The Witcher executive producer and showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, confirmed at the San Diego Comic-Con this weekend that the upcoming Netflix series will not borrow any material from CD Projekt RED’s video game adaptations.
While she has played and enjoyed the video games, Hissrich expressed her desire to stay close to the source material, starting with Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish, which the show’s first season will mostly be based upon.
“Extreme long vision, no, we will not start adapting the games,” said Hissrich. “If you think about how adaptations work, the games are adaptations of the same source material that we’re using. If you come to the games and love the characters and love the kinds of stories that you find there, I think you’re going to love the show too.”
Explaining her decision to use The Last Wish for much of the first season, Hissrich said that she wants to build the world and characters from the ground up.
The Last Wish was the first book I read so you know how, with anything, the first time you experience a world, you fall in love with it in a totally different way. I love all of the books, but that was really my entrance into the world. So yeah, I drew a lot from it. It really is world building in The Last Wish that I found to be the most important thing.
When I first started talking to Netflix about the show, I think everyone assumed that we would start with the saga because that’s sort of the most serialized storytelling and would lend itself to bingeing. And I said, ‘You can’t do that without setting up the world first.’ I guess that was a big challenge, too, was where to begin.
Netflix’s The Witcher will release in late 2019.
[Source: GameSpot]
