For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this excerpt from our big interview Raised by Wolves creator and showrunner – Aaron Guzikowski!
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Raised by Wolves
Aaron Guzikowski pits androids against zealots on a mysterious planet
By Claude Chung
Spoiler Alert: This article contains major plot details
Photo: Aaron Guzikowski on set
Debuting with its first three episodes on fledgling HBO Max in early September and becoming the streaming platform’s top-performing original series over the course of its 10-episode season, Raised by Wolves tells the story of two androids, Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim), who arrive at the planet Kepler-22B on a mission to save the human race by raising a group of children from embryos. Sound simple enough? Don’t worry, the plot thickens. They were dispatched to this distant world by the Atheists, who are battling a religious faction known as the Mithraic (based on the mysterious Roman Empire-era sect) in a global war that has rendered Earth inhospitable. The Mithraic have used advanced technological secrets from their scripture to become a mighty force, including creating killer androids known as Necromancers, who can fly and liquefy their enemies with powerful ultrasonic screams. The Mithraic launch an ark populated by selected true believers into space, landing on Kepler-22B several years after Mother and Father. By this point, all but one of the children, Campion (Winta McGrath), have died of unknown causes. An attempt to seize Campion from the androids, led by military commander Marcus (Travis Fimmel), triggers Mother’s original design as a Necromancer, and her subsequent retaliatory destruction of the ark strands the surviving Mithraic on the planet.
The series is produced by Scott Free, the production company of prolific filmmaker Ridley Scott (Alien, The Martian, to name just a few), and Scott himself directed the first two episodes. The tale of androids grappling with humanity, literally and figuratively, in a mysterious, hostile alien world fits so squarely into the director’s oeuvre and sensibilities that one could be forgiven for assuming the project originated with him. Instead, the show sprang from the mind of screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (2013’s Prisoners), who wrote the pilot and took it to Scott Free. While Scott and the script would appear to be a match made in the stars, Guzikowski admits he initially worried this might actually work against him. “I wondered at the time whether or not he would even be interested in going back to doing stuff about androids or doing science fiction.” Fortunately, the director sparked to the material so strongly he agreed to direct as well as produce.
Guzikowski took a roundabout path to screenwriting success. The Brockton, Massachusetts native then attended art school, where his primary focus was visual arts and the occasional film classes. After graduating, he spent the better part of a decade doing assorted art-related work and rock music gigs. Ultimately, he says, “I decided, Okay, I’m just going to try and do one thing. I’ll just write scripts and see how that goes.” While he’d only taken one screenwriting course, he jumped into writing a horror script on spec in his free time in the hopes of landing representation. In that vein, his experience with query letters was one of quality over quantity, and most went unanswered. Eventually he did succeed in finding his manager, Adam Kolbrenner (formerly of Madhouse productions, now Lit Entertainment), in the process. The scribe continued his various script attempts while working day jobs and, as Hollywood luck would have it, his script Prisoners landed on the coveted Black List in 2009 and was later co-produced by Kolbrenner in 2013, starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Dune). Getting on the Black List was the break Guzikowski needed; “Because of that, I was able to actually move out to L.A. and write full time.”
Over the years, while working on other projects, Guzikowski had been gathering ideas for a sci-fi TV series he wanted to write someday. “I would have some idea for science-fiction moments, and I would write it down and put it in a box,” he says. The scribe always knew the stirrings were better suited for television rather than a feature film, given both the challenging aspects of the script and its potential. “I think at the end of the day that the possibilities the show offered in terms of the mythology and the characters—that’s what we were doing that was different and had a real path to finding something really cool.” He always envisioned the setting would be a remote planet, but it wasn’t until he came up with the idea of a parental androids raising human children that he was finally able to catalyze his mix of ideas into a script.
Like what you’ve read? Continue reading the rest of the full article in Backstory Magazine to find out more about Guzikowski’s writing habits, what it took to get the show on the air and an exclusive opportunity to read the first 20 pages of his pilot script!
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