Rachel Portman and Jon Ehrlich (‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ composers) on making sure everything came back to the Kurc family [Exclusive Video Interview]
When Rachel Portman and Jon Ehrlich signed on to compose the music for the Hulu limited series, “We Were the Lucky Ones,” the pair had no apprehensions about tackling a project that’s set during the Holocaust. For Portman, it was all about getting to the core of the family at the center of the story. “I think for both of us, it was about getting under the skin of what was happening in the drama and not thinking about anything else because the films were so immediate to me and I was so drawn in by them,” Portman tells Gold Derby during our recent webchat (watch the exclusive video interview above). Ehrlich elaborates, “We were really tasked with not referring to it from that sort of perspective of this is something that happened at this particular time in history. This is a story about a family that loves each other and struggles to get back to each other.”
“We Were the Lucky Ones,” which is currently streaming on Hulu, is an adaptation of Georgia Hunter’s novel about her European ancestors, the Kurcs, a Jewish family in Poland that gets separated all over the world as World War II plays out in Europe and their determination to be a whole unit again. The series also stars Joey King, Logan Lerman, Robin Weigert, Lior Ashkenazi, Sam Woolf, Hadas Yaron, Amit Rahav, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Eva Feiler and Moran Rosenblatt.
Portman has been composing for film and television for over 40 years. She became the first female composer to win an Oscar when she won Best Musical/Comedy Score for “Emma” in 1996 and accomplished the same feat at the Emmys in 2015 when she won Best Movie/Limited Music for “Bessie” in 2015. She also earned additional Oscar nominations in 1999 for “The Cider House Rules” and in 2000 for “Chocolat.” Ehrlich has been composing for film and TV since the mid-1990s and has done scores for “House,” “Party of Five,” and “White Collar.” He has earned three career Emmy nominations: Best Dramatic Underscore for “Roar” in 1998 and “The Agency” in 2003 and Original Dramatic Score for “House” in 2008.
One instrument that the pair ended up using quite a bit in their score was the cello and for Portman, it just felt like the right instrument to use. “It seemed like the right voice because it’s mellow, but very moving and rich without being sentimental.” Ehrlich adds that they wrote a lot of the cello music in a higher than normal register which came about by accident for the pair. “We were like, let’s just try it up an octave. It seemed like it would be extreme but it somehow had that kind of yearning and striving and reaching kind of quality that we ended up continuing in a lot of places.”
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