Frank Spotnitz found fame and fortune straight out of film school with The X Files, helping it grow into one of most successful shows of the late 20th century and making stars of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
Now, more than a decade after the cult show ended, the US writer and producer looks to be on the verge of creating another sci-fi drama hit, with Friday’s release on Amazon Prime of his adaptation of alternate history series The Man in the High Castle.
The BBC was planning to turn it into a drama in 2010, but ditched the idea. The Syfy channel considered it, even going as far as asking Spotnitz to work up a treatment. But it wasn’t until Amazon asked him in 2013 if he had any spare scripts for its budding production arm Amazon Studios that the project finally got off the ground.
Why did the broadcasters back off? “It is a massively expensive show,” says Spotnitz, who is in London, where his company is based, for a press screening of the show. He smiles politely when I suggested £1.5m an episode, and indicates it is much more. “[And] the subject matter is dangerous, you can really offend people.”
Published in 1961 by Philip K Dick, the cult author whose short stories formed the basis for films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle is a grim fantasy that imagines a world where the axis powers won the second world war, and the east and west coasts of America are split between Nazi war criminals and imperial Japan, with a buffer Rocky Mountains state in between.
“The things we are talking about are still relevant and raw and mean a lot to people,” says SpotnitSo national broadcasters are afraid. In the case of Amazon, they are looking to stand out in a crowded market.”
His adaptation includes injecting an action storyline and adding more characters including a Nazi officer, played by Rufus Sewell, who is depicted “as a loving husband and wonderful father”, despite his horrific actions and ideals.
“It was critical it looked real and believable, I talked about it to the entire cast. This is science fiction but it had to look very natural, with no grand moral mission, you see how the characters respond to an inhuman world.”
Amazon’s way of working is to make a pilot, (released last January), and then analyse audience data. The first episode of The Man in the High Castle in January got a star rating of 4.8 out of five from viewers, one of the highest recorded, and attracted the largest audiences to date. Within a month the next nine of 10 episodes were commissioned, all of which will be made available to Amazon Prime subscribers at the same time.
It is a system and distribution model new to Spotnitz, he says later over the phone from his home in Paris. “My entire career has been in episodic television. You release the series in one-hour episodes, an episode at a time.” For the writer, the format requires “repetition and refreshment”.
“You are always subtly repeating what the audience needs to know. [But] if you are streaming, it is annoying in one long narrative.”
That affects the narrative flow and even the length of episodes. Shows made for streaming can be different lengths, in the case of The Man in the High Castle, roughly 52 to 60 minutes long, while Spotnitz has been more “used to delivering to the second”.
Chris Carter, creator of The X Files, remains a friend and asked Spotnitz to be involved in The New X Files, being revived by 21st Century Fox for the New Year, but The Man in the High Castle was in production.
So far the show has a rating of 98% on review site Rotten Tomatoes and positive write-ups in the US press. It seems Spotnitz may have made the right call choosing to stick with adapting Dick’s alternate history, rather than revisiting his own past.
