Soon after All the Light We Cannot See was released in 2014 – and before it would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize – the screen rights were quickly snapped up by a large motion picture studio with an intention to turn the story into a feature film.
The screenplay was about 100 pages, which would have resulted in a movie about 100 minutes long. But given that All the Light We Cannot See is more than 500 pages, that would have left a lot of the story out of the screen adaptation. Suffice to say, that project never got off the ground.
But that’s when producer/director Shawn Levy quickly got Netflix to grab the screen rights, in an effort to turn it into a four-part limited series.
“I was thrilled, particularly with Netflix's global reach,” said Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See. “The book was super popular in all kinds of different countries. And so I think it will be really exciting that it's going to come out on the same day in all these different places around the world.”
There’s great anticipation for the limited series’ world premiere in early November. And given the audience reaction to a special advance screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, the excitement for its debut is building.
Meeting in Toronto, Doerr visited with Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about the origins of the story, its filming (including how Ukrainian refugees portrayed 20th century Parisian refugees), and how, in spite of history’s countless challenges, our survival still depends on kindness and looking after one another.
Read the full transcript below:
GEORGE PRENTICE: It's Morning Edition. Hi, I'm George Prentice. And I'm here with Tony Doerr.
ANTHONY DOERR: Hi, George.
PRENTICE: A couple thousand miles and a passport away from Idaho. But it is more than physical distance. Where are you emotionally…as we're getting ready to see All the Light We Cannot See… on a screen, no less>
DOERR: Oh, I'm excited. You know, it's so fun to see you and…this is your comfort zone. I associate you so much with the Toronto Film Festival. And it's really fun to be here with Shawn Levy, the director and producer of the show, because he's so excited and he's from Canada.
PRENTICE: But the dynamic of a world class film festival…right? People queuing up…a big screen, you're going to get the full treatment
DOERR: As I'm sure your listeners know, it's a really strange dynamic this year because there are no movie stars. People who are in the Guild can't do promotion to promote You know, I am a novelist. I can work very inexpensively and for free, but it does make me feel for the writers and actors and for the studios. They're all just trying to figure out what the future of this industry is.
PRENTICE: So, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask a question or two about that. So, these are your brethren, right?
DOERR: Yeah, of course. You know, I'm not in the screenwriter, I'm a screenwriter. So I just think more about how people are paying for health insurance and how are people figuring out their next projects? You know, Shawn, the director of All the Light We Cannot See. He was in the middle of filming Deadpool 3. It was a 70- day shoot and he was on day 35. And he had 500 different people working on this movie. And he had to send them all home. So, you know, it makes me think of the caterers and the makeup people and people for whom taking three months, four months off without getting a paycheck is a huge deal.
PRENTICE: See, if I get this right: it's 2004. You're on a train. Someone next seat over is having a rather animated conversation on his or her smartphone. And then loses connection or loses the signal. But the “light that we cannot see”… I can relate to that in a very big way. This conversation is coming to people through the “light we cannot see.”
DOERR: You got it right. The enormous percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum is stuff we can't see. Visible light is just 1/10,000,000,000,000 of all the light that's out there. So not just radio waves, but microwaves and gamma rays and, you know, there's so much light bombarding the earth and flying through our bodies right now that's invisible to us. And before I had really any section of the story at all, I had that title. The title is usually come quite late to me,
PRENTICE: But do you keep a notebook or a journal?
DOERR: Yeah, I wrote down “all the light we cannot see.” And I just had this idea of a girl reading a story to a boy over the radio. And that's all I had. I conceived of her as blind and him as trapped in darkness and him kind of somehow needing this story, using invisible light, being carried by invisible light through walls and reaching him. And I always conceived of him as maybe blind in other ways. And so, you know, as folks may or may not know, the novel and the show play with blindness, both in metaphorical and literal ways.
PRENTICE: I want to make sure I have this right, because you just made reference to that: the grand versus the specific right. See if I have these words of yours correct: “The irony of fiction is that the path to the universal is in the individual detail.”
DOERR: Oh, that's great. Yeah, you got it. That's it. I mean, that's what I tell students. Yeah. I mean, you have students who come to you and they're like, I want to write about love or I want to write about longing or something. But ironically, to work up in those huge emotions, the way to tunnel into a reader's or a viewer's heart is always through the granular. And so, you know, it's the way to write about longing is the shattered glass on the pavement in the parking lot of the Albertsons on 16th Street. It's not you know, she was in love. When you want to render a character who's feeling such big emotions, often it's how they hold their hands or what they're doing in their kitchen at the moment. How? Did they get their mail? How does a person go walk down the driveway in Boise, Idaho, during an inversion and get her mail while she's in love? That's how you have to think as a storyteller.
PRENTICE: And that's how you get to love, right?
DOERR: Of course. Right. The path always to “the way to melt the stars.” Flaubert said, “is to fumble around with these clumsy thing” We long to make music to melt the stars, but in the end we just bang around on pots and pans to make music, to make bears dance”. That's what he said.
PRENTICE: You write in the third person mostly when you're writing quotes… or dialogue…if you will.
DOERR: Well, of course, dialogue, you know, is always you can be free with dialogue. But yeah, in terms of narration, I'm often in the first person. I do have several short stories in the first person, but third person allows you to have a narratorial voice that can have access to information that your characters don't always have. And I love that that power. So, I can zoom up all the way up into the sky and say the weather was something. And then I can zoom all the way through the skull of a character and enter her thoughts and mimic the pattern of her thoughts and the first person. You're always locked inside that single voice. So, third person allows you sometimes to do more fluctuation in terms of distance, kind of what you're talking about. You can move up into the clouds and down into the granular a little bit more easily. You can really disorient a reader if you're not careful with it, but I like that.
PRENTICE: From a listener perspective, What happens when rights [for your book] are secured?
DOERR: So the novel, All The Light We Cannot See came out in 2014, and on the day the book came out, Fox bought the rights as a film. They bought the film rights. So this is now nine years ago. That's crazy to think about. And the original conception was that it would be a feature film like 100 Minutes and a couple scripts were tried. And the novel, for those folks who don't know, I think it's 530 pages, so it's about 125,000 words. It's a pretty long book. There's a lot of white space in it, but I always kind of felt like they're not quite achieving the scope of the novel. And so, when those rights expired, Shawn Levy, who probably maybe most listeners would know through a big popular show called Stranger Things… Executive Producer, and always directs to 2 or 3 episodes from each season. But Shawn has done tons of projects and often with really skilled young actors.
PRENTICE: And he has said that as soon as he read it, he wanted the rights, but saw that someone else had it.
DOERR: Yes, he has four daughters and a couple of them had read the book and were like, Shawn, you got to you got to read this book. So then when the rights came available that same day, Shawn and his partner, Dan Levine, another producer on the show, came to me and they really persuasively said, This needs to be longer. I had already felt that. I felt like I would love to see this. And of course, as you well know, that was this moment when the industry is changing and now you can get these really, really well made things. The Crown is a perfect example, right, where you can tell longer stories.
PRENTICE: That said, I've heard Shawn Levy say, I think this I look at this as a four hour movie. Yes. In other words, it's yes, it's got that feature film experience, but yet it gives it the room to breathe.
DOERR: Such a gift that he gave to me and to all of us as viewers is that he directed all four. He felt like four was enough that one director could. So folks who don't know, usually in a series, if you get to round 5 or 6 episodes, it's basically humanly impossible to direct them all yourself. It's just too much work. But he has tremendous crazy energy and he he committed when they really started shaping into a four, four hours each, about one hour, the the last episodes, maybe a little bit longer or at least originally was he thought he could do it. It did. It command an incredible commitment from him because it's all filmed in Europe, primarily in Budapest, but also for a month in France and COVID was happening. This crazy heat wave came through Europe during filming to I don't know if folks remember, but it was like a couple of days. It was like way over 100 In France, you know, everybody's wearing masks. You have to keep everybody quiet. You have 200 people. You got to keep them quiet and they're all sweating. And, you know, if you give Mark Ruffalo COVID, you cost so much money. There's so many things I never have to think about as a novelist because, you know, you have to shut down filming for days. So they worked under really dire, amazing circumstances. His ability to lead with positivity in those hot afternoons when everybody's tired. Did you travel to Budapest? Yeah. And my son Owen got to come, too.
