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From NOVEL to NETFLIX
Production designer Simon Elliott. PHOTO COURTESY OF NETFLIX.
Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winner adapted for television
BY APRIL NEALE
In the dim glow of a Budapest film set, Anthony Doerr watched the essence of his World War II tale come to life, words once confined to the page dancing before his eyes. Entrusted to director Shawn Levy and Emmy-nominated (Bleak House, PBS) production designer Simon Elliott, Doerr’s novel, All the Light We Cannot See, is now a four-part Netflix miniseries. The collaboration, which delves deep into the heart of storytelling, explores the remarkable alchemy that transforms imagination into cinematic brilliance.
Starring newcomer Aria Mia Loberti as Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind girl living during WWII, the adaptation, with Levy and Elliott at the helm, brings alive the house Marie inhabits, the grotto, and many other staged scenes in Hungary and France. Guided by Doerr’s rich prose, Elliott constructed sets that allowed Loberti, who is blind, to familiarize herself and safely navigate the locations.
“The original intention was this would be a location shoot, but I got to build so much, like the grotto, which was full of challenges. Being someone who works within a visual medium and then sharing that experience with somebody who doesn’t was the most interesting aspect of this job. Introducing Aria to the world she would inhabit in a non-visual way was refreshing for me as a designer. It opened channels in my brain, which was rewarding,” Elliott said.
He explained that, for Loberti, the experience involved touch, smell, and exploration. When Loberti came on the attic set, an old barn, she asked what she was smelling. “ ere was an intrinsic smell to these beams over a hundred years old. So texture became so important. It’s something Shawn and I had pulled for from the beginning, having that weathered patina of age and history. And it aided Aria’s experience,” he said. Loberti, in turn, delivered a masterful performance as the hunted voice of French resistance, proving herself a talented and dedicated actor.
Doerr, who traveled to Hungary with his son Owen, knew Levy was the perfect creative to take on his expansive novel when he expressed enthusiasm to make the adaptation an extended series, rather than a lm. en too was the experience of fatherhood, shared by Doerr and Levy, whose own daughter had given him the book when it came out.
“One of the most resonant cores of the stories is the relationship between Marie and her father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo),” Doerr said. “We could connect on being fathers, which was a big pull for me.”
Fatherhood, and the lengths parents will go to to protect and nurture their children, is essential to the novel and the miniseries. Less than 20 hours into his trip to Budapest, Doerr was moved to see a shoot in which a young Marie (Nell Sutton) was moving her fingers, the camera following her hands as she moved through the city.
“Mark Ruffalo is helping guide her hand, and you see this paternal relationship between him and Marie that had developed. It was emotional and incredible to share that with my son while we’re seeing this scene where the father’s taking care of his daughter,” Doerr explained.
At its heart, All the Light We Cannot See is about, among other things, humanity and compassion, survival and resilience, isolation and connection. Doerr, intimately familiar with the story, was still caught off guard by its tenderness in a moment when Jutta (Luna Wedler) says goodbye to her brother Werner (Louis Hofmann) outside the orphanage.The idea was there wouldn’t be a lot of wood for Marie’s father to build it. It’s an emotional moment because it doesn’t cost me any money to invent these things I create with words, but it costs somebody so much time and money to make them in real life. To see that rendered physically was super moving,” he said.
“I thought, what’s wrong with me? I’m weeping in the theater. She doesn’t have a huge role but does a powerful job in that moment. It hits us; this system of disinformation and systematic hatred with people we’re used to thinking of as villains. I hope All the Light We Cannot See tells Werner’s story with enough complexity. Inverting the idea of who the villain is, and here I am, empathizing with him. There’s this complicated feeling inside of you,” he said.
Humans are evocative, messy, and complicated, and All the Light We Cannot See knows this. For everyone involved, it was a true labor of love.
On set, in a house decorated for the 1930s, Doerr remembered entering a room with Levy. “And the model [of Saint-Malo] is right in front of us, and it’s made from old wine crates.
