Interview (Written): Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan (“Westworld”)
A Wired interview with Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, co-creators and exec producers of the upcoming HBO series “Westworld”.
The original Westworld came out in 1973. What made you want to revisit this world?
Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan: I’ve been working for several years now with [show executive producer] J.J. Abrams on Person of Interest. Twenty-three years ago he sat down with Michael Crichton, who had directed the original film, to talk about remaking it, but he couldn’t figure out how to tackle it. Twenty years later it dawned on him that part of the difficulty was that the film is packed with ideas. For instance, there’s a throwaway line in the original about the thing that’s propagating the error from robot to robot being like a virus. I looked it up, and the first computer virus didn’t appear in the wild until 1974. There are so many ideas that J.J. thought, “There’s a series here.”
James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood in “Westworld”
Reporters at a recent press event questioned HBO programming head Casey Bloys about the network’s portrayal of sexual violence — an exchange that was spurred in large part by Westworld’s pilot, in which one of the female androids is raped, off-camera, by a human male.
Joy: The way we portray violence of any sort, including sexual acts, is something that we spend a lot of time talking about. With every scene, we ask ourselves: Is it integral to the story? Are we doing it in a fair way, not a gratuitous way? Of course, questions like that are subjective. Especially with a theme park in which humans are encouraged to let their id run free, to indulge in whatever their heart desires, it felt like these were topics that we did have to touch on in order to fully explore human nature.
Nolan: This is a story about how people behave when no one is keeping score and there are no apparent consequences. You have to deal in these transgressions.
A trailer for “Westworld”:
For the rest of the interview, go here.
“Westworld” debuts on HBO on October 2.