Steven Knight (‘All the Light We Cannot See’ writer) on the challenge of ‘adapting something that’s already so good’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Steven Knight has been round the block, and the British writer-creator of the iconic series “Peaky Blinders” knew when he was hired to adapt the novel “All the Light We Cannot See” as a four-part Netflix limited series that the primary challenge would essentially be to avoid trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. The 2014 book by author Anthony Doerr had not only been a runaway bestseller but also earned Doerr the Pulitzer Prize, and Knight had no intention of compromising its brilliance while writing the series. “It wasn’t ever a thought in my head to say, ‘OK, I’m going to impose myself on this’,” he says. “It was actually quite the opposite. For me, as far as possible, it was more, ‘Let’s let this horse ride, let it run the way it is, where you feel as if you need to do something, then do something…The challenge was in adapting something that’s already so good. But I think the alternative would be that you only adapt mediocre material because you’re scared of the other stuff.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
“All the Light We Cannot See” follows the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl played in the series by newcomer Aria Mia Loberti, and her father Daniel LeBlanc (Mark Ruffalo). who flee German-occupied Paris during WWII with a priceless diamond in order to keep it from falling into the hands of the Nazis. They soon take up residence with a reclusive uncle (portrayed by Hugh Laurie) who transmits clandestine radio broadcasts as part of the resistance. Marie-Laure’s path ultimately collides with Werner (Louis Hofmann), a brilliant German teen who is enlisted by Hitler’s regime to track down illegal broadcasts. The tale interweaves the story of their lives, both separately and interconnected, over the course of a decade.
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Knight used the text of the book as a starting point in his scripting and found the process of working with author Doerr to have been somewhat surprisingly wonderful. Why surprisingly? “Because when you read a piece of work and it’s so good, you think, ‘OK, when I meet this person, they’re going to be very intimidating and they’re going to be very grave and they’re going to be very impatient. But none of those things were true. He was wonderful to work with. He’s an incredibly generous collaborator…I was so pleased that there was no intimidation and no issue with actually addressing he text that he wrote.”
Not that this meant there wasn’t significant work involved in adapting the literary to the visual, no matter how exceptional the source material. A novel and a TV series are obviously two very different animals, Knight stresses, maintaining, “You can’t get into people’s heads directly when you’re on screen.” His biggest hurdle was making the story’s shifts in time feel seamless. “In a book, you get a blank page that says, ‘APRIL 1944’ or whatever, so as a reader you know where you’re at. Doing that on a screen is more of a challenge, and the enemy is confusion. But at the same time, I didn’t want to smooth it out where it would have been possible so that you start at the beginning and end at the end. It was important to keep those time shifts in there, which made it quite complex.”
Humbly, Knight compared his part in bringing the book to the screen as creating a picture of a beautiful mountain, with the book itself being the mountain. “I’m asked to go and do a painting of the mountain and I’ll do my version of it. And it may be slightly abstract, it may be slightly surreal. And no one would ever think this is a challenge to the original is just so good, so you accept that and enjoy the fact you’ve been asked to do this version.”
It took four years for “All the Light We Cannot See” to make it to the screen after Netflix acquired the rights in 2019, just in time for COVID to intervene. But in some ways the fact that the industry shut down for a while turned out to be a bit of a blessing for Knight, given that his phone wasn’t ringing and there was no need to go anywhere or meet anyone. “I was just sitting there with a keyboard and this beautiful book,” he says, “and it gave me a lot of space to work on it during that time.” The process was also made easier by the fact that “our first-choice cast pretty much all said yes, which just doesn’t happen normally.”
All four installments of “All the Light We Cannot See” are available for streaming on Netflix.
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