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In the history of cinema, few images are as iconic as Yul Brynner's gunslinger, relentlessly pursing his quarry: Westworld theme-park guest Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin), the sole survivor of a software glitch that turned the robots populating its imaginary worlds into killers. "It was terrifying, terrifying, but so much of it has become kind of iconic," says producer Jonathan Nolan, who with co-producer (and wife) Lisa Joy, is steering the HBO television reboot of the film. "Yul Brynner, this unstoppable creation, wearing the same wardrobe from The Magnificent Seven, is iconic." Though the film, just 88 minutes long and written and directed by Michael Crichton, seems to wholly belong to the 1970s in tone and style, its themes made a reboot unusually relevant, Nolan says. "The world has obviously changed in the decades since the original film, but changed only in ways that make the original premise that much more interesting," he says. "Everything he was playing with, AI, immersive simulator realities, has become our world." Re-watching the film, Nolan says he rediscovered its brilliance. "It's breathless, and kind of packed with ideas that it really doesn't have time to explore," he says, noting a scene in which a scientist refers to the "bug" infecting the software as moving from machine to machine like a virus. "Crichton wrote the film in '72, '73, the first computer virus didn't appear until '74," Nolan says. The original film plays heavily into the realm of male fantasy – for the most part, at least in the Westworld realm of the resort, it casts male guests as gunslingers and robotic women as barmaids or whores. "There are parts of it that are certainly associated with male fantasies, in terms of gun violence and you can go there and see beautiful women, but there are parts of it that are female fantasies too," Joy says of the new Westworld. "As a woman you can also go there and see some pretty good looking men. You can also let your id run wild as a woman." The series is co-produced by J.J. Abrams, who Nolan describes as "a great partner, a great friend and a creative godfather to the project." "I love that he loves film, he loves television, that affection for both media is readily apparent when you sit down with him," Nolan says. "He has this infectious love for television, but he also knows how ambitious it can be. Lost was one of the most ambitious shows I'd ever seen, his pilot for that was directed beautifully, it looked like a feature film." Joy describes the series, in writing terms, as the most difficult project she has undertaken. "I mean that as a compliment to the work as well, when you're really challenged and you're not resting on your laurels and you're always trying to push yourself to that next level," she says. The fact that she and Nolan are married, she adds, meant that they were brutally honest with each other in the writer's room. "We're very honest with each other, it was like, that's not good enough, just keep pushing," she says. "You just want to give [the actors] as good as they're going to give back and you know that they're going to bring their A-game." HBO ordered the pilot in 2013 with the idea that the series would launch in 2015. The delay was caused primarily because additional time was spent working on the scripts. "We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to just really get the best scripts that we could," Joy says. "When we went on hiatus it was an incredible privilege, frankly, to be able to get that time. And to be able to write through to the end of this series and go back into production and say, we have all the scripts." The premise of the original film was unusually simple: a software error causes the built-in safety software in the Westworld robots to fail, leaving the guests at the mercy of the robots, and sending Gunslinger on a hunt to complete its programming and "win" the duel which was under way when the software failed. Naturally, a contemporary television reboot of the idea is more multilayered. The series features additional characters, including the resort's creative director, Dr Robert Ford, played by Anthony Hopkins, and Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe, its head of robot programming; the rebooted Gunslinger is played by Ed Harris. "The narrative itself is inherently complicated, [and though] it may not be apparent from the first two episodes, it's an ensemble show with a large number of characters, and a large number of storylines that intersect with one another," Nolan says. "The narrative is exceptionally ambitious." The series also touches on Asimov's "three laws of robotics", first proposed by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov: that a robot may not injure or allow a human to be harmed, that it must obey humans except where obeying would contravene the first law, and it must protect itself, except where protecting itself would contravene either the first or second law. Nolan is, by his own admission, the Asimov "fan" in the family. "In all the books, Asimov's famous rules of robotics, they don't work," he says. "Something always happens. They're supposed to be a jumping off point for pointing to the futility of trying to control artificial intelligence because life is chaotic, and yet 40 or 50 years after he wrote them they remain the gold standard." Nolan notes that presently a "vast amount" of money is being spent in Silicon Valley in AI research. "It's a conversation that's beginning now," he says. "We base a lot of what you see in the show on some of the most current research and ... without talking about our sources or where we got some of the information from, it reflects some of the current thinking about how to control, modify, and project artificial intelligence." WHAT Westworld WHEN Showcase, Monday, October 3, 8.30pm.

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