Thomas Kail On Chronicling the Separation and Reunion of the Kurcs for ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’

We Were the Lucky Ones is a breathtaking experience, and it will stay with you long after you watch it. Georgia Hunter’s beloved novel tells the true story of the Kurcs, a Polish Jewish family who is torn apart at the beginning of World War II. No matter how many times we revisit this moment in history, it still feels unbelievable that such horrors happened. Director and Executive Producer Thomas Kail has a strong connection with this story, and he makes this limited series feel overwhelmingly urgent.

As someone who was unfamiliar to the Kurc’s story, I didn’t know how it would end. I kept reminding myself to repeat the name of the title of the series to keep that flame of hope alive that this family would be reunited. As soon as it felt like the characters got used to their new sudden surroundings or into a new setting, a spike in violence would erupt and yank me back out from the safe space that I gave myself.

“Georgia [Hunter]’s book was such a lovely blueprint, and everything she wrote about actually happened,” Kail says. “She wrote this story as a novel, but she researched this for eight and and half or nine years. She made it a novel to get inside peoples’ heads, so she didn’t have to write around it. What you expressed about the show is exactly how I felt about the book. When I gave it to Erica Lipez, she skipped to the end, so she knew what happened to the family before becoming invested in everything. I knew that if we could give you the same relationship to the family as someone does when they read it, then we did our job. Georgia is a terrific writer of prose, and she was in the writer’s room every day. We didn’t want to take her book and make something–we wanted her with us every step of the way.”

Kail directs the first and final of Lucky Ones‘ eight episodes. He introduces us to this large family at Passover, but the war begins by the pilot’s end. The rest of the series is dedicated to the strength of family and how the Kurcs hope against hope to find one another once more. Kail has the difficult task of making sure we know the relationships clearly as the engine of the story revs up. It’s impressive how he keeps everything so distinct.

“There was a lot of thought and care from our entire design team in making the distinctions and differentiations of the characters were as true as they were,” he says. “We knew that we had about twenty minutes of our story in episode one before they are torn apart. All of those things are things that George, Erica, and I talked about with the other directors and all of our producers. Making television is a relay race, and they were writing episode eight while we were shooting. As soon as I got the script for that last episode, I knew she brought it home. It’s a testament to our other directors and writers, because there is very little that we wrote and shot that didn’t make it into the final cut.”

A unique aspect to Hunter’s story is how we see Mila’s daughter, Felicia, grow up amid these circumstances. In one scene, Mila thinks she found safe passage to Palestine, but they encounter Nazis ready to kill everyone. They attempt to give Felicia to another family who can hide that Felicia is Jewish, and they transport her rolled up in material to hide her. As Felicia grows up, we cannot help but think about how she will look back on the events of her own life. We rarely see such a young person come to grips with such things so honestly.

“On the page, that relationship is one thing, but to find two young people who are able to embody this feels almost impossible,” Kail explains. We were protective of their experience. Georgia and I met in 1999, and she married one of my best friends. She had these family reunions and there was one in particular, in 2000, when an adult Felicia in her sixties would tell the stories that she remembered. Someone has footage of this, and she says, ‘We were the lucky ones.’ You think of this idea of what she did carry forth and so much of that is tied up in the complexity of survival. When you get to that final episode, everybody is sitting around the table and, as they go around, you realize the depth of loss. To hold both of these things at the same time is very much of the Jewish tradition.

There is a moment that she scripted when she has the two sisters, Mila and Halina, running together, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the last time we watched Mila run. Now the freedom of running with her sister and the purity of that gesture and the fact that she lived through this experience where she could have a moment as if they were children who didn’t know what was to come…when Erica put that down on the page, I had to give myself a break. There are these moments, like the train station or Addy approaching them in the boat, [where we] have to summon every ounce of integrity to honor it.”

Robin Weigert’s Nechuma Kurc keeps a level head for most of the series. She has to ensure that her family doesn’t see her fall apart as the matriarch of the family. She somehow projects calmness as she says goodbye to her children and gains reassurance from her husband, Lior, that they will come back together. In the final episode, we see that fall away when Nechuma goes back to her family’s apartment in Radom to see if any mail has arrived from her missing son, Addy, played by Logan Lerman. The new tenants will not let her come in, and Nechuma releases every ounce of anger, fear, and frustration to her own locked front door. It’s a stunning moment from Weigert as we see a woman’s trauma and heartbreak wrench itself into a furious fist.

“I felt the same way when it was happening,” he says. “There was something subterranean with Nechuma that, because of her situation, she was pressing down. To see in this moment where she couldn’t control it was amazing. Robin and I went to the same high school, and she was a few years ahead of me. My drama teacher also taught Robin, so when I went through, I heard all about her. The fact that we got to come together for this was everything to me.

We got to do a screening at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C., and my teacher was there. To be in the room with her and seeing her in that way had an enormous impact. That’s the gift of this book and the show that we made. We are so proud of what we made. There were over 25 Holocaust survivors when we screened it. For an institution that has spent so much of their time and energy and effort to make sure that something is remembered and to have them be so generous and host survivors and have them bless the show…after that, anything else that happens is an enormous bonus. If Georgia’s family and this institution says we did a good job, then we succeeded.”

Kail continues to be influenced by the iconic musical, Fiddler On the Roof. As we finish the series, the post-script updates us on the Kurc family’s lives, and I could not help but hear “To Life” playing in my head. Kail never wanted anything to feel dated as we leave this story, because it needs to stay present in our minds and hearts. Just because something is in the past does not mean that it ever remains there. Kail strives to keep the Kurc’s story, and many other stories, as alive as possible.

“There’s also that moment a the end of Fiddler where they leave and go to Chicago, much like Jakob does, but there’s a story about when they leave Anatevka,” Kail says. “Where do they go? Some don’t make it but many do, and they start again. This idea of what you take with you when someone comes as they do and say, ‘Leave the place you’ve known your entire life.’ It was important to us that our show felt like it was not sepia-toned but in full color. Even as we move through the post-script and it turns to color, it becomes the family in 2000 and it goes from still image to moving image. It was important that our costume designer, Lisa Duncan, and our cinematographer, Tim Ives, expressed no distance–nothing should be dusty. Color, to them, was vibrant, so we wanted it to be the audience’s experience as well.”

We Were the Lucky Ones is streaming now Hulu.