wasn’t just years in the making for director and executive producer Thomas Kail — it was a matter of decades. He met author Georgia Hunter — whose novel inspired the Hulu series about a Jewish family determined to reunite after being separated during World War II — in 1999, around the same time she began learning about her family’s history. Before Hunter even had a notion to put 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 several years later, Kail took his idea of bringing the “beautiful story” to the small screen to Hunter and creator Erica Lipez. Their initial adaptation pitch failed, Kail says, but their second attempt — six months into the pandemic — caught Hulu’s eye. “We took that same pitch about a family trying to have dinner together and their struggle to get back around the dinner table,” he recalls.
Once Joey King was attached to the project, it moved full speed ahead. Here, Kail opens up to about depicting this story from one of his oldest friends for a new audience. Everything is so vital and vibrant, and that’s something we talked about a lot.
How do we make this representative of the urgency and the full color of the time? We look at things sometimes as sepia tones because the way it was captured is photographic or in black-and-white, but to the people who are being photographed, the colors are not black-.
