WARNING: this clip contains a major spoiler for anyone who hasn’t watched episode one of the seriesįor Rupert Evans, the challenges were physical as well as psychological. The Man in the High Castle – A Better World We’re dealing with a situation that actually happened, in many ways.” “There are moments where I had to stop and sit down for a minute. And it goes deeper as the series goes on, it really pushes the envelope.” The fact that they were fictionalising real-life horrors was never far from Kleintank’s mind. “They suddenly realised this is a place where they routinely burn the disabled and the terminally ill. “I was at a screening of the pilot and you could hear the audience gasp,” remembers Kleintank. “The hospital’s burning.” It’s a chilling hint of how this familiar-looking world has spun off into something much more insidious. During their conversation, ashes silently begin to fall around them. But one of the most striking scenes takes place when the taciturn Joe, played by Luke Kleintank, is pulled over by a local cop while en route to the neutral zone. The opening episodes feature some standard action beats: Sten gun shootouts, a truck chase, an assassination attempt. In the show, he’s more enigmatic auteur than author, apparently responsible for propaganda newsreels showing seemingly impossible Allied victories in the second world war, material seditious enough to endanger anyone who comes into contact with it.ĭJ Qualls as Ed McCarthy and Rupert Evans as Frank Frink. In Dick’s novel, the Man in the High Castle wrote a book that imagined a reality where Hitler lost. Three Americans – Juliana Crane, her lover Frank Frink and mysterious stranger Joe Blake – are sucked into a plot surrounding the title character, a situation that makes their second-class status even more precarious. In San Francisco, a senior Japanese politician (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) schemes away in consultation with the I Ching. In New York, a Nazi spymaster in the feline form of Rufus Sewell seeks to eradicate the last embers of resistance. The Berlin scenes occur in the season one finale: predominantly, the drama unfolds in the US where, after 17 years of occupation, life under the Reich has become almost normalised. That is really unsettling and frightening, to realise that there’s nothing inevitable about victory for the virtuous.” Period shows are always expensive, but to do a period show in a time that never was is even more challenging Frank Spotnitz “It sounds dumb, but it was the first time it occurred to me that the good guys don’t necessarily win. You can’t fake this, the best CG in the world isn’t going to recreate being here in Berlin.” Spotnitz, who cut his teeth working on The X-Files, first experienced Dick’s novel in college. “Period shows are always expensive, but to do a period show in a time that never was is even more challenging,” he says. The man with the high budget is showrunner Frank Spotnitz, who, when we meet, is just grateful that the production – based in Vancouver – has squirrelled away enough cash for a day’s shooting in Europe. Perhaps the best way to create a potential House Of Cards-beater is by stacking the deck, because The Man In The High Castle has an awful lot going on: it’s a lavishly realised historical piece about life under occupation, a geopolitical spy thriller, a far-flung love story and a sci-fi conspiracy.Īlexa Davalos working on her aikido. (The director of that film, Ridley Scott, is an exec-producer for The Man In The High Castle.) Back in Germany, behind the Siegessäule, the 180,000-capacity Volkshalle megadome – one of Hitler’s pet projects – will be added with CG, a monument to victory on an even grander scale.Īfter the success of Amazon’s moody, atmospheric pilot a year ago – the most-watched programme in the company’s short history as a production studio – the 10-part series feels like a conscious bid to launch a drama as buzzy as any on its streaming rival Netflix. The west coast is occupied by the Japanese, where San Francisco resembles the crammed, Asiatic bustle of a pre-digital Blade Runner. The east coast is forcibly living life under the Reich, Times Square dominated by a giant swastika banner. In Amazon’s 10-part adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 53-year-old novel The Man In The High Castle, the Axis powers crushed the Allies in the second world war and carved up the US into two occupied territories separated by the Rockies. It’s a weird, unnatural diorama, but then this is a weird, unnatural place: 1962, but not our 1962.
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