As ‘Westworld’ returns, the creators discuss twists, Reddit and Rickrolls
seems like perfectly fair Karmic revenge.
Some aspects of the show have inspired lots of puzzle-solving, while others are more existential. Which discussion would you rather people be having about “Westworld”?
Nolan: I’ve never been terribly interested in twists for twists’ sake. I’ve been interested in the limitations of human — or in the case of “Westworld,” not-human — perception. The way we see the world and the way our biases and our hang-ups and our flaws impact the way we see this world. So with this project, we were interested in the ways that an artificial mind would perceive the world differently. Memory, which is something Lisa and I have long been fascinated by, and the clarity of memory felt like a really interesting thing to play with, and the story followed from that. We had initially turned it down because I couldn’t see past the “Fantasy Island” version of it, like we’d have different guests each week and the hosts would help through their relationship problems. (Laughs.) But Lisa saw it very clearly. She said to me one night when we were having dinner and talking about it: “God, this is everything that we think about and talk about. Everything that we’re interested in right now in one show.”
Lisa Joy: We’re in this really lovely creative moment right now where people aren’t holding themselves back anymore and saying, “Well, this is the genre or this is the world that I’m working in, so I can’t step outside of this box.” Previously, you might have thought that this should just be a kind of horror film, or a dystopian thing where robots chase humans around. And now as tastes evolve, as TV evolves, you can do an episode that has an amazing fight scene but also a scene that poses legitimate philosophical questions and also contains character elements that speak to the most simple and enduring elements of the human condition.
There’s been about 17 months or so between seasons. What were you doing over that time? Do you worry about situating people in the story after so much time away without their heads swimming?
Nolan: I think a little head-swimming is not a bad thing. For “Westworld,” Lisa and I go through three distinct phases. We write — or rather, we pull together a writers’ room and we plot it out. The original film is packed with cool ideas, but there isn’t really a single shared character between the film and our series. We had to build the world out from the ground up, so that means we spend six months thinking and writing. Then we turn our attention — Lisa and I both direct on the show — to the production. Then we turn our attention to the editing phase. The short version is we definitely didn’t get a vacation in between the two seasons.
A common theme in reviews of the second season is that the show feels more fun now that the hosts have busted out. Do you feel that, too?
Joy: For us, the show needs to go and follow the tone that logically extends from where our characters are at. Season 1 ended with a bang, and Season 2 picks up where that ended, and you see the hosts finally getting to be free, to slowly start liberating themselves and fighting back. That’s going to be exhilarating because we’ve been rooting for them for so long, but power always comes with its own complexities, and just because you have agency, doesn’t yet mean you’re going to be free from trouble or that you will know exactly who you want to be. It just means you have the freedom to decide who you want to be.
How connected do you still feel to the Crichton film? Is that a text that you return to a little bit?
Nolan: It’s not, with all due respect to the original film. About half of my career has been adaptations of other people’s work, and half of it has been original work. This show feels somewhere in between because we’re adapting a 92-minute movie into many, many hours of television. I never think you’re doing the source work any favors by feeling harnessed to it.
Crichton was a polymath, and he understood on a sort of breathtaking level the technologies that were emerging and where they might take us. He almost perfectly anticipated open, sandbox gaming. There’s no version of “Westworld,” but there is “Grand Theft Auto,” and they are almost exactly the same thing, and they’ve prompted a similar level of moral hand-wringing. As virtual gaming gets better and better, we’re going to wander into what we’d call the Canny Valley, which is the place where you can no longer distinguish reality from illusion, and therefore the moral consequences of your actions get much more complicated. Crichton wrote his film in the same year as the emergence of Pong, and he perfectly anticipated not just open-world gaming, but also computer viruses. He thought about the way these things would be networked together. There’s an awful lot of cool thinking that’s gone into his movie, and so we remain influenced by that.
How far ahead have you plotted this show out? Are you looking way into the future, or do you have to wing it a little?
Joy: In the broad strokes, “Westworld” is about the journey of a new life form. It felt like with such kind of lofty stakes, we should have a direction and posit a solution to some of the questions that we’re exploring here. So in that sense, we’ve talked about how the series as a whole will end and the broad directions of every season. We’ve talked about different worlds that we’re interested in exploring, and different characters we’d like to meet, and the broad strokes of their arcs.
That being said, even though there are kind of tentpole and major moments you want to hit, there’s still room to dance in between those moments. I think of it not unlike a sonnet or something. You have the sort of formal structure, but a lot of the magic occurs in the actual moments, of words chosen within that iambic pentameter. That’s a little bit of what TV is. You set some boundaries so that the scaffolding holds.