Sci-fi master’s dark world explored

A new series brings to the screen stories from the writer of Blade Runner, Minority Report and The Man In The High Castle, writes

mean to be an individual faced with the bulls... you’re faced with in the modern world? What’s the nature of reality? And that’s all filtered through his point of view,’’ he says.

The biggest challenge of the series is that, as each episode restarts with a new setting, characters and narrative, each of the 10 episodes effectively becomes a 60-minute movie. And they come with a stunning pedigree of cast, including Bryan Cranston (who also co-produces), Anna Paquin, Terrence Howard, Steve Buscemi and Greg Kinnear.

‘‘Some take place today, some 30 years into the future and one takes place 1000 years in the future on a spaceship,’’ Dinner says. ‘‘It presented a lot of challenges because we’re starting from scratch with every one. That’s also part of the fun of it.’’

The series was also filmed on two continents, in Britain and the US. ‘‘We made it complicated [that way] and I don’t know that we’d ever do that again,’’ Dinner says. ‘‘Two film cultures, different points of view, taking this material, filtering it through different directors’ and writers’ eyes. It’s all been both difficult and really, really great.’’

Dick’s works are in some ways antithetic to the more optimistic world of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, where Moore worked for many years, though even Star Trek dabbles with darkness, notably in its ‘‘mirror universe’’ stories and in Deep Space Nine‘ s Federation-at-war narrative.

The audience’s appetite for light and dark is to some extent informed by their sense of the world in which they live, and Moore believes it is our natural instinct to look to a place contradictory to our own. ‘‘I think that wherever you are, your fantasies, and your entertainment tends to be about where you’re not,’’ Moore says.

The original Star Trek series, he notes, was born in the mid1960s, a time of social conflict.

‘‘The Vietnam War is at its height, the civil rights movement is on the march and society is tearing itself apart in a lot of ways,’’ Moore says. ‘‘What Roddenberry did was say, ‘you know what, it’s all going to be OK, we’re going to survive, we’re going to conquer war and poverty. The future is bright’.’’

In the 1980s, in stark contrast, during the US Reagan administration, when the country was in a more optimistic mood, Moore says, the audience’s appetite turned to movies like Rambo and Blade Runner. ‘‘[At such times] we sort of have the luxury of thinking those darker thoughts,’’ he says.

And 2017? ‘‘I don’t know where the hell we are,’’ Moore says.

‘‘I’m not sure if this is a good time, [or] a bad time,’’ he adds. ‘‘It’s a deeply confusing time, so I don’t know what we’re looking for in entertainment.‘‘

– Sydney Morning Herald begins streaming on Lightbox from October 18.