(intense music)
- [Man] I remember hearing stories about Witchers.
Is it true what they say?
- I'm gonna bring showrunner out, Lauren Hissrich,
and star of the show Freya Allen,
please give them a very warm round of applause,
go for it, here they come!
(crowd cheers)
- I had read the book The Last Wish
before Netflix had ever approached me,
and I'd really loved it.
It's a book of just short stories that follow Geralt
as a monster hunter, as a Witcher.
And there was something really exciting
about taking this world that is high fantasy,
it obviously has a lot of monsters,
and has a lot of magic, and has a lot of fun.
But at the core off it are these really grounded characters.
And the thing that excited me the most,
when I went to pitch Netflix,
is telling the story of Geralt the Witcher,
but also telling the stories of Ciri and Yennefer,
who are big players in the books,
but aren't quite given the same introduction as Geralt is.
It's interesting, because people ask me
about the female characters a lot,
and sort of the complications of them.
But it's really just what real women
are like anyway right?
I mean it's strong in some circumstances,
vulnerable in others.
Occasionally bold, occasionally bitchy, occasionally silent.
To me, what I wanted to capture is these women,
before they were seen through the lens of anyone else.
In the books, all of the characters are met through Geralt.
So you get Geralt's impression of them,
and then you get to learn to meet them.
And I wanted the world to see Ciri, who she was first.
I wanted to introduce the world
to the three of them at the same time,
and allow them each to really flourish
as characters on their own,
before they ever started meeting
or interacting with each other.
When I first was pitching to Netflix,
I pitched them a completely different version of the story,
which I've actually never talked about before.
I pitched them a version of the story
that actually started with the second to the last book,
which is Lady of the Lake.
Where Ciri sort of ends up sitting by a lake,
meeting with a man,
and sort of telling her story.
And I actually started with that narrative structure,
which is to have Ciri be our focal character
and be kind of our narrator.
The problem was is that,
I realized as I started writing that version,
that I wasn't getting enough of Geralt
and his perspective
because it was all being told through Ciri.
So it actually took me a while,
I went through several versions.
And then I literally had
one of those aha moments in the shower,
and sort of jumped out of the shower (laughing)
and said to my husband, like does this make sense?
Can I tell all three of these stories at the same time
and now have it be too confusing?
This particular season skips through a lot of space
and time as well, so I think there'll be
a lot of fun pairings of relationships,
some that fans will hopefully really be looking forward to
and expecting, and also some new fun ones.
You know, it's been interesting.
Because I do think that television audiences
are really savvy now.
And as a writer, as a creator, we have that on our side.
So I think that we do jump through time a lot,
and we jump back and forth through events
and characters that seem dead aren't dead,
and people come back and you revisit places
or revisit stories again.
But I think it's an exciting journey for fans
and for even audiences
that have never seen The Witcher before.
Because, I think that they can keep up,
I think they're really really smart,
and want to be challenged in how they watch television
and I think this can do that.
(dramatic music)
(sword clangs)
- I've heard tales of your kind Witcher.
(sword slashing) (men exclaiming)
I thought you'd have fangs or horns or something.
- I had them filed down.
(Yennefer laughs)
- You know, basically when we meet Geralt,
he's almost 100 years old already,
and he's lived a lot of life.
And I wanted to start him in a place where I could,
that an audience could sort of
understand what he's gone through.
But then immediately challenge him in that first episode,
and sort of start his journey off in a different direction.
So I chose a story called The Last Wish.
Which to me, sort of puts him up
against a character named Renfri.
And challenges his worldview.
So basically we get to meet the Witcher,
we get to hear how he exists in the world,
what he thinks his role is, how he feels about it,
and then we immediately challenge it
and make him rethink that.
And that really starts his journey off,
I would say his interactions with Renfri are
sort of his emotional touchstone for the entire season,
and he comes back pretty often to what happened
and the decision that he made.
This is Geralt's sort of first run in
with destiny in the show,
and it really changes his journey
for the entire rest of the season.
Also it's just one of my favorite stories,
Renfri is one of my favorite characters as well.
So to introduce audiences
to sort of this kick-ass female warrior bandit,
and say these are the type of characters
that you're gonna see in our series,
and there're gonna be people that seem bad
that are actually good,
and people who are good that,
or seem good who actually
have much more complicated motivations,
and I think it's a really good way
to present the world of The Witcher to an audience,
cause it's morally and ethically gray from the get-go.
Just because some one looks good on the outside,
or may have good intentions,
doesn't mean they don't have a darker side inside.
And the people that you would
typically watch the first season
and say, well oh obviously that's the villain,
it was very important for us to get into his brain
and understand why he's doing what he's doing,
and that he actually thinks that he's doing something
for the good of the continent.
You know, one of the first things that I wanted to do is,
there's a lot of history revealed,
and sort of backstories of characters,
that are revealed through little lines of dialogue.
And it will be Yennefer saying,
you know, as a child this happened.
And I thought, well rather than be told that story,
I wanna see that story.
Which is part of the reason we went back in Yen's childhood,
or part of the reason that we start with Ciri as a princess.
And talking to her family before she goes out
and sort of starts her journey in the books.
I prefer our audience to evolve with our characters,
and so that everyone's kind of on the same page
in moving forward through stories,
not necessarily in a linear fashion,
but in a way where an audience member understands
how this character got from point A to point B emotionally.
The big thing that I learned on Daredevil and Defenders
and Umbrella Academy is about adaptation,
and about taking something that has a huge fan base
and that people really really love in its existing form,
and translating it to a new form.
And the changes that have to be made
between a comic book and television,
or between a beloved book series and television.
You know, I definitely understand
that people who have been reading these books
since they were kids,
or have read them to their kids,
it's really scary to say,
oh we're gonna have someone new come in
and just start changing things in this thing that I love.
What I will always say is,
in general we add to, we try not to detract from.
Sometimes we have to leave things out,
again 4000 pages of books, only eight hours to tell a story.
So there's a lot that we have to leave out.
When we start inventing new characters specifically,
it's usually just to give our characters someone to talk to,
in a book, you don't necessarily have to talk to people,
you can have pages and pages of description.
When you're on the screen,
we can't just get into a character's mind
and understand what they're feeling.
So we have to give those characters
someone to bounce ideas off of.
There are entire chapters of the book that are,
Geralt just kind of espousing things,
well you can't just put a character down in a room
and have him start telling, you know,
monologuing for six, seven, eight pages,
it just doesn't work on screen.
- [Woman] Chaos is the most dangerous thing in this world.
But, without control, chaos will kill you.
(dramatic music)
- Obviously there's a lot of allusions to fairy tales.
The Last Wish, very much has a
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves things happening,
which is great.
There's a story called A Grain of Truth,
which is a little bit of a Beauty and the Beast.
And a lot of the monsters and characters
are drawn directly from Slavic folklore,
and that was really important for us to keep
and sort of honor.
And even as we create new monsters,
or new characters that aren't in the books
to sort of flesh out stories,
we actually go back to sort of Polish culture
as often as we can.
We have a Polish producer Tomasz Baginski who's amazing,
and who is my immediate go-to
for so many questions about so many things.
And sometimes it's just about,
what are the stories that you were told as a kid,
what are the ghost stories you were told?
What has been passed down through your family?
The other thing that is unexpected in The Witcher,
is the wit and humor.
I think fantasy a lot of times is really really earnest.
It's about big, sort of life changing stuff.
Battles and wars being fought,
and people being marginalized.
And all of those things exist in The Witcher,
but at the same time, the thing that I connected
to most in the books is that,
you also really get to know characters
who aren't being directly impacted
by that battle happening over there.
They just have to get up every day
and keep their farming going, and continue to live.
And what I love about how real people exist is,
in the face of tragedy, we often turn to humor,
it's our only way to keep going.
And the characters do that all the time in The Witcher,
and it's a really nice balance I think,
because you get to laugh as much as anything else.
It's not really depressing to watch, at the end of the day.
(sword clanging and slashing)
- Don't judge me.
- So I first met Andrzej in Poland,
right after I had sold the series.
And we sat down and we had a lovely lunch,
and I sort of picked his brain about who he was
and where he'd come from,
and not even so much about what made him write The Witcher,
I'm sure he's been asked that question a million times.
But it was really just sort of
trying to understand who he was,
and who he is in these books, where is he in these books?
And then he came to Budapest where we were shooting,
it was amazing.
He was really quite taken,
and he got tears in his eyes several times,
and would bat them away. (laughs)
I think it was really great for him to sort of,
for him to see that we were honoring his vision so much.
And sort of bringing to life,
and I think everyone's always worried too
that we're not going to be able to do things justice,
and I think he felt very much
like we were doing his stories justice,
and making them even more beautiful than he'd anticipated.
The best thing that he said to me,
I was asking him if he had, if he'd read all the scripts,
if he was interested in starting to see early cuts
because he basically has access
to as much of the material as he wants to.
And he said no, because he said that he thinks of it
kind of like the ingredients of soup.
And he said, if you just line up the ingredients for me
that's not gonna do anything for me.
What I would rather do is taste the soup in the end.
And he really wants to, I think he trusts what we're doing,
he has seen enough to whet his appetite,
and now he wants to see what the world is going to see
in its fully finished form,
and I'm so excited for him to see it!
- [Man] You will unleash
(intense dramatic music)
true calamity upon us all.
(intense dramatic music)
- [Geralt] I'll take that chance.
(dramatic music)