The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

MA: There was that possibility, when you’re showing horrific things, is it going to be torture porn all the way through? How do you get out of that? And it’s the same problem with yours because the subject matter is horrific. But both of these narratives are possibilities because of the way America is. People might see it in a more hopeful way than they might have had that not happened. Your show is coming after a couple events: the election, the storming of the Capitol and the Biden agenda that is rolling out. When the show launched, people reacted very strongly to it, with a lot of anxiety. And at the Women’s March, there were all of these signs that said: MAKE ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN. MA: In the lead-up to the Trump election, people were saying all this “witch” language about Hillary Clinton-just straight out of the 17th century. Given the constraint of 10 episodes, it never occurred to me that things would go awry. Their fixes for adaptation were clever-in some ways improvements. So he had a solution, which I don’t want to reveal, and it made a lot of sense. But on a TV show, it’s very static and you want to make it more dynamic. In the North Carolina section, Cora’s alone in an attic for like, 70 pages, and in the novel, you can have her have conversations, look out a little peephole, and you can expand the space. No-the few conversations we had about Barry’s proposals about characters they would add or compress made sense to me. I assumed with 10 episodes, there was enough room to get all the big things in.ĬW: I don’t know! I was busy thinking about my depression.ĬW: I had a lot on my mind.

So the only way you could control it would be to write it, direct it and produce it yourself.ĬW: It never occurred to me that they would change things terribly. It is true that if you try to control these things, it’s not going to work, because no film or television person in their right mind would give you any sort of a veto. For instance, I said, It is forbidden for you to kill Aunt Lydia, and they said, Well, we weren’t going to anyway.

I like to think I might have some influence. With the additional seasons for Handmaid’s, what was your process of letting go and letting their vision take over? I hope it’s gonna go well because it’s Barry, but if it doesn’t, it’s separate. CW: In handing it over to Barry, I felt like the book is the book, and the TV show is a TV show.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead