The world we get in The Wheel of Time is completely different.
We see things we haven't seen on TV before.
Right from episode one, we start with a bang.
We’re taking no prisoners with this story.
It's hard-hitting and it's fierce,
and the conflicts are huge right from the word go.
In the first episode,
we build an entire village, then burn it down.
Building the Two Rivers I feel like is one of…
...the biggest joys we've all had on making the series of Wheel of Time.
One of the most important things for us
when we approached the adaptation of the books was,
how do we do a couple of very key things?
One of them was to take the first book and make it more of an ensemble piece.
The book is very much from Rand's perspective,
and for the show we wanted to see it from all of our characters' perspectives.
One of the big changes we have for the characters in the first episode
is aging them up a little bit,
and that was a very conscious choice on our part.
If we had all of our cast members be 17 or 18,
if you're watching it, it would read as a much younger show
that's not for adult audiences in the same way.
And so, Perrin has a wife.
Egwene and Rand's relationship is much further along
and deeper than it is in the books.
All of these were choices that we made to
age up those characters and have it feel authentic.
For Egwene, there's this huge piece of Two Rivers mythology,
which is the idea that all the women there
have braids after they're past a certain age.
I think that's a good example of how we're trying to approach the adaptation
as well as not creating things whole cloth,
but taking something that's right in the books,
the idea of a braid ceremony that must exist for these women
and saying, "What could that be? What would it look like?
"And what does it mean emotionally for the characters?"
We had about a week of long night shoots
doing the big Trolloc battle at the end of episode one,
which is very demanding.
And it's difficult doing very, very technical performances
at an hour when you should rightly be in bed.
There's an extra demand on your body to pull finesse and precision out of it
when it’s half past four in the morning
and you're racing to get the shot before the sun comes up.
We had to do the battle scene almost straight off.
For Daniel and I, that was really cool.
It's sort of trained us to be very intuitive of one another's presence.
We have to have a very kind of psychic bond
and a lot of the beautiful chemistry of the battle
comes from Lan's dexterous, dynamic sword fighting,
balanced with Moiraine's channeling of the One Power.
So there's this yin-yang relationship between us all the time,
of fast and slow, of brutality and gentleness,
of, you know, stillness and bursts of energy.
The only thing our characters know
when they leave the Two Rivers at the end of the pilot
is that Moiraine has said they must.
And so, for these kids, they've just taken this enormous leap of faith in this woman,
who seems both very exciting, but very dangerous.
What are Moiraine's intentions?
The way that our imaginations can be unleashed and feast
on a production of this scale and scope
will be very exciting, I think, for people.