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This was probably eight-and-a-half or nine years ago and I knew of the book, but I took a look at it more deeply from a filmic point of view and it just hollered at me because Diane Ackerman’s writing is so vivid. It was brought to me by the producers, primarily by Kim Zubick, and it was brought to her by the two originating producers Diane Miller Levin and Robbie Tollin. How did you get interested in adapting this for the screen?
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and the thrill of telling an all-too-rare story of a woman in this era.
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As “The Zookeeper’s Wife” opens in theaters this week, Workman spoke about finding a new way in to tell a story of the Holocaust when so many already exist, why her own research was done in Washington D.C. While the ingenuity of the couple to turn their zoo into a pig farm operation gives the film natural suspense as to when the Nazis, chiefly an ambitious zoologist named Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl, the “Inglorious Basterds” star donning a swastika once more), might get wind of what they’re doing, what becomes most engaging is how the survival instincts of all involved leads not to self-preservation but the lengths they’ll go to look out for one another. The daughter of Jewish immigrants herself, Workman was fundamentally sensitive to the material, but her skills as a screenwriter shine especially bright in adapting Ackerman’s meticulously researched nonfiction tome, which drew on real diaries of Antonina and Jan (played in the film by Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenburgh) for its dialogue.ĭespite a large ensemble, there are no insignificant characters in “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” with even the smallest of roles given their due by the end of the film as Workman and director Niki Caro ensure that every life depicted onscreen has meaning, a notion central to the Zabinskis’ drive to save everyone that they can. When producers were looking for someone to adapt the remarkable story of Antonina and Jan Zabinski, the caretakers of the Warsaw Zoo during the rise of Nazi Germany, her agent knew of no one else who could handle the broad scope of such a story in which the horrors of World War II are reflected inside the married couple’s home for rare animals, eventually becoming a refuge for Jews escaping the ghetto next door. Workman’s latest project, an adaptation of Diane Ackerman’s book “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” actually came to her. I seek out the stories that I’m telling.” It allows me to visit these places in my imagination and usually when I write, I go to these places I’m writing about. “I give the designers a lot to work with because that’s what roots me in stories is actual historical settings and what I’m looking at in my mind’s eye,” says Workman, who previously adapted Lisa See’s “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” and has biopics of the Dust Bowl photographer Dorothea Lange and the Spanish sailor Gonzalo Guerrero in the works. In her scripts, Angela Workman is known for going into great detail about the places where her stories are set, a quality that has made her particularly sought-after when Hollywood wants to make a historical drama.