HIS DARK MATERIALS
WHY HIS DARK MATERIALS WILL BE BIGGER ON THE SMALL SCREEN…
The lowdown on the BBC’s epic Philip Pullman adap.
Based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass - starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig - hit screens in 2007, scoring an Oscar (for Best Achievement in Visual Effects) but not nearly enough box-office dosh to scare up a sequel. Now, more than a decade later, BBC and HBO have teamed up for an all-new and expansive take on Pullman’s fantasy world, following young orphan Lyra (Logan’s Dafne Keen) on a perilous journey that takes in such characters as her uncle, Lord Asriel (James McAvoy), her adoptive mother, Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), and daring aeronaut Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda)…
How have you approached adapting the books into seasons? Jack Thorne
Writer Largely, it’s one book per season. There are a few treats I’ve stolen from future books that I’ve tried to infuse this season with. I looked at the whole story, three books, and said, “How did Philip think of them like this? And how can we think of them - how can we celebrate them in the best possible way?” And sometimes, that celebration involved moving certain elements forward.
Some religious groups boycotted the earlier Golden Compass… are you concerned about backlash?
Jane Tranter Executive producer No, because we’re adapting the books across the broad expanse of television. I think one of the things that can happen when you adapt a book for film is that you have to cut down the middle of the story. We’ve got eight episodes per book in order to be able to tell this incredible story, which is as broad as it is deep. And because of that, we can sound every note that Philip Pullman sounded – and in so doing, we make clear that the religious controversy that surrounded the film was not relevant to the books themselves.
In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman talks about oppression, about the control and falsification of information. When we first started working on this project some years ago, there wasn’t such a thing as ‘fake news’. So, I think what Philip was doing was exploring the theme of the truth needing to be allowed out to the general population. It’s not an attack on religion, it’s an attack on a particular form of organisation.
Dafne Keen Lyra Belacqua I see The Magisterium [the story’s primary antagonist] as more like Big Brother in 1984 by George Orwell. It’s a dictatorship — it’s not criticising the church. It’s criticising oppression, I think.
Dafne, can you tell us about bringing Lyra to life?
DK I feel she’s very needed right now because we don’t usually have youngwoman leads. We have more and more, thank God, but they’re not something that we have in abundance. And especially having to portray a character who is so strong and is so determined and who is a hero is very fun to do. I feel very privileged to be able to do that.
What in the books most helped you find your characters?
DK The line that most describes Lyra is a moment when she asks Ma Costa, who is Egyptian, what she would be in Egyptian symbols. And Ma says, “You’re not water, you’re marsh fire.” And that really marked me; it’s basically the perfect description of Lyra.