Interview (Written): Lisa Joy

Westworld series co-creator and executive producer talks about Season 4.

Deadline sat down with Lisa Joy, co-creator and showrunner of the HBO Max TV series Westworld to discuss what to expect in Season 4. Here is an excerpt of that conversation

DEADLINE: How many years after the revolution is it? Is it immediately after?

Lisa Joy: It’s over seven years since we last saw our characters. There’s no more fighting. It’s all over. We skipped the big fight and now we’re seeing the aftermath of the struggle.

DEADLINE: The set-up for season 4 looks like it’s hosts versus hosts. You’ve got Charlotte and you know she’s not human, and then you’ve got William who isn’t; he’s running the roost. Maeve is hiding in a cabin, and she’s getting assaulted by security guys who are hosts and she can hack into their brains. So, it looks like there’s this divide among the hosts.

Lisa Joy: Right. It kind of looks like it. It looks like after Dolores died over seven years ago that she kind of bought freedom for the humans from this massive AI, and they’ve kind of taken a mistrust to general AI. You can see it with Caleb where he refused to work with a robot, and now he’s working with a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI is gone. The hosts that remain have clearly been up to different things. In the case of Maeve, she’s been having her Eat, Pray, Love moment alone in Alaska, but maybe some of our hosts have teamed up for more nefarious shenanigans. I think the question that will emerge this season is after a period of unrest, once you’ve kind of earned this détente, this peace, can it stay, or are humans and their kind of inheritors in the form of these hosts somehow predestined to always fall in these loops of fractiousness and fighting and division?

DEADLINE: So, with Rehoboam gone, and AI not being gone, there’s talk of this tower. Is this the company that Evan Rachel Wood’s character works for?

Lisa Joy: I have no idea.

DEADLINE: Okay, but the tower seems like it’s this new AI because characters keep saying ‘the tower’s making me do these things.’

Lisa Joy: It just sounds like the raving of lunatics to me.

I love it! Lisa is just messing with us. I will say that the first two episodes of Season 4 set up the story to feel more like Season 1. I look forward to spending some time in Chicago during the 1920s! I live about a mile from Uptown which is where a lot of the action back then took place: music, murder, mayhem.

Here is a trailer for Westworld (Season 4):

You may read the rest of the Deadline interview here.

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