As part of the "Westerns: Then and Now" panel at the ATX TV festival in Austin this weekend - which included participants from Justified and Hell on Wheels - Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Person of Interest) and Lisa Joy (Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice) debuted a new sizzle reel for their upcoming HBO series Westworld , based on the Michael Crichton movie about a theme park where guests interact with lifelike robots, inside a detailed recreation of the wild west.

The sizzle reel opens with very picturesque landscape shots of what appears to be the Old West. Evan Rachel Wood's Dolores lives a romantic frontier life, riding horses and watching sunsets. "I choose to see the beauty, to believe that there's an order to the chaos, a purpose," she says, never questioning the nature of her existence - until we see a little boy tell her she's not real.



We then hear her say, "This world... I think there may be something wrong with it. Something hiding underneath."



From there, "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones plays, as we start shifting back and forth between the Western setting and the subterranean laboratory that runs the robotic works of the fake community, including Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Ford and Jeffrey Wright's Bernard Lowe, the head programmer of the unaware AIs that populate Westworld.



Violence is commonplace, as people are frequently shot (sometimes in the back) and Ed Harris' Man in Black kills a character played by Clifton Collins Jr. by slicing his throat from behind - much of this footage was quite visceral. The Man in Black also looks to stab and kill Thandie Newton's madame Maeve Millay, though several other images seem to suggest she may live beyond that point, making us question what constitutes a real death in Westworld, considering most of the inhabitants are sentient robots. Lowe informs Dr. Ford that there's a mistake in the current code for the robots, as Ford watches a gut-shot "cowboy" drinking milk, ignoring his injuries, and we see the milk pour out of the bloody, open stomach wound.



Dolores and Dr. Ford speak. She asks if they are very old friends. "No, I wouldn't say friends, Dolores," he says. "I wouldn't say that at all."

James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld.

Anthony Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright in Westworld.

The footage was great and clearly went over big with the ATX audience, who gave it an enthusiastic response. While it was only screened for those in attendance, and is not being released publicly right now, a description follows:During the panel, Co-Creator Jonathan Nolan spoke about why HBO was the best fit for this ambitious project."It was actually Game of Thrones that made us feel like we could pull this off," he replied. "The 30-second pitch for Westworld was that we were sort of making Days of Heaven and Alien simultaneously and then putting them together. Which is kind of my dream project, right? Exploring two genres simultaneously and playing with the juxtaposition of both. It's fantastic. And HBO felt like the only place we could make this. And Game of Thrones was really the inspiration for us. Game of Thrones had this commitment to practical production value, which is not necessarily what's in play these days."While Westworld -- which also counts J.J. Abrams among the executive producers -- isn't a typical western, Lisa Joy still addressed why the genre is so popular and enduring. "You're dealing with people in a lawless land," she said. "In a tabula rasa where you really get to define who you are because the rules are incomplete and the laws are semi-enforced. I think the interesting thing about that is that it forces the characters within these pieces to think about law in terms of a personal code. Because it can't be enforced externally so they have to come up with one on their own. And I think there's a timelessness to that.""The system doesn't always work for you," she continued. "It's incomplete and it's always evolving. And so in some ways, we're all frontiersmen. And so westerns and sci-fi - which can basically be space westerns - have a timeless appeal and are a really great form for exploring character."There's a meta aspect to Westworld in that some of the characters, Truman-show style, don't know that they're part of a grand show and that they've been designed to enact certain western genre elements and tropes. "There's this meta part of the world where we're dealing with the technicians who are also scripting the Westworld," Joy remarked. "We have some great comic actors there. And the great part about having two genres in one is the disconnect between some romantic love scene playing out under this golden-hued sunset and then you'll have a clumsy tech, blundering about, doing some narcissistic s**t. We got to make fun of writers, we got to make fun of ourselves. There'd be these histrionic, dramatic creative tantrums going on below ground, while up above people would be getting shot and massacred, which is so much worse.""You couldn't tell from the trailer," Nolan joked, "but it's actually a workplace situation comedy."Nolan then added, "There's a particularly hair-raising scene in the finale, which is about the contrast between artificial lives and those who are living. Compared to the original movie [which centered on guests being attacked by the out of control robots], for those who've seen it, our show is about the robots who do not realize they're in a fake western town. They think it's real. And so we finally, as the season was ending, had two of the actors turn around and say 'I'm trying to figure out what this is like, and it's f**king us! It's the actors and the writers."

Westworld is slated to premiere in the fall on HBO.Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity