Westworld - Episode 1.02 - Chestnut / In The Weeks Ahead Promo
Press Release
Episode #2: “Chestnut”
Debut date: SUNDAY, OCT. 9 (9:00-10:00 p.m.)
Other HBO playdates: Oct. 9 (11:30 p.m., 2:00 a.m.), 10 (10:30 p.m.), 11 (9:10 p.m.), 12 (11:30 p.m.), 14 (2:30 a.m.), 15 (10:35 p.m.) and 18 (8:00 p.m.)
HBO2 playdates: Oct. 10 (8:00 p.m.), 15 (3:30 p.m., 8:00 p.m.), 16 (8:00 p.m.) and 29 (5:10 p.m.), and Nov. 26 (1:10 p.m.)
A pair of guests, first-timer William (Jimmi Simpson) and repeat visitor Logan (Ben Barnes), arrive at Westworld with different expectations and agendas. Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Quality Assurance head Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) debate whether a recent host anomaly is contagious. Meanwhile, behavior engineer Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) tweaks the emotions of Maeve (Thandie Newton), a madam in Sweetwater’s brothel, in order to avoid a recall. Cocky programmer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) pitches his latest narrative to the team, but Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has other ideas. The Man in Black (Ed Harris) conscripts a condemned man, Lawrence (Clifton Collins, Jr.), to help him uncover Westworld’s deepest secrets.
Written by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy; directed by Richard J. Lewis.
Debut date: SUNDAY, OCT. 9 (9:00-10:00 p.m.)
Other HBO playdates: Oct. 9 (11:30 p.m., 2:00 a.m.), 10 (10:30 p.m.), 11 (9:10 p.m.), 12 (11:30 p.m.), 14 (2:30 a.m.), 15 (10:35 p.m.) and 18 (8:00 p.m.)
HBO2 playdates: Oct. 10 (8:00 p.m.), 15 (3:30 p.m., 8:00 p.m.), 16 (8:00 p.m.) and 29 (5:10 p.m.), and Nov. 26 (1:10 p.m.)
A pair of guests, first-timer William (Jimmi Simpson) and repeat visitor Logan (Ben Barnes), arrive at Westworld with different expectations and agendas. Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Quality Assurance head Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) debate whether a recent host anomaly is contagious. Meanwhile, behavior engineer Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) tweaks the emotions of Maeve (Thandie Newton), a madam in Sweetwater’s brothel, in order to avoid a recall. Cocky programmer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) pitches his latest narrative to the team, but Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has other ideas. The Man in Black (Ed Harris) conscripts a condemned man, Lawrence (Clifton Collins, Jr.), to help him uncover Westworld’s deepest secrets.
Written by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy; directed by Richard J. Lewis.
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Post Mortem Interviews
The big question being posed by the show – and the scene of Dolores being attacked in the pilot – is whether it’s ethical to treat something inhuman in an inhuman way. If I were to break my phone, no one would feel sorry for my phone no matter how sophisticated it is, but you take a creation like Dolores and things get far more complicated. What’s your perspective on that?
It’s something we explore a lot on the show. What is consciousness? We still don’t really know what that thing is that makes us conscious and how we measure and pain and suffering. If you wanna get really meta with it, we don’t even know if [our current reality] is real or what memories are or what dreams are. What reality are we living in? It raises all of those questions. And those are questions raised with animals as well. Just because they’re animals and they can’t tell us how they’re feeling, that doesn’t mean they’re not feeling it. If something is programmed to experience and understand what pain and suffering is, then who are we to say that they can’t understand it on some level and if they are really suffering? I’m not really sure.
Can you tease to how your character evolves this season?
There’s so many layers to her. If you just think about how long she’s been in that park – about 30 years. In the first episode you see what happens to her over the course of two days. I can’t even imagine all the different lives that she’s lived and the people that she’s met and people that she’s fallen in love with that she doesn’t remember. Once you open up that Pandora’s box, you realize, “Oh, there’s infinite possibilities here and we really don’t know what her story is.” And if she is the oldest host in the park she would be the most advanced. So who knows? The things we were called upon to do – and we had to be really professional while doing them – was sometimes hilarious and sometimes really trying. Midway through the season you’ll start to understand what I’m talking about. If anything is possible in that park, then you can bet things are gonna get pretty weird.
It’s something we explore a lot on the show. What is consciousness? We still don’t really know what that thing is that makes us conscious and how we measure and pain and suffering. If you wanna get really meta with it, we don’t even know if [our current reality] is real or what memories are or what dreams are. What reality are we living in? It raises all of those questions. And those are questions raised with animals as well. Just because they’re animals and they can’t tell us how they’re feeling, that doesn’t mean they’re not feeling it. If something is programmed to experience and understand what pain and suffering is, then who are we to say that they can’t understand it on some level and if they are really suffering? I’m not really sure.
Can you tease to how your character evolves this season?
