‘Unorthodox’ Screenwriter Anna Winger Talks About the Scene Inspired by Billy Wilder

Awards Daily chats with Emmy-nominated screenwriter Anna Winger about why Unorthodox on Netflix has the engine of a thriller.

Normally, screenwriter Anna Winger writes for actress Maria Schrader on the series Deutschland 83, but the tables turned with the limited series Unorthodox on Netflix, about one woman fleeing from her arranged marriage in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. With this project, Winger found her script being directed by Schrader.

“I found it really satisfying to watch it being shot, because it was a very strong relationship between the script and the execution,” said Winger. “I never felt like it was running away from the vision of what I wrote. We were all on the same page about what we were doing.”

The shorthand relationship worked, and both Winger and Schrader earned Emmy nominations for the series. I had a chance to chat with Winger about translating her script from English to Yiddish, what makes Esty truly different from other girls, and the Billy Wilder film that inspired that reveal in Episode 1.

Awards Daily: Congratulations on your Emmy nomination. Were you surprised? What was it like learning you were nominated?

Anna Winger: The show has been such a labor of love for all of us. It was the first project I did with my own company. You don’t make something ever expecting to get awards, and people kept saying, maybe you’ll get one nomination for Shira, and we were of course hoping for that. I forget which one we heard first. And then it turned out to be eight nominations for the show, and the fact that the Emmy committee recognized so many parts of the production; it was just incredible encouragement. We were blown away. It was totally thrilling.

AD: We were all rooting for you guys, too. We were excited to see you get in for Limited Series, Actress, everywhere. One of the things I really feel like makes this series stand out is that you’re working in multiple languages with the script. I’m always intrigued when characters drop their language and say something in English. What kind of decisions come about with that? Do you make things in English to emphasize things?

AW: What’s really interesting is that Williamsburg Yiddish is influenced by English. They mix certain words into their Yiddish anyway. Obviously I wrote the script in English, but then we [Alexa Karolinski, co-writer on episodes 2 through 4] started working with Eli Rosen to do the translations, and there are certain words like funny and fancy that they use in the flow of Yiddish. It was really cute. And we loved the way they mixed it into a kind of Yinglish. That’s part of the fun of shooting in another language; you want to get it right, so you want to understand how they would really say it. Eli was our Yiddish translator, and he was so funny. Sometimes he’d say, “In Borough Park we’d say this, but in Williamsburg. . .” Borough Park is just a neighborhood next to Williamsburg; it’s not very far. But all of the details—he’s a real linguist. And all of the details of how they say stuff and use English in Yiddish was very interesting for us. One of our actors is a native Yiddish speaker. Jeff Wilbusch who plays Moishe. So Yiddish is his native language. He’s from Israel, so he mixes Hebrew into it. Eli had to teach him the American version of Satmar Yiddish. As a writer, this is the kind of deep dive I love. It was very exciting to work with young people who speak it and unpack all of the different ways it’s evolved into contemporary culture.

AD: Going back to something you said, so you wrote this in English and then worked with a translator to translate it to Yiddish?

AW: Yeah. It’s probably like 50% or 60% Yiddish in the end. So we wrote it first and then worked on the translation with Eli. I write another show called Deutschland 83, and I write it also in English, but we shoot it primarily in German, so to me it doesn’t seem that weird to work with a translator on finding a translation. Language is such a big part of culture and character. From the very beginning, when we pitched this to Netflix, there was never an idea not to use Yiddish.

AD: It makes it feel so authentic. Even though we just talked about language, so much of what’s not spoken is power on this show. When Esty wades into the lake in the first episode, the episode you’re nominated for, what did you write in that scene to describe it? I’m always curious about what it says in the script. 

AW: The scene is very similar to how I wrote it, including the aerial shot of her floating in the water. That’s in the script as well, literally as scripted. So it was very true to form. But something inspired that scene. Billy Wilder in the last project he did before he left Berlin in the early ’30s, he made this silent movie Menschen amm Sonntag [translated to] People on Sunday, and it’s basically about life in Berlin on Sunday in 1930. It shows all of these people in the city and what they’re doing and waking up and getting ready, and it’s toward the end of the story, they all take a train out to this lake and they run to the beach and go into the water. I always loved that film. He didn’t come back to Berlin to work for 30 years after that. It’s is love poem to Berlin. I always liked the idea of doing an homage to that.

