Anna Winger (‘Transatlantic’ co-creator) on balancing World War II ‘melodrama’ with touches of ‘screwball’ comedy [Exclusive Video Interview]

David Buchanan
·4 min read

“It provided this window into the inner life of the characters,” shares “Transatlantic” co-creator, writer, and executive producer Anna Winger on what appealed to her about Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which served as the basis for her Netflix limited series. She is a novelist herself, so she appreciated how the book “really got into the minds of the characters” to tell the “crazy story that brings together Americans with Germans and French” in the “melting pot of Marseille.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

“Transatlantic” is set in 1940 Marseille, France, and follows the efforts of real life figures including Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold and the Emergency Rescue Committee as they attempt to evacuate a list of individuals from Europe as the Nazis begin to seize control. Since many of the events depicted in the series took place, Winger wanted most of all to accurately capture how “terrible things happen in beautiful places,” because Marseille is “kind of a paradise… It’s not a place where you imagine terrible things to happen.”

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Winger also strove to depict “the creativity of the characters,” most of whom were “artists, writers, people who appreciate the arts.” She felt it was important “to see that they’re still taking a joy and pride and creativity in the way they present themselves… even in this really dark space.” Along with their casting directors, the executive producer selected Cory Michael Smith as Fry because of his “charisma” and Gillian Jacobs as Gold because she has the “crazy elegance of a movie star from that era.”

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The series shot on location in Marseille, and the team took advantage of many of the sites and buildings from eighty years ago, an experience Winger calls “totally crazy” and “amazing and uncanny and special.” Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee operated out of the Hotel Splendide, which still stands today as a “rundown” government building. The “Transatlantic” crew took over the site and “rebuild the lobby in the real lobby,” “used the real roof,” and other rooms. “It’s not trick photography,” explains the co-creator, but rather “a lot of hard work by an incredible art department.”

Although “Transatlantic” depicts an especially horrible time in world history, Winger approached the series with a “genre mix” in mind. “I like to have an engine that’s serious, but to bring the audience along on this journey through humor, through romance, through a feeling of something that’s really emotional,” explains the writer. She discusses how the show moves from “screwball” to “melodrama” over the course of its seven episodes. As the show depicts more and more real-life, famous figures such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Peggy Guggenheim and the Chagalls, the co-creator wanted to question, “What was it like for these people who had been living a life of the mind, who thought they were safe in Paris, who believed this was going to pass?”

Although “Transatlantic” is a limited series, Winger shares some fleeting ideas about where a second chapter to the story would go. “I don’t think there was another place that brought all of these characters together,” admits the writer, but even so, she reveals, “I do think there is rich terrain at some point in their return to Europe in 1945, that was the next big refugee crisis… One day, either me or someone else is going to make something great when they all come home.”

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