Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy might have created Westworld, HBO’s new series about an android-populated Western-themed park, but this isn’t their first rodeo. Nolan cowrote five of older brother Christopher’s movies, including Interstellar. Joy is a TV veteran who’s writing the new big-screen Battlestar Galactica. However, Westworld—based on the 1973 cult-classic film—is the first project that Nolan and Joy, married since 2009, have collaborated on. Here, they discuss Westworld’s heady sci-fi themes and their domestic pardnership.
The original Westworld came out in 1973. What made you want to revisit this world?
Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan: I’ve been working for several years now with [show executive producer] J.J. Abrams on Person of Interest. Twenty-three years ago he sat down with Michael Crichton, who had directed the original film, to talk about remaking it, but he couldn’t figure out how to tackle it. Twenty years later it dawned on him that part of the difficulty was that the film is packed with ideas. For instance, there’s a throwaway line in the original about the thing that’s propagating the error from robot to robot being like a virus. I looked it up, and the first computer virus didn’t appear in the wild until 1974. There are so many ideas that J.J. thought, “There’s a series here.”
Unlike the movie, lots of the story is told from the POV of the park’s android “hosts.” How did that decision come about?
Nolan: The robots’ obliviousness to the rules of the world makes them great protagonists. I remember arguing with my brother over Memento; he wanted to do it backward, because going backward stranded the audience in the protagonist’s perspective. Westworld’s hosts share something in common with him in that they have a certain amount of amnesia—in this case, the amnesia has been built in by design.
Lisa Joy: Jonah and I would joke that if we were hosts, we would be so easy to program because our loop is so tiny: We would breakfast together, drive into the office, work, work, work, eat lunch and dinner out of a Styrofoam box, work, work, work, try to get home, put our daughter to bed, rinse and repeat.
Nolan: Whoever’s writing our lives is—
Joy: —really uninspired.
How much do you strive for accuracy on the show? Did you have advisers?
Nolan: We went on deep background with sources, talking about the state of AI and where it’s going. In Silicon Valley, a lot of people aren’t willing to go on the record, because it’s an arms-race environment. We modeled so many aspects of the show on their intense secrecy. The nice thing about the Western part is that there’s no obligation to accuracy whatsoever. Westworld itself is a pastiche of one character’s romantic ideas about the West: You have some of the elements of an 1840s Western; you have the trains from the 1870s and 1880s; some of the firearms are from the turn of the century.
In a meta moment, one of the human guests describes Westworld as being much more than “guns and tits and all that mindless shit I usually enjoy.” How do you achieve a balance between the mindless and the more high-minded concepts?
Nolan: That question is very much at the center of what we’re doing. The trend is toward human beings’ ability to turn more and more of their world into game space and narrative space—you’ve got peak TV, you have VR. We’re starting to ask, why are all these narratives so similar? Why are many of these narratives so violent? And the series very much asks the question: What the fuck is wrong with us?
Reporters at a recent press event questioned HBO programming head Casey Bloys about the network’s portrayal of sexual violence—an exchange that was spurred in large part by Westworld’s pilot, in which one of the female androids is raped, off-camera, by a human male.
Joy: The way we portray violence of any sort, including sexual acts, is something that we spend a lot of time talking about. With every scene, we ask ourselves: Is it integral to the story? Are we doing it in a fair way, not a gratuitous way? Of course, questions like that are subjective. Especially with a theme park in which humans are encouraged to let their id run free, to indulge in whatever their heart desires, it felt like these were topics that we did have to touch on in order to fully explore human nature.
Nolan: This is a story about how people behave when no one is keeping score and there are no apparent consequences. You have to deal in these transgressions.
Were you anticipating this sort of controversy?
Joy: We expect the show to be thought-provoking, because it’s thought-provoking for us. When I play Grand Theft Auto, I’m such a nerdy little law abider because I’ve always had this active imagination in which I sympathize and empathize with things. When other people turn off the game, they don’t think, “Oh my goodness, I just ran over four pedestrians, how terrible. I wonder if their family has health insurance?” Now, as technology develops, you start to wonder: Where is that line where it becomes immoral not to have empathy, even if you know that these creatures are artificial?
As Jonah mentioned, the original Westworld was very prescient. When we look back in 40 years, how do you think your version of Westworld will be perceived?
Joy: I think the thing that will endure about Westworld will be the questions it poses. Forty years from now, there will be ways in which we’re able to hack our DNA. So in the future we might be looking at the show from the other way around—empathizing with the robots because we’re now the robots, the ones whose code is hackable.
If you were given the chance to visit Westworld, what would be the first inappropriate thing you’d do?
Nolan: Oh dear … based on my track record with role-playing games, I’d be a bit of a square. But I do think a train robbery would be high on the list.
Joy: Before marriage, I think I would have at least kissed a gunslinger or two. I’m not sure about anything beyond that, but I can certainly see myself getting some smooches.
https://youtu.be/IuS5huqOND4
