ComingSoon spoke with composers Rachel Portman and Jon Ehrlich about their work on the Hulu series We Were the Lucky Ones. The series, about “a Jewish family separated at the start of World War II determined to survive and reunite,” is streaming today.
ComingSoon: What drew you to collaborate on scoring We Were the Lucky Ones, and how did you approach this project differently than your previous works?
Rachel Portman: I was introduced to Jon by our shared agent, Robert Messinger, in my search for a composer to collaborate with on this 8-part series. I was immediately drawn to his music and the sensitivity in his writing. I thought he and I would be compatible musical partners. I’ve had very little experience collaborating with another composer and you kind of jump in and hope for the best. Jon and I have a lot of respect for each other’s music which is a great starting point and we jumped right in and shared ideas back and forth. It was a wonderful collaboration. I wrote the Title theme and between us we wrote the rest, crafting and developing the score from a wealth of thematic material throughout the series.
Jon Ehrlich: What drew me to work on this project? The chance to work with Rachel. It was a wonderful collaboration where we freely shared and sharpened each other’s ideas. One of my favorite parts of collaborating with Rachel was having her as the first audience for whatever I had worked on that day. It was an additional layer of motivation knowing she would notice and appreciate all of the detail, as well as serve as a critical eye.
Can you elaborate on the musical language you developed while working together on the series?
Portman: The musical language is made up of live orchestral instruments, and non-live organic and electronic processed textures and percussive gestures. The main theme is primarily made up of cello solo melody, piano accompaniment, and strings, and these instruments are some of the main voices throughout the score. We wanted the score to feel contemporary and match the immediacy of what the characters are experiencing. The hybrid blend of the more processed sound palette with the live orchestra gave it a more contemporary sound.
How did the personal connection to Jon Ehrlich’s grandmother-in-law influence your approach to composing the score?
Ehrlich: The uncanny similarities of my wife’s grandmother’s story of survival to the Kurc family’s story made the experience of scoring this project extremely personal and emotional for me. Savta Lola was from Radom, the same town in Poland where the Kurc’s lived. Like Joey King’s character, Halina, Lola left Radom at 19 years old with her new husband, Teo, leaving her family behind. In interviews I did with Lola, she spoke about Lvov, and then Russia, where her husband was imprisoned and killed by the Russians. The Kurc family’s stories share so many of the names, places, and struggles that Savta Lola lived through. Lola arrived in Jerusalem at the end of the war carrying infant twin daughters, one with the name Halina, my wife’s mother. I don’t know that this personal connection affected the way we approached the score, but it certainly deepened my experience. In a very real and visceral way I felt like I was given the opportunity to accompany Lola on her journey — to feel what she felt; to give voice to characters who, for me, were emotionally interchangeable with someone who is so very dear to me. As Bella says in episode 8, “There’s no reason anyone survived this . . . none of us should be here.” By a string of perilous choices that Lola made over the years of the Holocaust, she survived, and her luck became my luck. Without her, I don’t have my wife and 3 children. And without this show, I don’t get the chance to deepen my awareness of just how lucky I am.
What specific elements of the series’ story did you aim to capture through the music?
Portman: This story’s foundation is built on the Kurc family’s deeply felt connection to one another. Pulled apart as the war begins, we follow their struggle to survive and find their way back to each other. Because they are separated through most of the story, it was important for the score to create motifs and themes that represented their bonds so we could feel what they are missing and longing and yearning for through the long and tortured years they are apart. We wanted the score to represent what ultimately sustains them across thousands of miles and years of separation — bonds that not only sustained their hope, but outlasted the horrors of the Holocaust. A first statement of one of these themes occurs in episode 1, the night they are first separated, when the men are called to leave, and Jakob and Bella whisper their goodbyes and vow to find each other no matter what. This is a theme/motive that develops and weaves its way through the whole series.
