A story of hope and triumph in one of history's darkest chapters, fans of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Could See are counting down the days until the title makes its series debut limited on Netflix. Hitting theaters on November 2, 2023, the Shawn Levy-directed series tells the poignant story of a group of seemingly unrelated people caught up in the horrors of World War II. An exquisite work, the historical drama tells the story of a young man named Werner (Louis Hofmann) who is forced to fight the Nazis. In an interview with Levy and Doerr at Collider's TIFF media studio at the MARBL Film Center, editor Steve Weintraub explains how they approached this delicate story about a German caught up in war without being due to his fault.
Offering to "go back to the script", Levy explained the plot of All the Light We Can See, detailing Werner's relationship with the Nazi Party. “One of the two leads is a character named Werner, who is a German orphan who shows this early, almost prodigy-level skill with radios,” Levy explains, “He is taken from his orphanage and put into one of these Nazi training schools that were historically very real and would often indoctrinate the youth of Germany [not only] into this military, but into this ideology. Werner is a character who is not indoctrinated into that ideology, who has a love for technology, has a talent for this emerging technology, but who is actually committed to keeping his soul clean, who has a sister who literally says to him when he's taken away, 'Do not let them convince you, do not let them change you. Keep the frequency in your head the same.'”
Finding a balance between communicating the atrocities of the Nazi party and those Germans who were forced to join the war was a tricky one for Levy, Doerr, and the rest of the creative team, but something they needed to do in order to make the adaptation work. “Hitler youth was sweeping kids when they were 10, 11, 12 years old,” Doerr explains, “At the end of the war, they're sending 14-year-olds off to battle.” As for Werner's part in the complicated tale, Doerr says, “Of course he's being indoctrinated by a new technology radio that's coming into the world and is able to spread disinformation in a way that humans were not able to do at that time,” but, even so, he hopes that audiences can find some sympathy for the character adding, “I hope, even as you recognize he's making morally wrong decisions, you understand how Werner got into that situation in his life.”
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