PRENTICE: So, I'm just thinking of the timing in Budapest. I mean, Ukraine had exploded… and you have Ukrainian refugees [streaming into Hungary].
DOERR: During the filming of the exodus of France. So folks who don't know, in the novel and in the show in June of 1940, as the Germans come in to Paris, you know, the one of the main characters, the main protagonist, is a blind girl, Marie. She has to flee Paris with her father and. Incredibly big moment in the history of Paris as so many people who were really unprepared, partially by their government, partially because nobody believed the horrors of World War One could ever be repeated. They just didn't believe the Germans would be able to blitzkrieg their way all the way to the capital that fast. So people are just streaming out of the city, often many of them with no idea where they were going to go. So, yeah, they're in Budapest filming these scenes and some of the extras were Ukrainian refugees who'd been.
PRENTICE: Playing Parisian refugees? Oh, my gosh.
DOERR: And at the same time, which we haven't even talked about in some of these other interviews I've been doing, is that the BBC was trying and successfully sending broadcasts into Ukraine, just using the same technology, the same radio technology that I'm writing about in 1940, 1939. They're using the same technology in 2022. So, yeah, that the light of Ukraine and of course the sympathies of the leadership in Hungary.
PRENTICE: That shadow is even wider and longer as this comes out. You never saw that coming. That said, it's it just makes the story that much more globally relevant.
DOERR: I hope this story is relevant. I think it's you know, the timing of it in many ways is perfect because I hope it's also asking questions about the use of technology for disinformation. Yeah. For freedom. You know, the way the radio in the in the show really plays a clear element, as in Marie's case, a tool of resistance against oppression. And in the case of Werner, this German boy, the other protagonist in the show and in the novel as a tool of control and disinformation. And so I think I hope young people, people of every age who are watching this are thinking about these new technologies in our life right now, from smartphones to AI, and how are these tools being manipulated by people in power. I hope every time you see a radio on the screen in this show, you're thinking about what's this thing I'm carrying in my pocket and how am I being manipulated? And, you know, radio is still such an incredibly relevant tool, as you know.
PRENTICE: Tell us about this actress who plays Marie.
DOERR: Yeah. So early on, all of us felt really strongly that we needed. So Marie… the character is 100% blind, goes blind as a young girl. And we felt we needed to find two actors because there's young versions of her in the script. We need to find somewhere around seven and eight years old and somewhere between maybe 16 and 20 to play the older Marie and Netflix. This enormous corporation with this huge global reach, was willing, first of all, to follow Shawn to cast somebody unknown, which is incredible, but to do a global search. So there were casting directors in like New Zealand and London all over the world looking, looking at audition tapes from anybody, a low vision or completely blind actor who is willing to try to play Marie and this woman, Aria Mia Alberti, she's a was a PhD candidate from Rhode Island. She's American. What? Yeah, she's so bright. I think she was a Rhodes Scholar, too. Although we should make sure. I should make sure.
PRENTICE: So not a drama major? Oh, my goodness.
DOERR: Actually, George, she was kind of discouraged from going into the theater as a young girl because she was told, you can't do this. You can't see. Wow. And so, yeah, her audition really leapt off. Of course, I just get to see it after they've winnowed the thousands down. But Sean used the phrase a numbing quantity of audition tapes that he looked at, and she wore her grandmother's clothes. So she wore a kind of period clothes for the audition. And she really she just looked like Marie on the screen to all of us. So yeah, they did a ton of zooms with.
PRENTICE: How interesting....of what she brings to the director. Goodness knows how much she depends on the director, but doesn't he depend on her?
DOERR: Absolutely. It's such an astute question because I think Sean learned a lot from her, you know, in terms of advice on what a character with a visual disability would actually do in certain circumstances. You know, he was given an example. You know, the script would say she feels her way to the couch or something, and she's like, Well, hey, if I've lived in this place now for six months or 12 months, I'm going to know where the couch is. I'm not going to feel my way there. So she was able to collaborate with him in lots of different ways to bring authenticity to the portrayal of somebody with a visual disability. And we shouldn't forget Nell either. So Aria is the older actor, but Nell was seven, now she's eight and she's 100% blind. She is so moving on screen and her relationship with Mark Ruffalo, who plays her father, was really beautiful. You could see, you know, after the cameras are rolling, each time he helps her down off the thing she's standing on and like leads her over to her family. And yeah, Nell is just a sweetheart. I just loved getting to meet her family. And she does a great job on the show as well.
PRENTICE: Well, whenever I'm at a film festival, I have a few go to questions. Tell me about a movie or movies that just thrilled you early on.
DOERR: Oh, wow. Okay. Royal Tenenbaums. When I first saw that, it didn't know, of course. Was that Wes Anderson's second movie?
PRENTICE: Well, Bottle Rocket, I think, was his first, So I think it might have been his maybe third or fourth. But yeah.
DOERR: The first one I had seen that that level of attention to detail is something I can very much relate to. This world building. I love to grab details in the case of my historical fiction or, you know, even stuff set in contemporary times. I love to grab details to try to knit together this dream that a reader doesn't wake up from. And I feel like that's what Wes Anderson does in those movies. So I remember seeing Royal Tenenbaums. That's the first thing that leapt into mind anyway and thinking, Oh my gosh, the world building in here where you want to scrutinize the sets behind the actors, the quirkiness of it, that all really affected me.
PRENTICE: Let's talk about Netflix, the intimacy. I mean, this is a huge story, yet this is going to be instantly intimate in that it will be in our living rooms. It will be right there with our kids so that we can talk about that episode the next morning or whatever. Right. And it's a very interesting dynamic that we shared as a globe when theater and stories had to come to us at home when we were locked down.
DOERR: Ah, yeah, that's lovely. I agree. I think I was thrilled, you know, particularly with Netflix's global reach. The book was super popular in all kinds of different countries. And so I think it will be really exciting and thrilling that it's going to come out on the same day and in all these different places around the world. And I hope readers who enjoyed the book and other languages will also come to the show and be told a story that is not just about entertainment. You know, I feel like this story is relevant. It's a story about children at war. And in many ways, you know, those are the kinds of lights that we don't see, that we don't pay attention to. The the way we're getting kind of numb to the story of Ukraine. Now, after a certain amount of time. It's just human nature when bad news keeps coming that you start to get a little inured to it. And I think it's important to remember the lessons of history all the time. So I hope all the light we cannot see can reach people around the world and help people remember like people are suffering right now.
PRENTICE: And you remind us in your works time and time again at different moments in our history when we think, ””Well, these are the final days of the world. This is the end of history”, whether it be a century ago, whether it be our grandparents generation, our generation, the next generation. But somehow, mankind finds a way.
DOERR: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, that's definitely the subject of my book that came out after All the Light We Cannot See called Cloud Cuckoo Land, where I was just so interested to learn like how many generations have believed they were the last. It's really this almost this syndrome, this end of history syndrome. You know, I think about my parents crawling under their desks and practicing for nuclear. In the novel, I talk about in this novel in 1453, you know, the citizens of Constantinople, they really genuinely believed every fiber of their bodies believed that this was the end of the world. And, yeah, I think stories abide. Human culture abides. You know, this new generation has enormous challenges with the climate and I and yet I think it's really important to remember that young people can find a way. It's not always about technical innovation. It's about kindness and storytelling and looking after each other. I think that's the way that young people can find a way each time to renew the the human project.
PRENTICE: What a treat it is to find you in Toronto….to have this conversation. As we anxiously await, I'm going to be one of the lucky few to see this here in Toronto. But the world, we will see this in early November. What a treat.
DOERR: This. I'm so excited for you to see it. Can't wait for everybody at home to see it really soon.
PRENTICE: Are you excited? Nervous? All of the above. What is it?
DOERR: Yeah, I'm excited and nervous and also gratified and just really, really grateful. I try to remember, like every day how what a gift it is that I get to tell stories for a living. That's just another version of play. When I was a kid playing with my Legos or my G.I. Joes, you know, that's kind of what I get to do every day with language is try to tell stories and rearrange things. So I just try to enter each of these events here in Toronto with a sense of gratitude.
PRENTICE: Great good luck with this.
DOERR: Thanks, George.
Find reporter George Prentice on Twitter @georgepren
Copyright 2023 Boise State Public Radio
