SHADOW AND BONE
SHADOW AND BONE IS THE LATEST FANTASY SERIES TO JUMP FROM PAGE TO SCREEN. SHOWRUNNER ERIC HEISSERER TELLS US ABOUT ITS JOURNEY
Step into the Shadow Fold. Best hold on to the wall, eh?
WITH HER 2012 NOVEL SHADOW And Bone, Leigh Bardugo introduced readers to a world of magic, monsters and drama. The tale spawned two other bestsellers – Siege And Storm and Ruin And Rising – as well as the Six Of Crows duology. The property always seemed poised to get adapted by a studio, network or streaming service. Inevitably, Netflix scooped it up, before securing Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Bird Box) as showrunner.
Heisserer was already acquainted with the title, having discovered it after making a New Year’s resolution to indulge in more pleasure reading. “The last 12 books I had read prior to Six Of Crows were all for possible adaptations,” he tells SFX. “You go in with a work brain that is constantly analysing what you are doing. I reached out to an old friend and asked for a recommendation, something I hadn’t heard of. And he says, ‘You are going to want to read Ocean’s 11 in a Game Of Thrones world.’ I said, ‘Yes, yes I am. I would like that.’
“I read the first book of the Crows duology and devoured it,” he continues. “I sent a tweet out to author Leigh Bardugo, who I didn’t know, and just said, ‘Phenomenal writing. These characters are living in my head now, and I’m going to go read your other stuff.’ It wasn’t until a year later that Netflix reached out to me and said, ‘So, we know you like Leigh Bardugo. Come in and talk to us.’”
Shadow And Bone takes place in the Russian-inspired land of Ravka. The story follows Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li), a teenage orphan who serves as a cartographer’s assistant in the First Army. Tasked with crossing the eerie region of darkness known as The Shadow Fold, Alina’s regiment encounters the Volcra, flying flesh-eating creatures that dwell within.
MOVE OVER, DARKLING
In order to save her best friend Mal (Archie Renaux) from becoming a meal, a frightened Alina unexpectedly unleashes a burst of light – an inherent magical ability she was blissfully unaware of. Turns out she’s a Grisha, a being capable of manipulating the elements. More specifically, she’s a Sun Summoner. Suddenly, Alina’s quiet life is obliterated.
“On the surface, Alina’s journey as a Chosen One takes some interesting turns and steps out of that familiar trope,” Heisserer says. “She’s never felt like she’s ever belonged. Alina’s been an outsider and has been treated as such, even when she’s fighting for the country that is currently in a war. To go from someone who is rejected as an outsider to being the saviour of the land, that’s a heck of a leap.
“It’s more complicated when your survival mechanisms and your defence mechanisms are all about being a wallflower and not being noticed,” he elaborates. “Now, the spotlight is on you: literally, considering that you create sunlight. With that comes a great amount of responsibility – using the old Voltaire or Spider-man quote. She has to figure out who she is, first and foremost, and then what her responsibility is to this country and to her friends and family.”
Alina’s main adversary arrives in the form of the charming and handsome General Kirigan (Westworld/the Punisher’s Ben Barnes) – a character fans of the books will know as the Darkling. He rescues Alina from an assassin’s ambush and drags her into his own crusade to free the Grisha from slavery and oppression. It’s a noble cause, for sure – except that Kirigan’s ambition and lust for power make him a danger to all the lands.
“Kirigan comes off as very good at his job,” Heisserer explains. “He is a general. He’s in charge of the Second Army, who are essentially the elite because they are the ones that can practice magic. We find out that Kirigan is quite old. He’s been at it a long while. He knows every trick in the book, including how to manipulate people into doing what he wants them to do. And Kirigan has a plan. He has a very distinct perspective on the world and on human behaviour. He is a little akin to Magneto in his pessimism about the world, and also his hope. And his hope certainly relies heavily on Alina – but not necessarily in the way she thinks…”
The TV series also draws from the pages of Six Of Crows. In the books, events transpire
There’s a good chance that left to our own devices, this show would debut in 2030
two years after those of the Shadow And Bone trilogy. Thieves Kaz (Freddy Carter), Inej (Amita Suman) and Jesper (Kit Young) are on their own little caper at the beginning, but eventually the two sprawling storylines will collide. Heisserer says that combining the two books resulted in a lot of characters and saga to juggle.
