“Almost all of the dialogue” in The Wheel of Time show isn’t from the books

The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins talks about changes being made from the books. How will the characters, dialog and locations be different?

Amazon continues work on its adaptation of The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan’s beloved epic fantasy series. The team has taken to giving fans behind-the-scenes looks every Wednesday, and today is no exception. Below, take a look at Thom Merrilin’s guitar, cataloged from the moment of creation in the script to the actual prop on set:

Thom Merrilin is a gleeman, essentially a wandering minstrel. He’s not known to play a guitar in the books — his instrument of choice is usually the harp — but that’s just one of many changes being made to Jordan’s story.

Showrunner Rafe Judkins got on Instagram to talk more about the coming changes, which resulted in some pretty interesting exchanges. For example, The Wheel of Time famously sends its characters all over the wide world to a variety of towering cities. But in the real world, there are only so many cities and so much money. Have any needed to be cut?

"This is perhaps the biggest source of changes for us. Even with the massive amount of money Amazon has kindly given us to bring this world to life, to go to as many unique cities/villages/locations as they do in the books is simply impossible. We have chosen to do a few places extremely well (both culturally and with production design) instead of doing dozens of places cheaply and badly. This results in many changes that have huge ripple effects (if you can’t go to Baerlon, do you still met Min? Do you still encounter the Whitecloaks? Do you still have dreams of Ba’alzamon? Etc.). I’m betting that most things that feel the most unnecessarily changed to people from the books (even if they’re hugely separated from that specific location) will be borne out of a location-specific change."

I think I can live with this change; like I said, there’s only so much money in the world, and Robert Jordan wrote about a lot of cities. The series has 14 books, you know.

I’m more curious about the characters. Judkins has assured fans that most of the characters they know will appear on the show, even if some characters introduced in the first book, The Eye of the World, won’t turn up in the first season. and they’re not inventing any fully new characters, although there might be some characters who are composites of multiple other people from the novels, which makes sense. Just like there are a lot of cities, there are a lot of characters.

But what about the major characters like Rand, Mat, Perrin and Nynaeve? Have the writers ever had to change their personalities?

"We try not to. Most of our job is about making sure that we create a story and scenes that can tell the audience about character motivations and WHY they’re doing something they’re doing when we can’t just drop into their head and say it like you can in a book. This often results in some of the biggest “changes,” but they’re ultimately put in to make sure that the character on screen is as emotionally true as possible."

And I found Judkins’ comment on dialogue changes particularly interesting:

"Every writer receives a document when they begin their script put together by our book expert, Sarah, that breaks down every scene in the episode and gives specific dialogue and scene references from the books for it. Especially for scenes that aren’t from the books at all, we will find scenes from the books with the same characters together or talking about the same thing thematically. That said, predictably, almost all of the dialogue in the show is not from the books so as to sound as natural as possible with out locations/actors/scenes as they’re played."

Did anyone else get whiplash reading that? He was describing the steps they take to ensure they have the dialogue from the books they need, and then went, “But obviously we don’t take any of the dialogue directly from the books.” Okay…?

We’ll have some time yet to puzzle through what that means. If all goes well, expect the first season of The Wheel of Time to premiere on Amazon Prime Video sometime in 2021.

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