WARNING: The following article includes spoilers for Hunters, available to stream on Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime's new series Hunters, is a big splashy prestige series starring Al Pacino as the leader of a team hunting Nazis in the United States in the 1970s. But it also grapples with big ideas -- including what it means to be a survivor and the price of fighting evil -- and doesn't offer any easy answers. Creator and co-showrunner David Weil deliberately packed the series with a combination of exciting action and thought-provoking commentary.

In an interview with CBR, Weil spoke about the origin of the idea for Hunters, the reason he references superheroes throughout the story and why he wanted to depict Jewish strength onscreen.

CBR: I know that the roots of this idea were from your grandmother. Can you elaborate on what the experience of knowing her seeded in you?

David Weil: Absolutely... I guess the best way to put it is when I first heard her stories -- she was a survivor of [Nazi concentration camps] Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen -- …because I was so young when I heard these stories, the only way I could really understand them, intuit them, was through superheroes and comic books. Those were the things that I loved and that I knew at such a young age. And she became the greatest kind of superhero that I knew. And so the way into [Hunters], I think the thing that I really always took from her stories, was her heroism. And sometimes there's quiet heroism. Sometimes there's bold heroism. Sometimes even just surviving in and of itself was a real act of heroism.

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Is that the reason you, throughout the series, include all the conversations about Batman and Robin and other comic-book references?

Yes... After the war, …many of these [comic-book] authors and illustrators were Jewish. And they came home from World War 2, seeing such depravity and such inhumanity, that they wanted to create the idealized version of women and men in these heroes. And so, I kind of look at our world in very superheroic terms, always.

Because I think that, oddly enough, though they're not given the credit for it, comic books and superheroes really grapple with the gray, with the murkiness of heroism, with the cost of being a superhero that a lot of other films and television shows do not do. And so for me, [Hunters] really is about the question of: If you hunt monsters in the darkness, do you risk becoming a monster yourself? To me, that's the great question that I think comic books offer us.

And I think, obviously in a much more grounded way, that's something Hunters is grappling with very deeply. Is that something that you were concerned about depicting, especially with Jews, [at a time when anti-Semiticism is running rampant].

Right…. In so much Holocaust cinema I feel like Jews are often solely portrayed as victims. And I think that in media we’re often portrayed as solely intellectual and ineffectual and nebbishy and Woody Allen and whatever. I wanted to create a new mode onscreen which is emblematic of, to me, Jews. Jews with might, Jews with strength, superheroic Jews, Jews who are badasses. And I think I wanted to tell stories -- and the series does -- of not only the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust but also Jewish might and Jewish rebellion.

There's… a story in Episode 4, which is about a group of people escaping from Auschwitz and the daring heist-like escape, so it was important for me to show that as well. But so, too, I think, was it important that we debate, what does it mean to be Jewish? …Is there a difference between justice and revenge? I didn't want to create Jews as monolithic -- monolithically good or monolithically righteous.

There's a great scene in Episode 8 between Meyer Offerman played by Al Pacino and [real-life Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter] Simon Wiesenthal played by Judd Hirsch where they debate the merits of what our hunters are doing. What is right? Is it right to go the legal route, which Simon Wiesenthal did? Or is it better to go and take justice into our own hands because the modes of government that rule over this litigation are inherently anti-Semitic or racist?

And so they really debate what is right and what is wrong. And Wiesenthal says to Meyer, ‘If you do this, Meyer, you risk… no longer being Jewish, that what you're doing is not Jewish.’ And Meyer says, ‘But if we choose not to do this, they will exterminate us and then all Jews will be eradicated again.’ So I think it is this gray moral question…. The reason I put it in [the show] is because I want us all to ask these questions and to debate these things forever…. It's important, that self-reflection, how we carry ourselves in the world, both for ourselves and our religion in some way.

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Did you have any concern about defining Jews by their experience in the Holocaust? A lot of the time, dramas featuring Jews come back to the Holocaust. Was that a concern for you in breaking this story?

I think it was an opportunity. And I think it was an opportunity because we're facing this epidemic of anti-Semitism and this epidemic of Holocaust denial [today]. So I think to depict and to show those scenes and tell those stories was tantamount to the series. But... it was also equally important, I think, to show other Jewish characters -- Jonah [played by Logan Lerman] or Lonny Flash [played by Josh Radnor] -- who didn't have that direct experience [with the Holocaust] but in some ways are affected by it.

But more there's something that I always grapple with. I had this line once, and you'll hear it a bit from Wiesenthal [in the series]. He says, ‘Remember who we were before the night fell. We were just people. We were people. We were listening to music, we played with our children.' Can survivors ever be anything than just survivors? And that's a burden. Some of the great survivors, Elie Wiesel, one of them, talks about that: That, 'I have been forever defined by this event but I am more than just that. I am an artist. I'm a writer. I'm a thinker. I'm a father.' And that, to me, is such an interesting thing.

So you'll see in later episodes both Wiesenthal and [fictional Holocaust survivor] Ruth [played by Jeannie Berlin] herself in the final episode in a flashback talk about those things: 'Remember who we were? We're more than just this.' Because remember, being persecuted means the Jews are defined by their persecutors. Being a survivor means that we define ourselves in some way, which I find very powerful.

Some of the depictions in the concentration camps and even the things we see outside of it were terrible. Were those events made up of whole cloth or was their research backing it up?

There was a great deal of research. We had… two full time researchers on staff and then we had an advisor as well. But, to me, there's a difference between literal representation and representational truths. So, for example, to me it would be exploitative to take a real event, let's say, an event -- I'm making this up -- but in Auschwitz, a Nazi who tortured a real-life person in a really sadistic way. There comes a great deal of responsibility with that. I think you should portray those things as documentary, as Claude Lanzmann [who directed the Holocaust documentary Shoah] would argue.

And so the chess match [that takes place in a flashback to Auschwitz], for example -- though I'm not aware that that ever happened -- that kind of sadism and torture and disgusting gamesmanship was incredibly emblematic and representationally truthful of the things that the Nazis would do to the Jews. So it's certainly a very fine line, but I think it allowed us to include drama, and to include these invented characters like Ruth... and young Meyer, who are not real people, in a story but still depicted truthfully.

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Was that part of the reason you added as much violence and the stylized interludes as well?

Yeah. You know, to me, there are different modes of violence…. In the [flashbacks to the] past I labored over every frame. Yes, it was horrific, but I wanted to suggest violence. Whereas in the '70s, …that’s violence… that is poppier, that is more gratuitous, that is more visceral. So, it was very important to protect the sobering reality of the past.

But you talk about those break the [fourth wall] moments. To me, the experience of being Jewish is one of horror and humor. And I think we use humor as an antidote, as a medicine, to a lot of that horror. And so I wanted to, in this show, express the way that I feel, what it feels like to me being Jewish. And I think some of the more comedic elements come out of that, and some of the more horrific elements also come out of that experience.

Starring Logan Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane, Josh Radnor, Greg Austin, Tiffany Boone, Louis Ozawa, Kate Mulvaney, Dylan Baker and Al Pacino, the 10-episode first season of Hunters is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

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