The Witcher, Netflix’s sword and sorcery answer to Game of Thrones, premieres in just over a month. As we start to take in these potential heirs to the throne, we have to ask: how long will they stick around? The Witcher, starring Henry Cavill as a professional monster hunter making his way in a medieval-style world where the people can be worse than the beasts, is stacked high with talent and is based on some solid source material, but are we looking at a show than can dominate a decade of television like Thrones did?
Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of The Witcher novels, thinks so, but honestly, that guy says a lot of things; I wouldn’t take his word for it just yet. However, speaking to SFX Magazine, showrunner Lauren Hissrich sounds like she’s in it for the long haul. “I’ve for seven seasons,” she said. “Right now it’s just about, ‘how do you set up stories that really capture audiences for years at a time?’ The worst thing we could do is put all of our energies just into season one, and not be thinking about where these characters can grow to.”
I mean, you could focus on season 1 and let it stand alone — that’s what Damon Lindelof did with Watchmen over on HBO, and that show is terrific so far — but it’s good to play the long game, too.
Speaking of the long game, The Witcher books are a little unique as far as source material goes. The first two books are basically short story collections — the first season of the show is more or less adapting them, so far as I can tell. Then, there are five books that tell a proper serialized story. And then there are the video games, which are their own thing. All together, there should be plenty of material for seven seasons.
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Other folks are talking about The Witcher. Speaking to badtaste.it, executive producer Tomek Bagiński remembered the long road to pitching the show to Netflix. “It was a journey of almost ten years, since I first met Sapkowski,” he remembered. “I had dreamed of bringing books to the screen since they were published. We started working with Netflix two and a half years ago, when Lauren became a showrunner.”
"We have always worked with Andrzej, using him as a consultant. He doesn’t want to be too involved because he likes to be surprised by the series, but we know he is very happy with the result so far."
I honestly don’t care if Sapkowski is working on the show. I do want him to speak about it on talk shows, though. Guy is funny.
Bagiński also clued us in to some trials the team went through filming the first season. “n the trailer you see an enormous trebuchet: know that we have broken it, and this is just one of the accidents that have happened to us! It was a very difficult project, with thousands of people involved for eight months. It is difficult to indicate a special moment: there were special moments every day.”
Happily, he’s ready for more. “It can never be simple, because if it were simple to achieve we would not get this quality level.” Look for that doomed trebuchet in the trailer below:
Also talking to badtaste.tv is production designer Andrew Laws, who’s excited about keeping the effects on the show mostly based on the real world. “We wanted our world to be realistic and to connect with a real setting,” he said. “We have therefore worked with visual effects to increase and extend the setting, but almost all the environments are real. Otherwise the story would not look realistic and the contact between spectator and history would break.”
"The goal is to get a very visceral and concrete feeling, in which the characters are very important, the audience must feel that they are with these characters. Obviously the monsters are the part with the greatest digital effects but many have a practical and a digital part. Look, it’s a very different approach and quite fresh compared to what you would expect."
We didn’t think the giant swamp spider was made entirely of practical effects, but it’s good to know they tried. “Monsters are part of the fabric of the world in which the series takes place, they are an integral part of it,” Laws continued. “But every different element of this world influences the rest, so for us it is interesting to work on the design and creation of the environment in which these monsters live, due to the symbiosis that exists between these elements.”
Finally, costume designer Tim Aslam talked a little about the outfits for the show, which you can sample above. “I discussed it with the showrunner at the beginning: it’s a fantasy series, it’s not really medieval. The style we have chosen is quite Gothic, and we have applied it to all aspects by studying fashion (which Lauren knows well) and the influences for the clothing of the various ethnic groups.”
The Witcher drops on December 20!
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h/t IGN, Redanian Intelligence