‘Unorthodox’ Filmmakers & “Necessity Being The Mother Of Invention” [Interview]

Maria Schrader is spending most of August in Berlin directing a new movie starring Dan Stevens. Last month, however, she was driving her car after a busy day of pre-production when her phone started popping with messages. It turned out that “Unorthodox,” the acclaimed mini-series she’d helmed all four episodes of, had surprised everyone by landing eight Emmy nominations.

READ MORE: Shira Haas went through a “roller coaster” of emotions filming “Unorthodox” [Interview]

“I knew that we were considered to maybe get a nomination or two and I thought maybe it’s Shira,” Schrader says. “It’s my nature to not think too much about it and don’t get my hopes too high. And I remember that the first message I got was from our people from Netflix, saying, ‘Congratulations, we got two nominations. It’s so wonderful.’ And then a couple of minutes later, the phone rang and was Alexa Karolinski, our co-creator and writer from Los Angeles, calling me and saying, ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.’ I said, “Yes, it’s great. We got two nominations, What are the nominations, by the way?’ And she said, ‘Are you kidding me? We got eight nominations and you’re nominated in person for best director.’ And I was still on the highway.”

No need to worry, Schrader’s shock over the Emmy surprises didn’t result in any traffic accidents, but even a few weeks later it clearly still feels like a dream to the filmmaker.

“The whole journey, everything that happened with an ‘Unorthodox’ was so unexpected,” Schrader says. “I remember so clearly the day COVID caused the lockdown. And we were so disappointed because we were invited to be in the competition of the biggest European [television] series festival, Series Mania, in France. The festival got canceled just a week before the launch. And we were so devastated because we weren’t convinced that this festival would have been our only chance to get some international [attention]. So imagine, imagine everything that happened with ‘Unorthodox’ after March 26th was just enormous and so unexpected and overwhelming for all of us.”

A partial adaption of Deborah Feldman’s memoir “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” the Netflix series chronicles the journey of Esty (Shira Haas), a young ultra-Orthodox woman from Brooklyn, who escapes to Berlin to try and start a new life. Her mismatched husband from their arranged marriage, Yanky (Amit Rahav), travels to Germany with his morally compromised cousin Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch) to find her and attempt to bring her home.

Executive Producer and co-writer Anna Winger was busy working on her German television series “Deutschland” when Feldman, who had a child enrolled at the same school as her own kids, approached her about turning her novel into a television program.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I’m used to making things up from scratch,” Winger recalls. “And at the time, I was thinking about doing another project with Alexa Karolinski, who created ‘Unorthodox’ with me. She had made a couple of documentaries that link to German-Jewish experience and I loved them. And we started talking about doing another project that was sort of around these themes. And then, somehow ‘Unorthodox’ became that project. But the truth is, we really worked on it for a very tight timeline. We started writing in November 2018, and we delivered the whole show in December 2019.”

Schrader was known for her 2016 film “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe,” Austria’s submission for the Foreign Language Film honor in 2017, but is also a successful and acclaimed actress in Europe. She also happened to be starring in “Deutschland.” Winger suggested she read the memoir and soon she was meeting with Feldman. She notes, “I was able to bring people from my team from my last feature onboard, like the [director of photography] Wolfgang Thaler, the production designer, Silke Fischer, the editor Hansjörg Weißbrich. So, it was really a very wonderful collaboration of creating it together.”

For Winger and Karolinski, one of the toughest aspects of crafting the series was Etsy’s experience in Berlin. With Feldman’s blessing, they “made up a lot.” In the mini-series, Etsy is a pianist trying to get into an acclaimed music program while in real life Feldman was a writer. They also created the perspective for the husband and invented the character of Moishe. As Winger notes, “Kind of everything that happens after she leaves home, we made up.”

Despite the fact “Unorthodox” was greenlit by Netflix, it did not have a significant production budget (certainly not compared to its fellow Limited Series nominees). Winger puts it in the bluntest of terms, “In other words, tiny.” But, she adds, “[Maria and I] both come from gorilla filmmaking backgrounds. I mean, it was workable, but we’re playing in a different budget playing field. Right?”

That meant that despite a good chunk of the script taking place in Brooklyn, a majority of it was actually filmed on interior sets in Berlin. That left just three days for what Winger describes as “challenging” exteriors in New York.

“I don’t want to overstate this, but I do think sometimes necessity is really the mother of invention,” Winger recalls. “I often think this is why I think it’s convenient to be writer driven because you can often find scripts solutions to certain budget challenges. And we make TV in a way, in Europe [not] so much the way it’s made in Hollywood. One thing is that we shoot it by location, like a movie. We don’t shoot each episode. So, there were certain possibilities that we had.”

One thing was paramount, however, and that was casting the right Esther, aka Etsy. Without the right actress, the project might simply not work. Both Schrader and Winger saw many auditions, but it was a self-tape from the Tel Aviv based Haas that opened both of their eyes.

“It was almost a magical moment because I opened my laptop, I saw the new auditions, several young actresses, and there she was,” Schrader says. “And it was almost like a physical reaction because it was Esther. I saw Esther, and my heart started beating. And while I saw her audition the second time, I started to write an email to Anna. And by the time I wanted to press send, I received – and it’s not a lie – it was really a magical moment, I received Anna’s email saying, ‘Look at your Shira Haas.'”

According to Winger she actually messaged Schrader, “She’s a smoking superstar.”

She adds, “When I saw that performance, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is it. This just fits.'”

Schrader went to Israel to meet Haas in person. And with her help, they found another Israeli actor to play Yanky in Rahav. A talented actor in his own right who had just happened to have been a friend of Haas for years.

“I just feel blessed to be able to work with these two very, very talented actors,” Schrader says. “And of course, Shira, she carries the show on her shoulders, and she is an enormous, outstanding actress, very experienced for her young age, very grown-up, incredibly talented. And at the same time, incredibly disciplined, so prepared. It was pure joy.”

Whether “Unorthodox” can surprise by winning major Emmy categories such as Limited Series, where it faces “Watchmen” and sister Netflix series “Unbelievable,” is unclear. What both women appreciate, however, is how far “Unorthodox” has traveled around the world. And especially during the COVID pandemic.

“It was the first time I directed something for television and then Netflix,” Schrader says. “We are living through crazy times, and sometimes I wonder. I sometimes wonder what it is, why ‘Unorthodox’ was so successful. And maybe it’s true. Maybe ‘Unorthodox’ spread some warmth and humanity in crazy times we live through. Probably it was one of the first [programs] being launched after the lockdown. And that also of course, yeah, that was probably a big factor for this kind of success.”

“Unorthodox” is available on Netflix.