Amazon originally aired its pilot episode earlier this year, citing that it was the most watched original television series for Amazon, and a month later had secured the rights to a 10-episode season.
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The story’s heroine is Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), who, as the story begins, is living in Japanese-occupied San Francisco and studying aikido, the Japanese martial art. “In the pilot you learn that her father was killed by the Japanese, and yet that doesn’t stop her from studying aikido and seeing the beauty of it”, Spotnitz says.
“The reason I do everything that I do with my dad’s work and what I do with [Electric Shepherd Productions] and as a trustee is about getting people to read his work”.
Spotnitz and The Man in the High Castle do a very effective job conveying just how bleak the prospects are for the Resistance. The starkly remixed iconography is alarming, fascinating, and, with the world now in paroxysms of war, uprising, and revolution, all the more thought-provoking. How injustice and savagery can become run-of-the-mill, even human. And I get it because it’s personal, they love the book and it affects them in a personal way and they become very passionate about it. I really understand that. She’s curious, and unbelievably trusting of those – like Joe – who volunteer to help her. Joe takes things like hearing that they’ve been burning disabled people and other “undesirables” in his stride. “It’s a very different show!”
“For me, in developing Juliana [Crain], I wanted to be as true to the book as I could”, Alexa Davalos added. You don’t really think that way. “It makes it harder to just point your finger at those people over there with their unusual accents”. A devoted patriot, Smith doesn’t care for baseball: “It’s a lazy sport compared to track or soccer”.
“All Jewish composers are gone”, Spotnitz says. He continues, “It’s unsettling to think that could be the case”. The characters are ultimately and centrally the life-blood of the series. And that’s terrifying. And that’s not that we, as Americans, like to think about.
Also confronting viewers is a vision of American un-exceptionalism. Overall, the story keeps with the ideas presented by Dick.
“This is a world where Elvis didn’t happen”, Evans said. Of course, Hitler was evil and he was a madman and a psychopath, but not all of the men who fought in the German army were evil.
What else do you have coming up over the next few months? “They don’t remember what it was like before”.
The triumphant National Socialists and Imperial Japan divide up the United States. Frank’s scenes in the Japanese prison, where through a hole in his cell he’s able to talk to the resistance fighter who first guided Juliana to Canon City, could have worked like an abridged Brothers Karamazov kind of interrogation about free will and divine indifference. In contrast to the more straitlaced and ethnically uniform American Reich, the Japanese Pacific States feel more, well, American.
Rupert Evans as Frank Frink. “A film that shows another world?”
Inside the bag? A film reel marked “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”, containing World War II news footage that looks familiar to us: victories at Normandy, Iwo Jima and the like. Could the Allies really have lost the war to Nazi Germany and Japan?
“That’s one of the things about watching his character – you can never quite make up your mind whether he’s good or bad”. “Tuesdays they burn cripples, the terminally ill. Drag on the state”. “It really isn’t a television narrative”, Spotnitz says. There is a lawless “neutral zone” slicing through the country along the Rocky Mountains. “It’s something I hope to do in season two”. What do viewers need to know about the character going into the show?
That’s a relief, considering how other ambitious series have struggled with multiseason plotting.
Ridley Scott, who brought Dick’s’ “Blade Runner” to the big screen, serves as executive producer, which is made instantly and abundantly clear. “But I felt like you had to do that, because that’s what they did”.
You play the character Joe Blake. Plotwise, this is an enormous series. “I just feel like I was born in the wrong era”. I do know how it ends. Large chunks are devoted to descriptions of Dick’s favorite hobby at the time he wrote it (jewelry making), as well as his favorite divination method (the I Ching).
Despite this, says Poniewozik, the show marries its heady ideas with an assortment of genres from sci-fi to espionage thriller and mysticism to create a mystery that is “bracing” and “addictive”.
I’m a third-generation actor in my family. We were in the same city. A complex show with compelling characters and high production values, “The Man in the High Castle” is wonderfully addictive. I’ve seen the first six and am absolutely hooked. “I was in constant contact with the fans online”. It’s a pretty incredible piece of work so it would be a shame not to see it.
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“This is not hyperbole, this show definitely would not exist if Amazon hadn’t picked it up”, Isa Hackett tells me by telephone, two days before Man in the High Castle’s entire first season debuts on Amazon November 19.
