Interview – We Talked To Writers and Producers about Shadow & Bone

I’ve praisedShadow & Bone enough in the review – I think it’s certainly a big part of this interview and the author Leigh Bardugo, whose eyes light up when talking about the adaptation of her books.

It’s not an easy task to make an adaptation Yes, our left and right may be full of adaptations, but it also underscores how difficult it is to adapt things to the series or film A group of journalists and writers, series writer Leigh Bardugo and series manager Eric Heissererhave had the opportunity to sit down and ask a few questions about what is Shadow & Bone why two series came together and became one story, ravka where, why Tsarist Russia…?

They told me.

(Note: Eric Heisserer liked the fact that my cat Meci was in the frame in the middle of the meeting I wish they had taken his video and sent it, that’s the part of the interview I wanted to share the most)

LB: Leigh Bardugo (writer) – EH: Eric Heisserer (series curator)

– For audiences unfamiliar with books, can you sum up the world of Shadow & Bone a little bit, Leigh?

LB: Shadow & Bone is set in a country called Ravka, inspired by Tsarist Russia, and it is divided by a darkness full of domestic monsters called The Fold, ravka is surrounded by hostile countries and war; therefore, it is necessary to go through this darkness to reach the other side of the country, which is usually given to young and un equipped soldiers.

In Alina Starkov, one of these soldiers serves as a mapper in the army, has no significant rank, and as she passes through The Fold, it turns out that her company has a great deal of power when it is attacked.

– We are often accustomed to worlds reminiscent of medieval and Central Europe in fantasy stories.

LB: I knew that the story I wanted to edit would ask the question “What would happen if magic and weapons met on the battlefield?” and that I wanted to write a story set in the mid-1800s or late 1800s, Tsarist Russia was a very favorable time for me, and as for the influence of Slavik cultures, I also knew that I wanted to get rid of that classic English medieval vibe of fantasy literature, but also the themes in Shadow & Bone; the distinction between the rich and the poor is like a society that has not been industrialized, in a way that has fallen behind its surroundings; very suitable to be interpreted with this culture

– Why did you choose to combine two book series for the series? For example, why didn’t you choose to make a series for the Grishaverse series, a second adaptation for the Crows Assembly series?

LB: I think we thought we could handle it, and we wanted to give something new to the readers who are already fans of the series. Shadow & Bone is a “chosen person” story; The Council of Crows, on the contrary, is the story of those who see the world as expendable, who have no important destiny, who are not of royal ancestry, who are not elected in any way, but both stories have one thing in common: a sense of belonging; Being able to find where you belong and the people you belong to, so actually merging the two series, even though it had some difficulties, seemed natural to us.

EH: I would also like to add that if we hadn’t reintroduced these characters, we wouldn’t have had much chance of making a connected adaptation in the future.

– In connection with this, I would also like to ask why did you adapt the two series to have events happening at the same time? Because books aren’t connected to each other in this way.

EH: First of all; Shadow & Bone had the main characters on the side, and we didn’t want the characters on the Crows’ Council side to be second to none, so when we were feeding the Crows Assembly to the show, we sort of fictionalized what might have happened before the story of the book and shot the two stories at the same time, and we thought that if we tried to give the stories from different dates at the same time, it would require a lot of brain gymnastics for the audience.

LB: Yes, we had to decide what the rules of the show were before we could break the rules of the story in the books.

– I want to ask you something you’ve always wondered What it’s like to adapt a book into a series? What are the challenges?

EH: Now it’s such a difficult job that if we try to talk about all kinds of troubles, we probably just need to talk about it for the next hour, but I think it’s better to take a different approach when starting an adaptation: What are the things we can turn into opportunities? Because the challenges will be anyway.

For example, the writing of Shadow & Bone as the first singular was a plus for us, allowing us to construct in our own way what other characters are doing when Alina is in one place, and we work with a lot of very talented people; For example, our costume designer Wendy takes the story in the books, the descriptions of clothes and places and puts their own experiences on top of it, “Oh! Look, this design brought to mind this work that I’ve done before,” he said, adding that listening to these ideas and experiences is also crucial in creating the world of adaptation.

– Eric, you read the Shadow & Bone series before you started doing the show, and I wonder if there were any places where you and Leigh didn’t get along. How do you project certain scenes or characters?

ER: Of course! We disagreed about a lot of things, and I don’t know how to describe it without citing certain scenes, but I think the most interesting stories happened when things went where neither of us could have foreseen. Sometimes things go where we both say, “Wow, that never occurred to me,” but these new ideas fit very well into the series, so we chose to use those ideas.

– What was it like to write dialogues of characters who had never met in books?

EH: Now I can give you a fan answer and a producer’s answer, which one do you want? But ultimately what we were trying to do was stick to the characters.

LB: It’s really hard to answer this question without spoilers, but I have to say that I really like what’s coming out because the books are written and finished, they don’t have a place to say “I wonder” Eric and his writers had the opportunity to reopen all those closed doors and say “I wonder” in the face of events and characters, and I think they did a very good job.

– Leigh, how does it feel to watch the world you created come to life?

LB: Well, it was crazy I’ve never been on a tv or movie set before, and I don’t think I understood how big a job it was going to be at first; I imagined there’d be five or 10 people on a set, maybe a make-up artist or something, and how many people would have to come together to get to the set in Budapest and make this show happen; It was really breathtaking to see the sets, the dozens of art wonder costumes in the room of our costume designer Wendy (Wendy Patridge)

And really, I didn’t really realize how big a job it was to turn a fantastic series into a series until I saw the first episode of the series over.

– There is a Ravka language specially created for the series You worked with David J Peterson, who created the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones To create this language What was it like to create a language?

LB: I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, and David and I met on a panel where he talked about Dothraki when I wasn’t even a print writer, and we’ve been friends ever since, and we used to joke that if I ever had a book adaptation, he’d work on it.

Unfortunately, we don’t hear it spoken that often on the show, but besides Ravka, Kirche and Fjerdan have also developed their language, really worked hard to create languages that will be most faithful to the world of the series, that will adapt to the best way, I’m always afraid to use these words, but it was really like a dream come true.

– And how does it feel to see the characters you’ve created in front of you? I think Ben and Freddy in particular are very good casting choices.

LB: Obviously, the idea of finding actors for the characters in my head was very scary at first, but as a result, we had to give up the idea of finding the character that looked perfect and find the player who could reflect the spirit of the character. Yes, Ben and Freddy are really handsome, but they also reflect the spirit of their characters really well.

Ben, for example, adds incredible weight to a character that can seem very easily cartoonish with his acting We really needed very talented actors and we found them, we are very lucky in that even I started to influence how I played the characters in my head

– When I watched Shadow & Bone, I was really surprised to see how clearly the political tension and racism between Ravka and the countries around him was revealed.

LB: Obviously I don’t think we set out to tell a story about racism, but we wanted to tell the story honestly, and if you’re going to tell a story that goes through the borders of warring nations and questionable countries, you have to tell the tension and prejudices that this kind of war is going to bring.

– Leigh, you’ve said before that you want to create a fantasy series that opens its doors to everyone.

When I was writing LB: Shadow & Bone (the grishaverse’s first book), I always mentioned that I over-used the reflections of the fantastic series I grew up in, and those series were too white and too heterosexual.

But as I developed and grew as a writer, I wanted to reflect on the world I saw around myself in the fantastic series I wrote; Which is why the idea of creating a world that accommodates all kinds of people was important to me.

Leigh Bardugo and Eric Heisserer;

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