There’s so many layers to her. If you just think about how long she’s been in that park – about 30 years. In the first episode you see what happens to her over the course of two days. I can’t even imagine all the different lives that she’s lived and the people that she’s met and people that she’s fallen in love with that she doesn’t remember. Once you open up that Pandora’s box, you realize, “Oh, there’s infinite possibilities here and we really don’t know what her story is.” And if she is the oldest host in the park she would be the most advanced. So who knows? The things we were called upon to do – and we had to be really professional while doing them – was sometimes hilarious and sometimes really trying. Midway through the season you’ll start to understand what I’m talking about. If anything is possible in that park, then you can bet things are gonna get pretty weird.
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When Delores tells Bernard that her father told her the “violent delights” phrase, the camera then cuts back to her father continuing to speak. Are we supposed to assume there was more that he said in addition to that phrase and that she lied to him about it?
Nolan: No, I think it’s the phrase itself that’s important. The seemingly innocuous phrase that has layers of meaning behind it.
This might also be a bit confusing to some, as well: The hosts don’t know they’re robots. Yet they have a level in their programing that’s accessed while in those creepy “Analysis Mode” interviews with the tech staff. So they have some awareness that they’re robots on some root level?
Nolan: We wanted to play with the ways in which the hosts are similar to us and the the ways we’re different. Humans only have one sort of aperture for consciousness. There’s many different levels and lots of smarter people than me have tried to analyze how all of those pieces fit together: the conscious, the subconscious – all the Freudian-Jungian stuff. But with the hosts, those levels would be explicit. They would have a different architecture. This gave us great fodder [for Westworld programmer characters to] directly query the hosts’ subconscious. You could query my subconscious too, although a lot of it right now would be about cookies [Laughter]. So the ability for the technicians to directly query the subconscious of the hosts was such a fun way to play this dynamic and also hint at the levels of sophistication and control that are latent in the host that they’re not allowed to access. So, no, they’re not aware of their plight. They are aware on another level, but they are forbidden from accessing it.
Nolan: No, I think it’s the phrase itself that’s important. The seemingly innocuous phrase that has layers of meaning behind it.
This might also be a bit confusing to some, as well: The hosts don’t know they’re robots. Yet they have a level in their programing that’s accessed while in those creepy “Analysis Mode” interviews with the tech staff. So they have some awareness that they’re robots on some root level?
Nolan: We wanted to play with the ways in which the hosts are similar to us and the the ways we’re different. Humans only have one sort of aperture for consciousness. There’s many different levels and lots of smarter people than me have tried to analyze how all of those pieces fit together: the conscious, the subconscious – all the Freudian-Jungian stuff. But with the hosts, those levels would be explicit. They would have a different architecture. This gave us great fodder [for Westworld programmer characters to] directly query the hosts’ subconscious. You could query my subconscious too, although a lot of it right now would be about cookies [Laughter]. So the ability for the technicians to directly query the subconscious of the hosts was such a fun way to play this dynamic and also hint at the levels of sophistication and control that are latent in the host that they’re not allowed to access. So, no, they’re not aware of their plight. They are aware on another level, but they are forbidden from accessing it.
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At the end of the episode, we learn that Dolores is the oldest host in Westworld. How central is she to the show's existing mythology, and the ongoing mythos as well?
Nolan: Very central. Her story … we were interested in the park not as a new place, but as an old place. If you drive around Southern California right now, there are a lot of billboards for Disneyland's 60th anniversary. We were fascinated by the idea that if you make a good game space, a good and durable environment like this, it would last for generations. People would come back and bring their kids to meet Dolores, the same way they met her when they were a kid — or Teddy, or any of these characters. For us, it only enhances the pathos of these characters, in that this has been happening to them for a very long time. Dolores has been the girl next door with aspirations to travel and see the world and escape her modest little loop for going on 35 years. That, to us, enhances the horror of her situation.
The impact of this reveal is compounded by the final shot of the episode: Dolores killing a fly. How big of a deal is this violation of her core code, moving forward?
Joy: I do think it's a big deal. It's a small step; it's just a fly. But it's a sign of something happening in Dolores. Something is stirring within her. It is not to be taken lightly.
Nolan: Very central. Her story … we were interested in the park not as a new place, but as an old place. If you drive around Southern California right now, there are a lot of billboards for Disneyland's 60th anniversary. We were fascinated by the idea that if you make a good game space, a good and durable environment like this, it would last for generations. People would come back and bring their kids to meet Dolores, the same way they met her when they were a kid — or Teddy, or any of these characters. For us, it only enhances the pathos of these characters, in that this has been happening to them for a very long time. Dolores has been the girl next door with aspirations to travel and see the world and escape her modest little loop for going on 35 years. That, to us, enhances the horror of her situation.
The impact of this reveal is compounded by the final shot of the episode: Dolores killing a fly. How big of a deal is this violation of her core code, moving forward?
Joy: I do think it's a big deal. It's a small step; it's just a fly. But it's a sign of something happening in Dolores. Something is stirring within her. It is not to be taken lightly.
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