Foundation: Dark Knight Writer David Goyer Explains 4 Key Things You Need To Know

David S. Goyer (Dark City, The dark knight) may be producing and writing Foundation, based on the influential science fiction novel series by Isaac Asimov, for Apple TV Plus, but it had a rocky road to the novels themselves.

“I had heard of Foundation as a kid,” Goyer told Polygon about Zoom. “My father, who is an avid science fiction fan, gave me a copy of the trilogy when I was 13 years old. And he said, ‘This is the greatest science fiction work ever written.’ He did not read it.

The Foundation series, which is perhaps more concisely summed up as “the fall of the Roman Empire but it is space,” began with eight short stories published between 1942 and 1950, which were first compiled into three novel volumes in the early 2000s. fifty. . Much later, after pressure from fans and publishers, Asimov returned to the series, publishing four more novels throughout the 1980s.

On the subject, Goyer also took the same time to enter the Foundation, and he only gave him one chance at age 20. “I don’t think I have understood everything. I picked it up again in my late 30s, early 40s, and then I began to understand it and to understand the magnitude of what Asimov had done. Foundation it was the first work of science fiction that was taken seriously, where people sat down and said, science fiction can be a work of art, it can be a commentary on civilization.

In the same way that Asimov’s established the three laws of robotics As a framework for its Robot series, the Foundation’s books are based on a single science fiction idea. Mathematician Hari Seldon has developed a way of predicting the broad course of society’s future and has discovered that the Galactic Empire will soon fall, after which humanity will be plunged into a 10,000-year dark age.

But Seldon’s mathematics has also shown a way to shorten that dark age to just a thousand years: the establishment of a community called the Foundation. As the novels progress through the centuries, Asimov threatens the Seldon plan with internal and external social forces, and every time you think it’s about to fail, the plot twists.

“If you went to someone’s library when I was little,” Goyer told Polygon, “they would have a copy of The Lord of the rings – that would be the fantasy book, even in a serious library, that would be up there – and they would have Foundation. That would be the only science fiction work that would be there. So everyone, even serious academics, consider Foundation something worthy “.

But it’s also considered one of the less filmable holy grails of sci-fi, and not just because of how the plot progresses hundreds of years at a time. Foundation doesn’t exactly focus on classic film ideas about stars. Asimov keeps it light in action and visuals and heavy in climaxes of almost Agatha Christie-style discussions between politicians, academics, or merchants who are light years away from actual space battles.

How did Goyer turn this source material into the lush and colorful world of Foundation for Apple TV?

“That’s really the tightrope act,” he told Polygon, “and the audience will decide whether or not we succeed as a show. Novels are great on ideas and great on dialogue. They’re not particularly great on character, they’re certainly not great on action, most of the action happens off-screen or between sentences. The Sack of Trantor – “the capital of the Galactic Empire, a planet whose entire surface has become a single covered city kept in perfect climate control with artificial skies” – the fall of the Empire, occurs off-screen, in one sentence. That’s something we could expand to a full season. I think any reasonable person could read the books and know that it would be impossible to do an adaptation one by one, line by line. ”

Goyer says he preserved the spirit of the Foundation’s books even as he updated, humanized, and greatly expanded them, keeping several guiding ideas in mind throughout development: keep technology simple, silhouettes memorable, and conflicts that may arise. relate, and have a plan.

The technology: “In terms of technology,” he told Polygon, “I didn’t want to waste a lot of time explaining the technology. It takes place 25,000 years in the future. I wanted technology to be able to work intuitively and primarily visually without having to explain things. I didn’t want too many sci-fi terms. So I use a lot of classical language. The Empire has force fields, but they call it an ‘aura’, things like that. “

The design: “Because of the shapes of things, because of the costumes, I wanted things to feel classic. I was really worried about the silhouettes of things. ”

The conflicts: “I wanted to make sure the stories worked only on a purely dramatic level, even if you took off all the sci-fi trappings. Because if this show is going to work, it will have to attract people who do not consider themselves to be sci-fi fans, or even Asimov fans. “

The plan: “I released eight seasons, 80 episodes to Apple. Who knows if we will get there. Hopefully, if it’s a success, we will. But the big plot points that are going to happen over the course of those eight seasons are all settled, so we know we’re not making vampires. We know what we’re writing towards. ”

Most of all, Goyer said he wanted to do a cover of Foundation It reflects the world of the modern audience, in the same way that Asimov reflected the audience of 70 years ago.

“People tune in to television for many different reasons,” Goyer told Polygon, “so the trick for me was to keep the kind of intoxicating philosophical debates that were going on, but also figure out how to dramatize those debates, how to come up with characters that they would externalize the ideas that Asimov was working with. ”

Foundation premieres on Apple TV Plus on September 24 with two full episodes.