Yahoo News Shawn Levy Knew He Needed ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ for Himself
Prolific producer and director Shawn Levy fell in love with “All the Light We Cannot See” long before he was attached to adapt the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Anthony Doerr into a new Netflix limited series, out Thursday, November 2. “I did not read it as a filmmaker. I read it as a reader,” he said to IndieWire over Zoom. “By the time I got back from whatever holiday I was on where I read that book, the rights were already unavailable, having been snatched up by Scott Rudin and Fox Searchlight.”
The story of a blind French teenager Marie-Laure and German soldier Werner connecting via radio, providing each other salvation under the devastation of WWII, caught Levy right as he’d made the deliberate decision to take a step back from directing films, and focus on producing. “I had, at that point, directed maybe like nine movies in 11 or 12 years. It was a lot of movies in a row,” said the helmer of hits like “Cheaper by the Dozen” and “Real Steel.” “I was feeling that fatigue, but it was also the release of my last ‘Night at the Museum’ movie. Robin [Williams] had died some months earlier, and it compelled me to pause and think about being more intentional about how I spend my time.”
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Putting more focus on being a film and TV producer paid off in due time, with him and his company 21 Laps Entertainment producing “Arrival,” which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Picture in 2017, and blockbuster Netflix series “Stranger Things,” which has earned him four Emmy nominations. Having successfully pivoted from the kinds of PG-rated family comedies he had been so known for, Levy continued to put feelers out for the rights to the prestigious period piece, “because you never know what happens on the way to the starting line, and maybe ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ pops free.”
By the time his 21 Laps colleagues Becca Edelman and Dan Levine helped him finally secure the rights to the war novel in 2019, Levy had a whole new creative outlook. “My whole pitch [to Doerr] was, ‘Don’t try and cram your sprawling, epic novel into two hours. Let’s do it in this form that allows for longer narrative and storytelling. Let’s do it at Netflix where there will not be a mandate on runtime. There will not be a mandate on episode count. We’ll do this story right. We’ll do the adaptation right,’” said the filmmaker.
That included not being afraid to make changes to the story that would better serve its television iteration, a skill he’d honed producing “Arrival,” a Best Adapted Screenplay nominee based on a short story by Ted Chiang. “If the film works, the liberties and diversions from the source material are quickly forgiven because the storytelling in this new form succeeds,” said Levy. “That’s our job more than rigorous adherence to the source material because if all we did was transpose the prose literally, it wouldn’t make for a great movie or show.”
The producer alludes to a years-long search to find the right writer for the project, eventually landing the similarly-prolific “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight to adapt “All the Light We Cannot See” into a four-part Netflix limited series. “One thing that we all felt strongly about the book is it’s this poetic, lyrical, emotional story, but it’s also a real page-turner. It has a real suspenseful narrative drive and the stuff that Steven brought to life and added into the lifeblood of the show was in the service of that tense plot engine and the stakes of a net closing around not only Marie, but pressure being pushed down upon Werner, who in spite of the German uniform that he wears, is trying desperately to preserve his essential goodness,” said Levy of the development process. “I found Steven’s new inventions and plot diversions very successful. Perhaps there will be purists who react differently, but Anthony loves the adaptation.”
Despite chasing the project for years, Levy did not initially plan on being the sole director of the limited series. But then, “I read the first draft of the first episode of ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ and I said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to share. This is so good, and it is resonating for me in such an emotional and personal way, I’m going to do the whole thing myself.”
The Emmy-winning HBO limited series “Chernobyl” served as a possibility model for him, having been helmed solely by writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck. “With Steven writing all the episodes and me directing all the episodes, I was really able to, frankly, disregard the fact that it’s technically a TV series, and I directed this thing as I would a four-hour feature film,” said Levy.
The Shawn Levy that read “All the Light We Cannot See” during a self-imposed career slowdown was a different Shawn Levy than the one who acquired the rights to the book fresh off the massive success of “Stranger Things.” Same goes for the Shawn Levy that finally got to direct the series after he had made his grand return to film with “Free Guy,” one of the films credited with bringing audiences back to the theaters coming out of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.
“The two most defining things of the past half-decade of my life have been ‘Stranger Things’ and my collaborations with Ryan Reynolds,” said Levy. Those projects made him “more comfortable, with more facility in using different muscles as I find different visual languages to tell a given story in movie or show form,” said the director. “My comfort with different genre storytelling, with more complex visuals both in terms of camera movement, composition, lighting, and aesthetics in general, I’d say that just my confidence as a stylist and as a cinematic storyteller has grown.”
That said, “All the Light We Cannot See” plays to strengths Levy had his entire career. “I love discovering new talent. I love crafting a great performance from young and newer actors. I love a combination of new and veteran actors,” he said. Those components come through in the new Netflix series, which pairs breakout talent like star Aria Mia Loberti (herself visually-impaired like her character Marie-Laure) with Emmy favorites like Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie.
“If there’s a unifying quality to everything I’ve directed, it is a certain emotionality. Sometimes it’s comedic, sometimes it’s spectacle, sometimes it’s action, but it’s always warmhearted. It’s always un-cynical,” he added.
“All the Light We Cannot See” is a passion project that comes at a time where Levy has reached a new peak of his career, now directing Marvel movie “Deadpool 3,” with both a Star Wars film and the final season of “Stranger Things” on the docket. For him, helming the limited series “wasn’t going to be about the directing fee. It wasn’t going to be about the budget, and it would take a year of my life not directing a movie,” he said. “I knew this material was worth it, and so without hesitation, I went all in.”
“All The Light We Cannot See” will stream on Netflix November 2.
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