'Westworld' Producers Talk Androids as Protagonists, Meeting Their Own High Standards
HBO's TV adaptation of 1973's Westworld is getting closer and closer to landing on our screens, and promises to be a thrilling sci-fi/western mashup that we're all hoping can rival fellow drama Game of Thrones eventually.
The original film, the life-like robots of a futuristic resort malfunction and turn on the human guests. But in the adaptation, executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are attempting to "turn the original movie inside-out, with the 'hosts' as the protagonists."
"The 'hosts' are discovering that they’ve been created in our image, but beginning to question if 'humanness' is really what they want to aspire to," Nolan explained to Entertainment Weekly. "And given their circumstances, it’s easy to understand why they start to question whether they want to be like us at all…"
Delayed from a 2015 air date to late 2016, Joy believes the delay was necessary to meeting the standards they'd set for the show. "The show is complicated and ambitious. For the first half of the series we were writing while in production and we needed the time to catch up on scripts," Joy said.
"Taking that time allowed us to really finesse all the storylines we set up – deepening character arcs and delving further into the series’ larger mythological questions. By finishing all the episodes before returning to shooting, we were able to concentrate on production in the latter half of the show – making sure the last few episodes were as ambitious on the screen as they were on the page."
The series is described as a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the reimagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.
The series has a ten episode first season order, and is debuting this October.
Source: Comicbook
