6 Questions with Anna Winger
The creator of Unorthodox gets you into fighting shape
I don’t know Anna Winger at all, but I feel like I spent all of 2020 hearing about how incredible her series Unorthodox is. So when her publicist reached out to ask if Anna could contribute to the 6 Questions series we do here, I was glad to oblige. This isn’t a paid post! Anna’s responses are really practical and helpful!
Anna’s new series is Transatlantic. It premieres today on Netflix. It sounds like exactly the kind of show that I could never sell: “It's the greatest story never told about Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee who saved over 2000 people—mainly surrealist artists, writers and thinkers such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt—from Nazi-occupied France.”
If anyone watches the show and enjoys it, please let me know, and maybe we can get Anna on the podcast! Meantime, she doles out genuinely great advice below.
6 Questions with Anna Winger
1. What you working on right now?
It is a luxury to have the time to write again after delivering Transatlantic. One new project takes place in Mexico, where I lived as a teenager and in my 20s. Two projects are in the UK, one set in the contemporary countryside and another in London in the early 1980s. So I am also doing a lot of reading and research.
2. What challenges are you facing specific to your current writing project?
Because I come to writing as a visual artist (I was a photographer for many years), seeing the story comes first for me, understanding the look and feel. Whether it’s historical or contemporary, I spend a lot of time looking at photographs and listening to music to build the world in my imagination.
3. What advice about the business of TV/film writing can you give to someone starting out now?
Don’t try to gauge the market. Find a story you see clearly, then be specific and go deep. It takes a long time to make a film or TV series so you need to be passionately interested in the material and ready to fight for it.
4. What advice about the craft of writing can you give to someone starting out?
I think it’s useful to write almost anything you can write professionally, especially on assignment. You really learn how to do this work by doing it and part of that is exposing yourself to outside criticism. Notes can be really, really useful—even if you don’t agree with them!
5. What do you respond to most in a piece of writing?
Character, emotion, specificity, language. I love to be immersed in a complete world.
6. What are you watching/reading/listening to lately that’s getting you excited or inspired?
My husband [producer Joerg Winger] and I are catching up now on a lot of what we missed while we were both in production last year. Recent docs like Laura Poitras’ All The Beauty and the Bloodshed and the Ethan Hawke’s series about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman on HBO.
I loved the novel The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. Also a new German film called Sonne und Beton (Sunshine and Concrete). We try to go to the movie theater once a week, here in Berlin, where we live. I do not want to live in a world without movie theatres! Everything is better up on the big screen and in good company.
