The Peripheral Filmmakers Talk Crafting an All-New Sci-Fi World (Exclusive)

With Lisa Joy having developed Westworld and Reminiscence and Vincenzo Natali having directed Cube, Splice, and various genre TV series, it’s no understatement to say that the pair are well-versed when it comes to developing ambitious new worlds in the realm of science fiction. The pair have recently collaborated on the Prime Video series The Peripheral, which required them to offer audiences some familiar elements in the world of sci-fi stories, yet also presented them with unique opportunities to establish this world as something even the most devout genre fans haven’t quite seen. The Peripheral premieres on Prime Video on October 21st.

“Well, I’m something of a geek, and so I have been around this genre for a long time, and so I’m hell-bent on not repeating things,” Natali shared with ComicBook.com when discussing establishing the series’ visual style. “I think that was one of the exciting opportunities of The Peripheral was to present not one future, but two futures that I don’t think we’ve really seen before. To get out of the Blade Runner, cyberpunk template and look at something that is very different, but perhaps much more plausible. With London, I think the joy of it was creating a future that’s beautiful. It’s not dark and dystopic. It’s stunning in how cultured and aesthetic it is. And yet it has this ghostly, somewhat forbidding quality to it too. So that was the joy from a conceptual design point of view.”

He continued, “But really, at its heart, it is such a human story. And with Lisa and Jonathan [Nolan] and Scott Smith, who was our writer-creator, they built a human story. What I was doing was merely the backdrop for that. I think that it has such a strong emotional entry point with Flynne and also with Wilf in the future, that no matter what, you are drawn into it because you care so deeply about these characters.”

The Peripheral centers on Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz), a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow’s America. Flynne is smart, ambitious, and doomed. She has no future; until the future comes calling for her. The Peripheral is master storyteller William Gibson’s dazzling, hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of mankind—and what lies beyond.

In addition to the series’ unique visual style, Gibson is considered to be the founding father of cyberpunk, with Joy pointing out what makes his worlds different from other stories she’s brought to life.

“The same thing that makes William Gibson so fascinating and singular is the same thing that has made him difficult to adapt, in that his futurism … He’s basically a prophet. He always gets it right. So nobody needs to read horoscopes anymore. You don’t need to go to a psychic. Just call William Gibson or tweet him maybe, and he’ll tell you what’s about to happen to you,” Joy recalled. “The thing is, his futurism is so fully realized, so completely built from the ground up, that it is expansive and detailed. When that goes to production, we’re talking expensive, difficult to capture all of that scope and all of that nuance on screen.”

She added, “Luckily in this, we are dealing with a director as talented and as visionary as Vincenzo, who’s also this incredible visual artist. He’s so visual in everything that he imagines. Also our VFX team. The great thing is that technology for filming has evolved to make it easier to achieve some of that vision when directed in such a way that it allows for that kind of world-building, and so we just had a perfect opportunity to finally bring William Gibson to life in the way he deserves.”

The Peripheral premieres on Prime Video on October 21st.

Are you looking forward to the new series? Let us know in the comments!