Another, quite opposite aspect of the story that we also needed to capture in the scoring was the looming, relentless, inescapable, darkness that was casting longer and deeper shadows across their world. We wanted the score to reveal the dark hidden underbelly of human cruelty — to evoke the sense of rolling, rumbling, encroaching thunder, inexorably enveloping them and closing all escape routes. We wanted to place the audience in this environment where our characters are experiencing the animalistic, primal, feeling of being hunted. So, we created a sonic palette of processed textures and percussive gestures that evoked the sounds of distant thunder, guttural rips and growls, nauseating asphyxiating tone beds, and internal grinding pulses and heartbeats that we often layered with the live orchestra for a contemporary hybrid sound.
In what ways did you balance honoring the hope and the loss portrayed in We Were the Lucky Ones through your score?
Portman: It was important for us to not separate those into distinct primary colors. For the most part the hope is always reaching out of an awareness of loss and struggle. It is hope laced with yearning — a longing to survive and overcome their circumstances. So generally, we weren’t scoring one or the other, but rather one within the context of the other, which is ultimately more interesting and more musically compelling — writing within a harmonic and melodic language where there’s always some element that’s unresolved, that keeps us searching and leaning.
Could you describe a particular scene or moment in the series where you feel the music played a significant role in enhancing the storytelling?
Portman: There’s a scene near the end of Episode 3 where Genek is overcome with emotion. Seeing the expression of bliss on Herta’s face as their newborn son latches onto her breast, he slips outside and looks out at the bleak, desolate, frigid landscape of the Siberian winter. This is a moment where Genek is filled with inner turmoil as he crumples in a heap on the frozen earth sobbing. We wanted the score to shine a light on the intensity and emotional complexity of his experience. Genek’s storyline in this episode is highlighted throughout by a theme that plays his hubris — his determined sense of righteousness and demand for fairness. The theme develops and builds as he repeatedly draws himself and his family to the precipice, endangering the lives of his vulnerable wife and child. So, in Genek’s final cathartic scene of this episode we’re underscoring his sudden overwhelming realization of what he’s done. It’s a kind of operatic moment where all at once he’s experiencing the incredible fragility of his newborn son, juxtaposed with the harsh cruel environment they’ve brought him into, alongside the shame of his arrogance and failure as a father and husband.
What challenges did you face while composing the score, particularly considering the sensitive subject matter of the Holocaust?
Portman: It felt like a huge responsibility to be asked to score We Were the Lucky Ones. The challenge was always to be true to the characters’ experiences while threading through the hope that kept the family going, the hope that they would reunite. It was extraordinarily moving to be working on these stories of bravery and courage.
How did you collaborate effectively as composers with distinct styles to create a cohesive and impactful score for the series?
Portman: Initially I started working on themes while Jon developed the more processed sonic template, then as things progressed, we worked on everything together. We divided up writing the music cues. Jon was developing a lot of the thematic ideas and Jon was also largely responsible for the darker non-live scoring language.
Ehrlich: There was a lot of passing of the baton back and forth. Rachel was waking up when my day was ending and vice versa, so it was as if the ball was always in the air, to mix metaphors. Also, I would say that our styles are much more similar than not, both in our musical sensibilities and our picture instincts. So, maintaining cohesiveness felt very natural. If anything, it felt like we were making each other better rather than constraining each other’s instincts.
Can you share any memorable anecdotes or experiences from your time working on We Were the Lucky Ones that left a lasting impression on you?
Ehrlich: Just after the final mix of 108, I happened to be on the east coast when they did a screening of the first episode at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. I was incredibly fortunate to be there for that screening. It was attended by a group of Kurc family descendants who had been flown in from Europe and South America and all over the US. Meeting them and then watching them watch their family’s story on the screen was a profoundly moving experience that I’ll never forget.
How do you hope audiences will perceive and connect with the music in the series, especially considering its historical context and emotional depth?
Portman: We hope the audiences will feel an emotional connection with the characters’ journeys and come to love their musical themes. As the story progresses, we hope the musical language will carry the audience and deepen their experience of watching the series. We also hope they will feel the very real fear and truth in what happened to the family through the darker elements in the score.