“Current me would go back to past me and throttle him for trying this,” Heisserer jokes. “What made it so worthwhile is you get such
a great scope of the world, the Grishaverse, by showing both sets of characters and establishing different countries and different cultures, and even different social classes. Game Of Thrones did that in early seasons, where you just spent time in different parts of the world. You really weren’t thrown off by it. You got a sense that there were multiple empires at play here. I felt that kind of reach is what this show needed.
“Selfishly, I knew there was no guarantee we could get to the Six Of Crows characters separately if we did the show one set of books at a time,” he adds. “My concern was that by the time we got to the end of Shadow And Bone, we would be done. We would have lost our opportunity to bring in this other set of characters and this other world. The challenge was to look at what these characters could have been doing at the same time as the Shadow And Bone trilogy happened.”
Television is a visual medium of course, and with modern technology, the sky’s the limit when it comes to the imagination. However, nailing some of the iconic images associated with Shadow And Bone was no easy feat.
The Shadow Fold’s impenetrable darkness, for example, proved particularly tricky to achieve on the small screen. The series’ creative minds had some thoughts about its appearance, although Heisserer says “those ideas were rather vague as we got into the actual breakdown. All of us realised that our first swing at the Fold was dissatisfying,” he continues. “We did a number of iterations of the Fold until we had a good eureka moment, largely to do with the skin of it. What does it look like on the outside? Inside, we had a good sense of what we could do there. Also, considering we had a limited budget to deal with, we couldn’t spend a lot of money once you’re inside the Fold.
“Outside though, we were looking for something that felt like a weather pattern or a visual texture that was based on something in the real world, but still felt dark, intimidating and almost supernatural,” he continues. “My VFX supervisor, Ted Rae, brought to the table these fascinating photos of the surface of the Sun and its texture and said, ‘Look what happens when we do a photo negative of it and turn it all black.’ For it to be sort of black fire, the outside of the Fold, got us very excited.”
Another time-consuming effect revolved around Alina’s gift. As a Sun Summoner, she can bend and control light. If done incorrectly, those moments could fizzle rather than dazzle. At the time we speak to Heisserer, they are still a work in progress.
“There’s a good chance that if they left us to our own devices, this show would debut in 2030,” Heisserer says with a chuckle. “The fun
thing about a person with light-based powers is that you have a prism of light to work with. Sunlight can come in different hues and tones and temperatures. We had to be careful not to have it behave too much like fire, since we have a whole class of Grisha who does that.
“Then we got into the expression of colour in Alina’s sun-summoning powers that might communicate her inner feelings,” he adds. “Can you get a sense of her emotional state based on what colour she is using for her light? As long as it looked like a sun when she created a sphere or dome around her, that it felt like it was looking at the surface of a star, we felt like we were in the right spot.”
JESS FOR SUCCESS
Equally crucial was assembling the proper talent. Readers already have a preconceived notion of how their favourite characters should look; get it wrong and hell hath no fury like an outraged fan community.
The original novel Shadow And Bone simply describes Alina as “a skinny girl with dull brown hair”, and author Bardugo has noted in the past that “none of my leads are explicitly POC”. The producers took a more diverse direction and cast the half-english, halfchinese Mei Li for the part, making Alina half Shu.
“That was a role that we thought would take forever,” Heisserer reflects. “It was an international call to find someone mixed Asian. We were prepared to see a thousand auditions and just buckle up for a long ride. Jessie was fifth in the group that we saw. Of course, we still saw 400, but everything was, ‘Is this as good as Jessie? No.’ We lucked out and found her right away.”
The Shadow And Bone trilogy is considered Young Adult literature, a term that often carries a negative connotation. Many detractors believe those types of stories cater to an adolescent demographic more concerned with romance than mature themes. Heisserer, however, embraced the source material and maintains that the TV series offers plenty of entertainment and substance for everyone.
“I believe that YA classification is often maligned,” says Heisserer, who notes that there’s a degree of snobbery about sci-fi too. “Science fiction tends to get shelved in a different place than literary stories. They are just mislabels based on some bias that prejudges a genre.
“Good stories are good stories, no matter what the age of the characters are,” he concludes.
Shadow And Bone starts streaming on Netflix on 23 April.