It’s 6am on a chilly Sunday morning and Berlin’s Siegessäule – the 67m-high column just west of the Brandenburg Gate, topped with a golden statue of Victory – is ready for its close-up. As old-fashioned VW trucks pootle around, a camera crane swoops downward, tracking a vintage Mercedes: black, boxy, ominous. Someone shouts “cut!” and the conga of classic vehicles slows up as one, like a dying zoetrope. A cluster of Nazi soldiers relax their rigid stance, clapping their hands against the cold. Between takes, the N26 bus whooshes past on its daily route, bleary Berliners peering curiously through the windows at the frozen motorcade.

It’s a weird, unnatural diorama, but then this is a weird, unnatural place: 1962, but not our 1962. In Amazon’s 10-part adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 53-year-old novel The Man In The High Castle, the Axis powers crushed the Allies in the second world war and carved up the US into two occupied territories separated by the Rockies. The east coast is forcibly living life under the Reich, Times Square dominated by a giant swastika banner. The west coast is occupied by the Japanese, where San Francisco resembles the crammed, Asiatic bustle of a pre-digital Blade Runner. (The director of that film, Ridley Scott, is an exec-producer for The Man In The High Castle.) Back in Germany, behind the Siegessäule, the 180,000-capacity Volkshalle megadome – one of Hitler’s pet projects – will be added with CG, a monument to victory on an even grander scale.

After the success of Amazon’s moody, atmospheric pilot a year ago – the most-watched programme in the company’s short history as a production studio – the 10-part series feels like a conscious bid to launch a drama as buzzy as any on its streaming rival Netflix. Perhaps the best way to create a potential House Of Cards-beater is by stacking the deck, because The Man In The High Castle has an awful lot going on: it’s a lavishly realised historical piece about life under occupation, a geopolitical spy thriller, a far-flung love story and a sci-fi conspiracy.

Alexa Davalos working on her aikido. Photograph: David Berg/PR

The man with the high budget is showrunner Frank Spotnitz, who, when we meet, is just grateful that the production – based in Vancouver – has squirrelled away enough cash for a day’s shooting in Europe. “Period shows are always expensive, but to do a period show in a time that never was is even more challenging,” he says. “So I’m thrilled. You can’t fake this, the best CG in the world isn’t going to recreate being here in Berlin.” Spotnitz, who cut his teeth working on The X-Files, first experienced Dick’s novel in college. “It sounds dumb, but it was the first time it occurred to me that the good guys don’t necessarily win. That is really unsettling and frightening, to realise that there’s nothing inevitable about victory for the virtuous.”

Period shows are always expensive, but to do a period show in a time that never was is even more challenging Frank Spotnitz

The Berlin scenes occur in the season one finale: predominantly, the drama unfolds in the US where, after 17 years of occupation, life under the Reich has become almost normalised. In New York, a Nazi spymaster in the feline form of Rufus Sewell seeks to eradicate the last embers of resistance. In San Francisco, a senior Japanese politician (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) schemes away in consultation with the I Ching. Three Americans – Juliana Crane, her lover Frank Frink and mysterious stranger Joe Blake – are sucked into a plot surrounding the title character, a situation that makes their second-class status even more precarious. In Dick’s novel, the Man in the High Castle wrote a book that imagined a reality where Hitler lost. In the show, he’s more enigmatic auteur than author, apparently responsible for propaganda newsreels showing seemingly impossible Allied victories in the second world war, material seditious enough to endanger anyone who comes into contact with it.

Alexa Davalos, no stranger to period pieces after starring in Frank Darabont’s 1940s-set Mob City, plays Juliana, downtrodden aikido expert and impromptu fugitive. Her life gets flipped after a chance encounter with the newsreels, forcing her to flee from San Francisco to the neutral zone. For Davalos, the show taps into a common impulse to ask ourselves ‘what if?’. “As human beings, we have this propensity to ponder the different path, wondering that if we made a different decision, how it might have had a domino effect,” she says. “So there’s this palpable, relatable feeling within the story except in this case, it’s global.”

DJ Qualls as Ed McCarthy and Rupert Evans as Frank Frink. Photograph: Liane Hentscher/Amazon

The opening episodes feature some standard action beats: Sten gun shootouts, a truck chase, an assassination attempt. But one of the most striking scenes takes place when the taciturn Joe, played by Luke Kleintank, is pulled over by a local cop while en route to the neutral zone. During their conversation, ashes silently begin to fall around them. “Tuesdays,” mutters the cop. “The hospital’s burning.” It’s a chilling hint of how this familiar-looking world has spun off into something much more insidious.

“I was at a screening of the pilot and you could hear the audience gasp,” remembers Kleintank. “They suddenly realised this is a place where they routinely burn the disabled and the terminally ill. And it goes deeper as the series goes on, it really pushes the envelope.” The fact that they were fictionalising real-life horrors was never far from Kleintank’s mind. “There are moments where I had to stop and sit down for a minute. We’re dealing with a situation that actually happened, in many ways.”

The Man in the High Castle – A Better World

WARNING: this clip contains a major spoiler for anyone who hasn’t watched episode one of the series

For Rupert Evans, the challenges were physical as well as psychological. When Juliana abandons his character Frank, he’s left to answer to the authorities. “I had a pretty harrowing couple of days naked on a concrete floor getting tortured,” says Evans. “It wasn’t fun, but you just have to commit to it or it looks stupid.” The British actor has valuable experience when it comes to Nazi-smashing: he battled steampunk SS in the first Hellboy movie and took them on as Ian Fleming’s brother in Sky Atlantic mini-series Fleming. How do Sewell and the rest measure up here? “They’re probably even more intimidating, and I’ll tell you why,” he says. “Most of them speak with American accents, and they arrive in scenes with a smile. They’re the ones you have to really watch out for.”

While creating his alternate reality, Spotnitz opted to change the content of the book in one crucial way; he’d bring Hitler back to life. “He was dead in the book, and I just thought: it’s too good an opportunity,” he says. “We have to bring him back. So we use Hitler’s continued presence on the world stage as a source of anxiety because his power is in question. So there’s a lot of vicious Nazi plotting going on below him.” It’s just one part of a plan to seed storylines that could be expanded over multiple seasons. “We’re currently focused on these characters but the whole planet is out there, so we have that to explore,” says Spotnitz.

Alexa Davalos, and Luke Kleintank as Joe Blake. Photograph: Liane Hentscher/Other

Shooting a TV show about Nazis, even briefly, in Berlin raises certain sensitivities. (Due to German law, any swastikas were added later digitally.) But the show will launch in Germany at the same time as in the UK and US. It’s a place where the subject of Nazism is contentious but not taboo according to Spotnitz, who has been teaching a TV production and writing course in Berlin for the past two years: “I’ve had pitches from many German producers involving the Nazis, they talk about it all the time, more than anybody else. It’s extraordinary.”

So does he think The Man In The High Castle still has something to say about the way we live now? “There are strains of intolerance, hatred and racism that have actually been particularly loud the past few years,” says Spotnitz. “It’s my belief that what attracts people to fascism and totalitarianism is universal – it could happen to any country, any people, any time. I want people to look at the show and think: are we intrinsically different or would we be seduced by the same things? And if they say no, that’s fine, too. I don’t have the answers. But it’s a timely question.”

The entire first season of The Man In The High Castle will be released on Amazon Video on Friday 20 November