In terms of her walking into the water, the idea of cleansing is a really important symbol; water is very symbolic is Jewish culture, and the idea of the mikveh (bath) is a huge part of Satmar culture. We debated for so long where she should first take off her wig. We had many different versions of where she might. I don’t think it happens overnight that you decide to shed your birth skin and decide to emerge as a butterfly. I think it’s a process. The idea of her walking into the water with all of her clothes on, and then taking off her wig, but still having her clothes on. Normally you’d take off your clothes, right? It sounds really right for the character’s moment and her transformation.

AD: One of the best things about the series, in my opinion, is the tension that we don’t know whether she’s a good musician. Eventually we learn she’s good, but not conservatory good. Did you purposefully keep that vague? Did you try to incorporate anything small into insinuating that her voice would be a factor in the end?

AW: It’s funny that you ask that, because we had various versions of scenes in which she sings earlier. We even had the idea that someone might suggest to her that her voice was beautiful. I would say one of the tricks of this project was the genre mix, because it’s both this transformative coming-of-age story, a romantic tragedy, but it also has this thriller engine with thriller tension. Are they going to find her? Are they going to get back together? Is she going to make it? We used these questions deliberately to push the story forward in a way that was fun and felt really tense. It’s both deeply emotional but it’s also driven by these thriller questions.

When we first started talking about this, I said, we’re going to have a thriller engine, and it does have that, even though it’s not a typical thriller. And somehow the tension is also in these questions. Is she going to totally fuck up? (Laughs) You feel so devastated when Yael tells her, “Listen, that’s good enough for boys at a couple of bar mitzvahs, but you’re not good enough.”

AD: I love that we don’t see much of her singing, because it is such a surprise at the end. So much of the story is about her voice not being heard, so it’s already there. 

AW: When we made her a musician, it just wrote itself. Obviously she would be a singer because it’s about finding her voice; plus, singing is so much about Jewish culture and for her to use that for self-expression felt so right—all the prayers are sung in synagogue and everything. That really felt culturally appropriate somehow.

AD: Yes, definitely. I wanted to ask you this question: Esty tells Yanky in the first episode that she’s different from other girls. What makes her different? She’s raised similarly in the faith as other women.

AW: A couple of things make her really different. Deborah is such a unique individual. One of the things that makes Esty different is that she’s very actively curious about everything. She asks a lot of questions, which is not typical of her environment. Most people around her just accept information as it’s delivered; she asks a lot of why. You see it in the scene where she’s being taught about sex, but euphemistically. She’s like, explain it in more detail. She’s determined in a way. But contextually, she’s an only child. In that environment, most people are raised with 12 siblings. They have huge families. Because of her circumstances and her mother leaving, she’s an only child raised by very old grandparents, and because of her father’s problems, she doesn’t have parents.

AD: I love how when she escapes, she covers her head in the cab, as if she doesn’t want them to see her. But I also think she doesn’t want to see them, because she might feel guilty and stay. Do you think she has a tremendous amount of guilt over not being able to stay? Do you think she wishes she could conform?

AW: Of course. I think she tries really hard. That was really important to us. She’s not escaping something; she feels that she’s failed at it. In the first scene where they meet and even at the wedding, you see how much hope she put into it and needed it to work, and it almost worked. It’s really about the end of something. The marriage begins with a lot of optimism, but it just doesn’t deliver. They can’t make it work. She has to go look for herself elsewhere, because she can’t make it work here. Very few people leave. Most people are happy in the community. I think most people are very content there.

AD: Yeah, and that’s why you can see the pain. She feels like such an outsider. You can see that she wants to fit in, but she can’t. Was it hard not to project your own beliefs on these characters? Yanky could easily be a character to like. As someone who believes women should be able to read, was it hard not to project your own feelings on your characters?

AW: I like to write about people who are different from me. Part of the research and the deep dive into another person’s world view is part of what attracts me to screenwriting, especially because you can write both sides of something in a dialogue. I always find it very interesting to get into the different points of view because you can’t write it if you don’t believe it while you’re writing it; you have to understand how they see the world. Most people and most characters don’t do what they do because they’re bad people; they do what they do because they believe they’re pursuing something righteous. I think the process of screenwriting is finding the characters and understanding where they’re coming from.

Unorthodox is streaming on Netflix.