Jonathan Nolan Promises HBO’s Westworld Will Keep You Up At Night
As long as there's no CGI Yul Brynner.
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If you’ve always dreamed about going to a rough and tumble, grown up version of Disneyland where you can live out all of your movie western frontier daydreams, HBO’s upcoming Westworld is right up your alley. A remake of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film, the series imagines a theme park where you can go and play cowboy, even shooting high tech androids and bedding futuristic sexbots. Momentum has been building for a while, and now we’ve got our first photo from the show, as well as some additional details.
HBO isn’t afraid to go big on a project, and Westworld is definitely ambitious as hell. It’s also attracted a ton of high profile industry folks. Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Interstellar) created, wrote, and will direct the pilot, J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) will produce, as will Jerry Weintraub and Bryan Burk. Even the cast is full of big names. Anthony Hopkins plays the visionary creator of the park, while Ed Harris takes the villainous Man in Black role originally made famous by Yul Brynner. James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood play a pair of star-crossed robot lovers, and Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Miranda Otto, Rodrigo Santoro, Shannon Woodward, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Angela Sarafyan, and Simon Quarterman round out the rest of the call sheet.
Nolan tells EW that ,“It’s a place where you can be whoever you want to be and there are no consequences—no rules, no limitations. What happens in Westworld, stays in Westworld.”
Aside from what we already said, there’s not much in the way of plot details to be had, but Nolan goes on to add, “What we can tell you is that we intend to make the most ambitious, subversive, f–ked-up television series. The things that keep you up at night, any of those things that trouble you—that is exactly what the show is about.”
We were definitely already interested in Westworld, but it sounds more and more promising the more we learn. With the combination of hard science fiction and the classic western motifs, co-creator Lisa Joy says, “We get to look backward and forward.” Though reportedly the ideas you come across in the script aren’t that far off, as they’re based on currently emerging and developing technology, giving the series a concrete basis that grounds it in the real world and makes it all the more possible.
Right now there’s no hard and fast premiere date set for Westworld, but it will air on the premium cable channel sometime in 2015.
