EXCLUSIVE: Anna Winger drew inspiration from comedy and entertainment in Casablanca when penning upcoming Netflix war drama Transatlantic.
The show, which is the first to emerge from the Deutschland 83 creator’s Netflix deal, tells the story of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization that helped thousands of refugees escape Nazi-occupied Marseille during World War Two.
Speaking exclusively to Deadline just before its Series Mania premiere, Winger said she wanted to set Transatlantic apart from previous similar offerings such as Schindler’s List through its humor and creativity, and that she sought inspiration from 1942 hit Casablanca. “I’ve been approached with lots of World War Two material during my career and have avoided it because I felt like it had been done, but what I loved about this story is the positivity,” she added. “We leaned into the style of the movies made at the time [of Casablanca], which were being made contemporaneous to what was going on [in World War Two].
They were processing their trauma with humor and I thought that was incredible.” Although it was greenlit in September 2021, at which point Winger’s Airlift Productions unveiled its Netflix tie-up, the auteur said the show has taken on greater meaning since the Ukraine War. “We certainly didn’t expect to be making the series to the backdrop of another crisis,” she went on to say. “It was overwhelming but gave everyone involved a strong sense of purpose.” Based on Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio, Gillian Jacobs and Cory Michael Smith star in Transatlantic as protagonists Mary Jayne Gold and Varian Fry, young people who risked everything to help move thousands of refugees from Marseille to the U.S.
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