Inside the quest for the next Westeros
There’s a gold rush right now in fantasy TV adaptations. But who will fill the void left by Game Of Thrones?
THE MEEK MAY inherit the Earth, but the geeks are after Middle-earth, and Westeros, and more besides. The quest for the “next Game Of Thrones” has been underway since before the HBO show finished, but it’s now at fever pitch.
HBO has six Thrones spin-offs in development in the hope of cloning that cash cow: the ten-episode prequel series House Of The Dragon is first out of the gate in 2022, after being inspired by the wreckage of a failed pilot that reportedly cost $30 million for a single episode. HBO also has an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, part of a new and less Euro-centric generation of fantasy novels.
Amazon, meanwhile, has been on the hunt for its own Thrones, ever since CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly requested exactly that in 2017. The Lord Of The Rings emerges in 2022, at a reported $465 million budget for the first season (that figure may include the eye-watering $250 million paid just for the rights). It’s also adapting Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time, a series so big it’s less a doorstop book and more a load-bearing wall, for roughly $10 million per episode (for comparison, Thrones’ first season cost $6 million per episode, rising to $15 million). Not to be outdone, Netflix is into The Witcher’s second season, and a second helping of the youngerskewing, Russian-esque Shadow And Bone. Even the BBC has made three seasons of His Dark Materials. But can any of these match Thrones?
Well, maybe. Wheel Of Time was Prime’s biggest premiere of 2021; good thing too, with Season 2 already shooting. “It’s such an amazing vote of confidence to have the studio believe in the show,” says showrunner Rafe Judkins. “I think it speaks to them. I want to show people who aren’t familiar with these books what the best things about the series are.”
Judkins and his fellow showrunners are, for the most part, fantasy enthusiasts trying to spread the gospel. But for decades, Hollywood dismissed the genre’s cost/benefit analysis.
An air of uncool lingered around like the stench of dead orc, and Rings was too singular, too gigantic, to serve as a model for other adaptations. Thrones changed that: its violence and sexposition won over fantasy doubters. Suddenly, buying your cast some
cloaks and armour wasn’t an instant ticket to irrelevance.
Budgetarily speaking, Thrones had the great advantage of long periods spent with (mostly) human characters outdoors. “Technology has helped, but it’s also not helped,” says Henry Cavill, star of The Witcher. “When one leans too heavily on VFX, the audience knows. So a lot of it is using scenery to its maximum effect.” It’s no coincidence that Wheel and Witcher also involve long walks in the fresh air. Wilder material, like the Napoleonic dragon warfare of Temeraire, is probably still out of reach for even these TV budgets, so there’s a risk that these shows will eventually feel same-y. Hopefully the high elves of Amazon’s Rings, witchy Aes Sedai of Wheel and Igbo-derived culture of Who Fears Death will keep things fresh.
If the Thrones void can be not just filled but expanded, this could be a TV golden age for fantasy fans. “I love fantasy,” says Cavill. “There’s always going to be someone who’s gonna scratch their nose [at it]. [But] it’s cool! And it’s only going to get cooler, as long as there are good executions of it.” Whether that means literal executions (RIP Ned Stark) or in the more general sense, the pressure is on all these shows to not only justify their sky-high budgets, but to launch their whole genre to great new heights.
HALFWAY THROUGH ACCLAIMED new romantic-comedy-drama The Worst Person In The World, everything stops. Our hero, Julie (played by Renate Reinsve) is having a tense conversation with her boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). Dreaming of an impossible affair, Julie imagines the world freezing around her as she runs through the streets of Oslo to have a stolen afternoon with a prospective new love, Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). It’s a bravado set-piece in a largely naturalistic film — but as Norwegian director Joachim Trier explains, it had a Hollywood inspiration.
“Y’know, I could talk for hours about the French New Wave or Ingmar Bergman,” says Trier with a laugh. “But honestly, my one main reference for this scene was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by John Hughes. When Ferris sings ‘Twist And Shout’, and all of Chicago starts dancing with him... as a kid, I saw that in the movie theatre and I thought, ‘Is this Ferris’s imagination or is it real?’ It didn’t matter. I believed it. It was a part of the story and I engaged in it. This is the same.”
Trier, who wrote the screenplay with fellow director Eskil Vogt, was keen to create a “middle-of-the-film climax” that had the same dreamy joy as Bueller: what he describes as “almost a musical sequence, without singing or dancing”. The sequence, he says, was born directly from Julie’s character, speaking to her romantic imagination as well as her extremely millennial anxieties. “I think the film deals a lot with the theme of time. Julie feels a tremendous pressure of expectation, turning 30. She feels time is slipping away from her.” Pressing pause on reality gives Julie a brief respite from that ticking clock.
Filming the sequence — which involved closing down large stretches of Oslo for days at a time — was a complex operation. “We needed a lot of planning and preparation,” Trier recalls.
“The police were wonderful, helping us lock off streets. I had a good team of people to help me.” Despite having worked with CGI in previous films, Trier was keen to complete the sequence largely in-camera, in order to create “a warm, human scene”. The only visual effects were to remove a “support mechanism, made out of metal” that held up bicycles, paused mid-cycle.
Hundreds of extras were recruited to complete the effect, all required to stand as still as possible while Reinsve runs past. “We needed to train people to [stay] in these postures,” Trier explains. “We would train in parking lots. It became this wonderful collective experience.” Eagle-eyed viewers will note that not everyone’s standing-still skills are up to scratch — and that’s okay, says Trier. “It’s not perfect. There’s a big crane shot going over a park, and I noticed one little girl, about seven or eight years old, moved her arm a little bit. I felt sorry for her! But that’s just part of the game. We have enough perfect CGI films in the theatres at the moment. It’s the feeling that matters.”
It seems to work: the film has earned ecstatic responses out of Cannes and London Film Festivals (with Reinsve winning Best Actress at the former), and there is Oscar buzz building. The sequence has connected, Trier thinks, not because it’s high-concept, but because it feels truthful to the characters. “I mean, I’m not the first person in cinema to have people stand still. I think it’s put in the right romantic context — it’s how it’s used in the film.” Like Bueller’s big sing-song, it’s the feeling that matters.
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD IS IN CINEMAS FROM 25 MARCH