Not long ago, we heard that production on the upcoming fourth season of Westworld, HBO’s sci-fi drama about robots who gain sentience and challenge humanity for dominance of the world, had shut down due to an outbreak of COVID-19, which has become a pretty common issue over the past year. Happily, producer Lisa Joy revealed that things are back on track. “We are shooting it now,” she told SFX. “It’s busy. It’s a busy time here.”
So far as teasing the next season goes, Joy was mum on that. “Every season, I’m just excited to explore the changes in the characters, their evolutions,” she said, keeping details to a minimum. She did talk a little about how her own outlook clashes with the bleak view on the show, though:
"Even though Westworld can be dark… I think I’m an optimistic person. You have to be a bit of an optimist when you have kids who will be inheriting the world after you. And I really hope to try to find the path where humanity can improve somehow, and to meditate on that and the role in which we could assume to do that."
Westworld season 3 left on a pretty grim note, with the host version of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) teaming up with a host version of the Man in Black (Ed Harris) to manufacture more hosts to, one assumes, take over the world. But maybe humans and robots will work to an accord eventually…? We’ll see what’s in store when season 4 debuts, probably sometime in 2022.
Lisa Joy is “very, very excited” about Fallout series on Amazon Prime Video
Joy is extremely busy. In addition to working on Westworld, she also wrote and directed the sci-fi film Reminiscence starring Hugh Jackman, and she and husband Jonathan Nolan are making a TV adaptation of the long-running post-apocalyptic role-playing video game series Fallout for Amazon Prime Video. And that’s all on top of having two kids with Nolan. “I don’t see a lot of sleep in my future,” she joked. “I’m going to have to reminisce about a time when sleep was more possible!”
About Fallout, all Joy would say was that she is “very, very excited about it.” That one is probably a ways in the future, but she’ll be giving us lots of work to entertain us until then.
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