind young woman to play the lead,
07:32 you're getting the benefit of her lived experience.
07:35 So for instance, the book might describe
07:38 Marie goes up to the couch
07:40 and feels the edge before sitting down.
07:43 Well, Aria would rehearse that scene and say,
07:46 "Well, how long have I been in this room?
07:48 "Because if I live in this house
07:50 "and I've sat on that couch 500 times,
07:53 "and if I don't live with anyone who could move objects,
07:58 "I don't need to feel where the couch is
08:00 "because I've mapped the space through my experience."
08:03 That's just one of hundreds of things
08:07 that I learned from Aria and gave the show this authenticity
08:12 that frankly, some people might miss the tropes
08:15 of how blindness have been portrayed
08:17 in films and television, because I can't name a time
08:20 where a blind girl and a blind young woman
08:23 are playing a blind character at two different ages
08:26 and representing their own experience in this way.
08:28 And so that's just one example where the book got it right,
08:32 but now we're collaborating,
08:33 which is what you hope happens with your cast,
08:35 where it's a partnership.
08:36 And Aria is teaching me about the portrayal
08:41 of that experience that I can only guess at,
08:43 we can only guess at,
08:45 empathetic however we might want to be,
08:47 but we don't live it.
08:48 So to work with someone who has was invaluable.
08:51 - Yeah, we shouldn't forget Nell either,
08:53 who was seven years old and plays the younger Marie.
08:57 She's probably on screen maybe 20% of the time as Marie.
09:00 - But memorably.
09:01 - And she is phenomenal.
09:02 Oh my gosh, completely blind and so moving.
09:06 Every time she's on screen working with Mark,
09:08 she was just like, they had this amazing,
09:09 really touching fatherly bond together.
09:13 He was so kind after, as soon as Sean would stop rolling,
09:16 he's always helping her down off whatever she's standing on,
09:18 helping her back to her family.
09:19 It was so sweet.
09:21 And to your other question about metaphorically,
09:22 of course, I'm playing with that so much in the novel.
09:25 And I think Sean executes that beautifully.
09:27 Werner in many ways is the less capable character.
09:30 You have to walk with Marie, with Aria,
09:33 you have to walk this really careful line
09:35 because she's extremely capable.
09:38 So you want to honor her disability almost as an ability.
09:41 She's really quite capable.
09:43 And the moral blindness that Werner's a big part of,
09:46 I think comes through really nicely in the film.
09:48 In many ways, he's the blind character until the end.
09:51 - Switching gears now to "Deadpool 3", what is happening?
09:56 - Well, like the rest of our industry,
09:58 or at least large swaths of it, we are paused.
10:02 We were halfway through filming "Deadpool",
10:06 co-starring Wolverine.
10:08 It was a joy every day.
10:10 And that chemistry is, I have to say, spoiler alert,
10:13 it is as relentlessly awesome as we had all hoped it would be.
10:18 But we are halfway through filming, we shut down our crew,
10:23 and the rest of us are awaiting a fair and equitable deal
10:27 that ends these strikes and puts our industry,
10:29 and certainly inclusive of our movie, back at work.
10:32 I would say this, when making "Deadpool",
10:34 I, again, I spoke about this earlier,
10:36 I only know how to make something that I love.
10:39 And so long before I loved Ryan Reynolds, I loved "Deadpool".
10:44 I love "Deadpool".
10:45 "Deadpool 1" is, to me, like a perfect movie.
10:49 And so I was not gonna mess with the DNA of that franchise.
10:53 Our movie is raw, audacious, very much R-rated.
10:58 We went to great lengths to not shoot it on sound stages
11:03 with digital environments.
11:04 The internet has proven that
11:06 by revealing pictures of our shoot.
11:08 Thank you, internet.
11:09 But no, we wanted something that felt grounded, real.
11:14 But you put Hugh Jackman in his most iconic character,
11:18 alongside Ryan Reynolds in his most iconic character.
11:22 I would say it's more a descendant of "Midnight Run"
11:27 and "48 Hours" and "Plane, Trains, Automobiles"
11:30 than it is a descendant of "Airplane".
11:33 (upbeat music)
11:36 [MUSIC]