Based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film, HBO’s new series Westworld comes from executive producer J.J. Abrams and EPs/writers Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, Person of Interest) and Lisa Joy (Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice). The series expands on the concept of Crichton’s film, about a theme park populated by robots that recreates the Wild West for guests, putting much more of a focus on the robots (or “Hosts” as they’re called here) and how they experience Westworld – while also depicting those behind the scenes who control Westworld (played by the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright, no less), along with those visiting the park.

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I sat down with husband/wife duo Nolan and Joy to discuss their approach to Westworld. We spoke about what appealed to them about the concept, the choice to begin the series through the perspective of one of the Hosts (Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores), how much they let their actors know ahead of time about their characters and much more.For me, part of it was the character exploration and the possibilities of doing that. I haven’t done this genre before. I’d watched westerns before this and I admire the craft but I hadn’t latched on to this in a visceral, connected way and I think it’s because in many Westerns, though not all, it’s a kind of limited lens. You’re looking at an archetypal hero, normally a guy, and the women are secondary figures. They’re the footnotes to the man’s journey. Starting from the Host perspective, not only did we subvert the sci-fi concept, by not starting from the human perspective, but we also subverted the western genre, by not just focusing on the most notable western archetypes but by looking at the women there and people of color. The thought of expanding that lens and having this more pluralistic perspective is really intriguing for me. And doing it as a TV show allows you to dive so much deeper into the characters, both the hosts and the humans within the world. That was a delicious challenge I was really excited to explore.For me, the jumping off point of starting with the Host… Everyone’s favorite party conversation brainteaser these days is “Are we living in a simulation?” I get tired of that question fairly easily because in a sufficiently robust simulation there’d be no way of answering of course. But the idea that our lives could be programmatic, that there could be rules at play that we’re not familiar with, that we don’t understand, is something I’ve long been fascinated by - and so is the idea of fate and the idea of an unseen hand that’s guiding events. Here, it’s a very literal thing. Before we had children, I was a gamer back in the day, and I think that was the other aspect of what drew me to the original concept, was the idea of life ever more beginning to resemble a game. That with enough wealth and sufficient technological advancement that you could get to a point where you live, as a lot of people do, a significant portion of your life in a fantasy universe, whether it's World of Warcraft or the new VR games that are just coming out.You really dissolve into that experience and live your life inside - not a real world but a curated world. One that’s distinct from the real world because there’s intention there, there are rules. There is a narrative. Life, real life, resists narrative through lines. There aren’t hidden levels. There’s just f**king chaos. But in the game universe there are always deeper levels of meaning. So for us it was like a candy store. There were all these ideas that we wanted to play with in one series.We have three perspectives for the show. The Hosts, and that’s where we start, the technicians – the writers, programmers -- and then the guests. We knew there always had to be perspective on that because of the unique nature of the proposition of it. We spent a lot of time thinking about who was the ideal… Given the rules of the world and the rules of the genre, the western genre was male dominated, so we kind of reverse engineered back to Crichton’s original pairing of two guys on a bachelor weekend because that felt like exactly the right lens to explore that aspect.And you’ll see other guests throughout, glimpses of them. You see a family in the first one and you’ll encounter a couple other guests as you go along. You’ll see some female guests. But in these episodes we have this wonderful ensemble and we were trying to constrain in some way the scope of it to what they would see through their lens and their perspective. So you encounter some of them through the Host perspective and in passing. You’ll see more of the male dyad in terms of the guests.It was on a need to know basis. We talked to a lot of the actors and there are parts within their performance where they’re meant to not know their future. Sometimes I’d talk to Evan [Rachel Wood] and she’d be like “I don’t want to know. It’s enough that I know what’s in front of me and what I have to do. I want to be in the dark in the same way that my character is in the dark because that means I can focus on the performance as it is, as I’d be experiencing things and that was very much how we felt also.” They put amazing trust in us and we would communicate a lot about character work and everything but we did hold some of it back and let them experience it along with their characters.Especially for the Host characters. We’re always willing to have a conversation about what’s happened in a character's past because they need to know that going into it. With the Hosts, they don’t get to know what happened in their past so you have to be that much more sadistic.We want the audience to experience it, but roughly speaking, that’s about right, what you’ve pictured - a typical journey to Westworld, defining the length of that, roughly laying out that season. But there’s an awful lot of other stuff going on.It’s not strictly in continuity. It’s a little bit of a nod toward the idea that in this world and this telling of the story, this isn’t a new place. This is a place with its own history and that sense of history within this place is very important to the story we’re telling. This is a labor of love for Hopkins’ character. He’s been there for decades and parts of our story are told in flashback. It was really about establishing a sense that this place is an ongoing cultural institution, with a playful nod toward the movie.

Westworld premieres Sunday, October 2nd on HBO. You can read my review here Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman