something to show me. “Wait!” she says just as we’re about to end our Zoom call, reaching for something just beyond her screen.
“When I found out we were going to be doing this,” she says, “I was at the thrift shop in my neighborhood and I found .” Then she points it at the camera: an issue of WIRED from 1995 featuring Keanu Reeves on the cover alongside the line “William Gibson on the making of .”
For Middleton, to be giving an interview to WIRED about ’s epic journey to the screen not long after finding a 1995 issue of the magazine in a secondhand store is so uncanny it almost feels like a glitch. “Dude, it was eight bucks,” she says, agreeing that eight dollars is a steal for a vintage WIRED. “I was like, ‘This is crazy.’”
Maybe all things happen exactly when they’re supposed to. Gibson originally released in 1984, back before hackers were cool. Back before hackers were CEOs. It focused on Case, a young computer jockey who can get online through a jack in his head. He teams up with Molly and a former military man named Armitage to break into the offworld home of the Tessier-Ashpool family, who became astoundingly rich thanks to the tech company they founded.
The book’s novel ideas—cyberspace, brain-computer interfaces, all-powerful AIs—were years away from being mainstream, let alone possible. In the years since, there’s been much talk of turning into a movie or TV show, but it never took off, even as Hollywood mined sci-fi for hits.
On adapting an iconic sci-fi novel:
It's a huge seminal book. I had not read it until the summer of 2020, but I was aware it was one of those white whales. It inspired a lot of things, and people had been trying to adapt it for years.
The world will be taken on a wild ride. It’s an epic. It’s ; it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; it’s . This is the first time it comes onto our screens, and that's a big moment for us and fans of sci-fi.
When we were shooting it and in the thick of it, it was easier to not get freaked out by the expectations. It felt nice to be in a little bubble with the world that we had created. I tried to look at the expectations that people clearly have and the love that people have for this book and what these characters mean. I definitely get freaked out sometimes and I just have to shut my computer and not think about it.
On getting the rights:
I had a meeting at Skydance, and they had given me the book and said, “Hey, the rights of this book are going to come available again. We’re going to try to adapt it as a TV show as opposed to a movie or several movies." It made so much sense. So I read the book, and really responded to it right away. JD and I had been friends for years prior to that, and were looking for a way to work together. He had also had a meeting at Skydance, and they had also given him the book.
Yeah, there was a wonderful kismet of this moment, and we were like, “Wait, we’re both talking to people about this. Why don’t we do it together?”
Drake has always been a fan of and as a storyteller has great taste, but that's only part of it. The real magic is that he’s built an incredible team at [his production company] DreamCrew that he trusts to bring things to life once he identifies something he loves or believes in. Jason Shrier, who leads film and TV for DreamCrew, is one of the folks in our little brain trust on this show, and someone we pride as always having his finger on the pulse. But he has a relationship with [entertainment company] Anonymous Content, and Skydance, so it was kind of serendipitous that as Drake and DreamCrew had identified the books, all of these parties were starting to form and realize that they could work together to go get the rights. Drake, individually and by way of DreamCrew, is part of the mix and remains an important part of our process.
On working with William Gibson:
The way it was set up was that William Gibson was going to be the decider of who was going to get the rights when they came available. So we went to work on a pitch and with the hope that we would be the people he would choose.
We had heard that there were some bigger names, much bigger than JD and I. I just felt like there was a counterculture vibe about him and I was like, I don't think it matters that we're nobodies. I think if we can somehow communicate our passion for his book, and not just go and say, “Oh, obviously we’ll take care of your book, you can trust us,” but actually go in and do the work and come up with a thoughtful presentation and a thoughtful pitch, then I think we've got as good a shot as any.
I'm sure Bill would not mind us sharing this part of it, but it's very easy to look at these big pieces of literature or movies that have stood the test of time and just think that they were immaculately conceived. Just to hear him talk about where he struggled and what he was self-conscious about and then what he was surprised worked and what he wished he could have done, what he wished he had time to do—it was the first time Graham and I both looked at as a living text.
On making their own:
One of the first questions we asked ourselves was “How do you make this feel new in spite of inspiring so many things that have now already come out ahead of this?” It was never going to be our ambition to out- . But what we could do is talk to Gibson and find out where, for him, some of those big tonal touchpoints are. An interesting one that came up really early in talking to him was that he had never perceived the world of as a dystopia. Even that was a nice thing to just remember as we found our way through it.
The best we could do is bring people to the experience of what it felt like reading it for the first time in 1984. Because anything beyond that, your reference points are already going to be derivative. If you put up reference art, you're already behind it. The joke that we were even making when hiring [production designer] Luke [Hull] was like: Here's someone who's done and , and in our minds is plus . It's old-school and hi-fi and colliding those things together.
We didn't want the world of to feel like X amount of years after the world that we were living in. In the teaser that opens the show, you see this piece of technology in the late '60s, early '70s that we know did not exist back then in our world. We wanted to announce right out of the gate: Don't be looking for the iteration of whatever phone you have in your pocket 50 years from now. We want this to be its own world.
Watching someone hack will only be exciting for so long. But what is stakes-driven is the danger to Case in doing it and the toll it takes on his body. Is he going to get the thing they need for the larger story for himself? Can he prove to himself that he can still do it? All of those things were immediately stickier than just watching him do it.
A thing Bill [Gibson] said really early on is, he had always sort of imagined Case as a neurological athlete. We took that and ran with it, in that it should take a toll. There's an expenditure to do this work.
On adapting a book beloved by fans:
I try not to think about how important it is and focus on my job of playing the scenes in front of me. JD and Graham had William Gibson’s approval, the scripts were brilliant, and the world so detailed and real. You can smell this world, which feels unique.
I'm so glad that one of the first things we did was go see Bill Gibson up in Vancouver. He took the burden off of us and let us know that he wasn't expecting a literal translation of his text. He's the one that we're really beholden to.
Even in those early conversations with him, he mentioned, “Oh, I always wanted to do a bigger Tessier-Ashpool story, the story of the family [behind the powerful AI called Wintermute]. I had a book deadline, and I never really got to expand on that story. But if you find yourself looking for other things, other liberties or places to go into and make your own, that would be one.” So that's why we came up with that storyline.
On the set design:
Before we ever got to hiring the heads of any departments, JD planted a flag and said, “As much as we can, we want an in-camera aesthetic. We want to be practical.” That really drove the decision to go to Japan, because trying to recreate Chiba City, we already have set extensions, obviously, because it takes place in the future, but the textures of Japan [are there], and we wanted it to feel like you were actually there.
The other thing we did, the thing I had never done on any other show, was we hired our production designer first, before any other head of a department. We knew that while we were still writing we needed that person to help us realize the world. What they were going to do practically—from a props perspective, from a concept art perspective—was going to inform our writing as well.
It is a very bespoke version of the future; everything had to be machined and built and designed. We didn’t have all of these things that you could normally just go to the prop shop and get. But that is what drives the feeling of , feeling textured and grounded and real and a place you could go to, and it is both familiar to the past but aspirational to the future.
On the design of Case’s deck, the terminal he uses to access the virtual world of the matrix:
We saw a lot of decks. If I remember correctly, I feel like we were on the way to being like, "OK, this is the deck." Then Luke was like, "Sorry, before we make that, here's another one." That is the one we went with. But we were all resistant to it just feeling like a laptop. We wanted something that was a little bit like a station.
On getting the synth-rock band Son Lux for the score:
Graham and I knew from the beginning we wanted to feel different, not feel cyberpunk. In the same way that every other department had to honor retro-futurism in their own way, we wanted to charge our composer with doing the same.
They're the best, and a band we've been fans of for a long time. I don't know how many Son Lux concerts I've gone to, and it was really cool in the last few years to see their turn into scores. Obviously, Everything Everywhere All at Once was a big one for them. Ryan [Lott] and the gang just really found 's own sonic signature.
On casting Case:
We had finished two or three scripts, and we started having conversations about casting. Apple had had a great experience with Callum on Masters of the Air and they encouraged us to meet with him. It was the first and only meeting we had. He was in LA for something else and he came to meet JD and I, and within five minutes of hearing his voice it was like, “This is the guy.”
My vision was aligned with theirs, and luckily they asked me to join. I hadn’t read the book, but I was in a sci-fi mode. I’d read and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? when this came through. I remember we had [] in our house when I was a kid, but I’d never picked it up. Graham and JD had written a wonderful character, and he felt so nuanced and detailed on the page—I jumped off from their starting point.
Case has the right mix of dangerous, courageous, and naive. Joe Strummer was a big influence. Thom Yorke. Iggy Pop. There’s an incredible documentary called that I used as a base. There are always many, many things that go into a pot.
On maybe casting the actor who will be the next James Bond:
We're crossing our fingers and toes.
On casting Molly:
We had Case, so it was about “What completes the duo?” It’s a vibe thing; it’s a physicality thing. Callum's quite tall. And not that our shorter friends can't kick ass too, but you just wanted it to make sense on screen. Callum was shooting in Vancouver, and we brought a few people to read across from him. It was Briana for sure. They just had such a fun chemistry, and she just had the kind of no-nonsense grit to her. She could find these neat moments of warmth, but also not have that break her hard shell. I know everybody says this in their interviews about their show, but we really lucked out.
I was not familiar with the book, and I had a meeting with David Levine at Anonymous Content. When he initially told me about the character and the fact that she's got lenses over her eyes, I was like, “I don't think I want to do that. That doesn't sound fun at all.” Then I met with JD and Graham months later, and they just sold me on it.
I feel like Molly is very funny in our show, and in the book, Molly is very cool, and there's a lot that we don't see that is very clearly there. Molly is a guarded character, but there is so much going on, and we do get to see some more of the very human part of her outside of the “razorgirl” badass trope.
On Molly’s razorgirl lenses:
They were stuck on my face. It was double-sided sticky tape basically, but they held on. I think they fell off maybe once or twice throughout the entire shoot, and that includes fight scenes, so they held up. Steps were always a daunting thing. I couldn't really tell when I was going to step off something or be fine.
Whenever I took them off, it would feel weird. I would feel kind of exposed. I think at some point in the shoot, they started to feel probably how Molly feels, that they are very comforting and very much like, I can hide a little bit.
On having the jack—a brain-computer interface—attached to the back of your neck:
Actually, it was fine.
On William Gibson’s cameo as a patron at the Chatsubo dive bar:
We invited him to the set in London. I knew we had a lot of fans of his book working on our crew, but it wasn’t until he arrived that I saw the number of people that had brought their personal copy of hoping to get it signed. I was like, “Oh wow, I guess they're not here for the scripts.” []
I think we were like, “We want him to get out here, and we know it's a long slog from Vancouver, but if we can get him out here, we got to put him in. We have to just immortalize his presence in the show.” So part of it was timing, but it actually worked out for what we wanted because Chatsubo is such an iconic location in the book, and to see him there as a barfly just was like, “This will be so fun.”
On whether the other books in William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy— and —could find their way onto the small screen:
It's too early to say at this point. I think we're still kind of focused on getting this one out into the world, but we'll see. I hope so.
On tech entrepreneurs being inspired by
There's some great tweet that went viral last year that is sort of like, "New tech CEO says they're launching a product called Skynet.” It's like you're missing the point if you're naming the thing after the bad thing.
Our show is asking what happens whenever corporations have unchecked power and when a technology is unchecked and there's no regulations, and our relationship with that technology goes unchecked. Our show is asking what we lose without oversight. I think life gets much, much worse. It's scary. scared.