Don’t worry, HBO’s His Dark Materials will stay true to the books
HBO released the official trailer for its adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books at last week’s San Diego Comic-Con, and so far, it’s looking pretty good, particularly if you’re a fan of the books. Lots of important stuff here, from armored polar bears to religious menace to daemons, a physical manifestation of the human soul that, in Pullman’s world, all people have. In this story, these animal familiar are as important as the characters to whom they belong.
Speaking at the His Dark Materials panel at Comic-Con, screenwriter Jack Thorne (the guy behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, incidentally) revealed that he wrote 46 drafts of the first episode before he felt he’d gotten every important detail just right. “You do sometimes get lost in other stuff, but the thing about the daemons is that they are characters,” he said. “Everything that Philip built is for a reason. I think that’s what we’ve tried to do, is just try and capture the important notes, and tell them to the best of our ability.”
His Dark Materials HBO/BBC. Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby
In the finished episodes, you might think that the daemons would be rendered entirely with CGI, and you’d be…mostly right. But there were still puppeteers standing in for each daemon on set. In post-production, the puppets were edited out and replaced with CGI-rendered versions. This method was particularly helpful for Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) who plays Texan aëronaut Lee Scoresby. Scoresby’s daemon is an arctic hare named Hester, and Miranda’s first scene, fittingly enough, was on his character’s hot air balloon singing a duet with his daemon.
The show’s protagonist Lyra Belacqua has a white ermine named Pantalaimon for a daemon, and the pair are constantly getting into trouble. Actor Dafne Keene (Logan) wasn’t a fan of the books before she landed the role, but afterward, she gobbled them up. “Literally, until I finished the three books, I did not close the book,” she said. “They’re just so fun, they’re so entertaining, they’re so good because Philip’s amazing.”
Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon from His Dark Materials. HBO/BBC
While daemons are an integral part of the story, it’s Pullman’s stance on religion that may be the most controversial part of the story. When The Golden Compass — the theatrical adaptation of the first book in the trilogy — hit theaters in 2007, many Christian organizations boycotted the film and Pullman’s books, saying they were an attack on religion.
His Dark Materials executive producer Jane Tranter disagrees. “Philip Pullman, in these books, is not attacking belief, not attacking faith, not attacking religion or the church per se,” she said. “He’s attacking a particular form of control where there is a very deliberate attempt to withhold information, keep people in the dark, and not allow ideas and thinking to be free.”
Perhaps the reason The Golden Compass was a flop was that it shied away from the religious aspect of Pullman’s books. That shouldn’t be a concern with the television series, given HBO’s penchant for producing shows that aren’t afraid to push boundaries.
Still, as Tranter explains, HBO needed some convincing to come on board. “It was a long process,” she said. “It took us a couple of years to really begin to put the pieces together in a way that people other than myself and Jack…and a small group of people could see. It’s not an easily comprehensible piece, and I think [HBO] felt that was very much for them.”
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