Thomas Kail talks about the core family element that underscored his creative vision for the TV adaptation of the Hulu series, starring Joey King and Logan Lerman.
Before Hunter even thought about putting the Kurc family’s Holocaust survival story on paper, Kail had already heard many of the real-life accounts.
The stories stuck with him after the book’s release in 2017, and Kail took his idea of bringing the “beautiful story” to the small screen to Hunter and creator Erica Lipez.
Kail talks about depicting a story from his oldest friend–for new audiences
Making the Series Urgent
Jewish actors cast in these roles?
What did not just want to get a group that get along–we had to make them a family. I want to make sure that any of the actors have the deepest possible connection to the story we’re telling. The thing about being Jewish is: it means something so different to everybody, depending on how they were raised.
The first episode that Erica wrote, there’s about 20 minutes where you get to be with the family before everyone starts getting pulled apart.
We wanted to make sure that we understood the depth of their love, why they wanted to be together, because that was going to be such a beacon for them as the world pulled them apart. For us, the story was quite simple: How does this family get back around the dinner table together? How do they find each other again? It takes eight years, but they eventually get there.
That last Passover scene, where they’re finally back together after all these years, there’s a moment where they stop to remember those who are not with them. In the midst of it, holding both those things– having this unfiltered joy of looking across the table and seeing their siblings and being back with their mother and father, and then also taking the necessary moments to remember who didn’t make it– there was something about the contrast that makes this show honest.
Most impactful scene for you?
There’s a moment in episode 8 that Erica put in the script that I wanted to honor with Halina King and Mila Hadas Yaron, who have both been through so much. These two women walking, with this vista of nature around them, and they just start running and they’re not running from anything, they’re just running to run, and I found that so meaningful just to see them so free.
Pressure for depicting real lives?
I felt responsibility, It did not feel weighty. Sometimes pressure can feel like it’s constricting — I did not feel that. I wanted to deliver for all the people in the family. I wanted to deliver for this cast and crew. I wanted to deliver for all the people that didn’t make it.
Conversations with the actors?
The director needs to be able to have specific relationships with each actor. I need to know what they need from me. The way that people like to be directed really varies. It’s a little different with each moment, and my job is to try to be the Swiss Army knife that the moment requires. Sometimes the job is to get out of the way. Sometimes you can feel when the hand is too heavy from the director, and I like to make things that feel like it just happened.
The filmmaker has to try and make something that feels like it has honesty and truth in it, and that it can be whatever the viewer needs it to be. We all come to stories needing different things or expecting certain things, and sometimes we get something that we didn’t know we needed.
This is a show that was about a moment in time that we hoped would never repeat itself. And it has to be a caution, something that makes us understand that when we look around and see things that are similar to what’s happening in this particular story, something needs to be done about that to stop it.
