After speed-reading Georgia Hunter’s New York Times bestselling novel “We Were the Lucky Ones,” Erica Lipez had little doubt it should be turned into a film or limited series. She saw parts of the Holocaust through Hinter’s book that she’d never known before. And as a Jew herself, this surprised Lipez. “It felt like a really big opportunity,” she asserts. “But I definitely had a moment of panic before I said yes because I knew if we got a chance to make it, it would be the hardest thing I ever did.” That, however, did not dissuade her. Lipez became the creator and showrunner for the eight-part Hulu effort adapted from a book she calls “incredible” and “the most amazing spine for a TV series.” We spoke with Lipez as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV Showrunners Panel. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
“We Were the Lucky Ones” is inspired by the true story of three generations of Hunter’s own Polish Jewish family, the Kurcs. Her grandfather and his four siblings and their children managed to survive the Nazi invasion of their native Poland and the subsequent Holocaust, scattering across the world to survive against incalculable odds. The series depicts them before, during and after the war as they reunite. What made a project of such massive scope and span less daunting for Lipez was having the author close at hand as a co-executive producer. “I had Georgia with me every step of the way,” she points out. “She was in the writers room. She was with us on set. It really is Georgia’s family story, and it felt like we had to a very authentic portrayal of that story and really honor what she put down in writing herself. In some ways it was an easy book to adapt because she gave us so much.”
It also helped Lipez that Hunter “acknowledged she didn’t have experience with television, but she has the soul of a TV writer because her book is written with a lot of propulsion and pace and these cliffhangers that really lend themselves to those rises and falls of storytelling that you see in TV. I think we used her as our gut check if we sort of felt like we were going a little too far with something and she would let us know. But for the most part, she just was fully open to us realizing these people om screen.”
A bigger challenge for the showrunner was to cover so much territory in the space of eight hours. It covers nine years and family members spread over four continents as well as the lead-up to the Holocaust and its aftermath. “That’s a lot of sprawl in a TV show,” she admits. “You don’t typically follow 12 characters. You don’t go to all of those different locations. Just even from a budget perspective, you typically have your standing sets and you go back to them. And we had to realize a show about a family where part of the nature of their survival is they kept moving. So in every episode, they were going somewhere else. And it was a giant puzzle.”
While her own name is at the top of the sheet in terms of running things, Lipez is relieved that so many people chipped in to share the responsibility. “I think if I had felt like I was tacking that alone, I would’ve just crumbled under the task,” she believes. “But it was a huge team effort between our designers, our writing team, our directors. And I think what we always used as our guiding force the fact that while the lens of the story is big in scope, it’s really intimate in lens. It’s from the family’s perspective. We never see more than what the family sees. That’s also (why) it doesn’t just become what could feel like a history lesson, which we did not want.”
“We Were the Lucky Ones” streams over Hulu.
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