Western Union the Couple Behind HBO's WestWorld

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy might have created Westworld, HBO’s new series about an android-populated Western-themed park, but this isn’t their first rodeo. Nolan cowrote five of older brother Christopher’s movies, including Interstellar. Joy is a TV veteran who’s writing the new big-screen Battlestar Galactica. However, Westworld—based on the 1973 cult-classic film—is the first project that Nolan and Joy, married since 2009, have collaborated on. Here, they discuss Westworld’s heady sci-fi themes and their domestic pardnership.

- Mark Yarm

The original Westworld came out in 1973. What made you want to revisit this world?

Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan: I’ve been working for several years now with [show executive producer] J.J. Abrams on Person of Interest. Twenty-three years ago he sat down with Michael Crichton, who had directed the original film, to talk about remaking it, but he couldn’t figure out how to tackle it. Twenty years later it dawned on him that part of the difficulty was that the film is packed with ideas. For instance, there’s a throwaway line in the original about the thing that’s propagating the error from robot to robot being like a virus. I looked it up, and the first computer virus didn’t appear in the wild until 1974. There are so many ideas that J.J. thought, “There’s a series here.”

Unlike the movie, lots of the story is told from the POV of the park’s android “hosts.” How did that decision come about?

Nolan: The robots’ obliviousness to the rules of the world makes them great protagonists. I remember arguing with my brother over Memento; he wanted to do it backward, because going backward stranded the audience in the protagonist’s perspective. Westworld ’s hosts share something in common with him in that they have a certain amount of amnesia—in this case, the amnesia has been built in by design.

Lisa Joy: Jonah and I would joke that if we were hosts, we would be so easy to program because our loop is so tiny: We would breakfast together, drive into the office, work, work, work, eat lunch and dinner out of a Styrofoam box, work, work, work, try to get home, put our daughter to bed, rinse and repeat.

Nolan: Whoever’s writing our lives is—