On paper, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner seem like odd bedfellows for the adaptation of a post-apocalyptic video game for television.”Stand out is really a mixture of our backgrounds,” Robertson-Dworet, a screenwriter who, among other things, Grave robbers And Captain Marvelsays about her partner, a writer and producer who is best known for comedies Silicon Valley, Portland And Baskets. “I come from an action and genre background, and Graham knows the TV and comedy side. So Stand out is dramatic, but also funny and weird.”
Luckily for her, her colleague Jonathan Nolan and Amazon Prime Video, Stand out is also a hit. Before the series earned 16 Emmy nominations, it was the streamer’s most successful launch to date and was quickly renewed. During a break from their writers’ room – on the eve of Robertson-Dworet’s second child, of all things – the pair discuss the five-year journey of combining their voices and what’s next.
You both come from very different worlds and what you’ve done isn’t necessarily representative of either. How difficult was it to nail the tone of this show?
GRAHAM WAGNER We joke that neither of us can write this show. I’ll give it a go and it’s not quite right. Then Geneva will give it a go and it’s almost done. There’s nothing in this show that doesn’t have to be passed back and forth between us a few times. We’ve talked a lot about the Venn diagram – it has to be something that Geneva likes to write, that I like to write and that Jonathan, especially for the first three episodes, likes to direct. The appeal is in the middle of these three seemingly independent circles.
Do you find that video games are more open to adaptation than books in terms of intellectual property?
WAGNER Jane Austen is no longer sacred. There may have been a time when you were a philistine if you deviated from the original in an adaptation, but that is no longer the case. Because Stand outwe changed the course of the game’s canon story. There was a Reddit thread that had to be closed. (Laughs.) People were so mad. So in a way it’s the new sacred cow. That makes it kind of fun to play with.
GENEVA ROBERTSON-DWORET Since it is an open world game, there are many ways the narrative can unfold. It is not as sequentially set as The Last of Us — where they did a beautiful, very direct adaptation of video game history. We didn’t have that opportunity because everyone who plays the game does it in a different order. That was wonderfully freeing because we could create our own story and our own characters in that world. When we started this project, we asked ourselves, “What characters would we want to create in this world and mythology?”
Video games can be off-putting to some audiences and many of us suffer from dystopia fatigue, but this is obviously a huge investment by Amazon and needs to reach a wide audience. How conscious were you of that during production?
WAGNER As for the dystopia part, we’re there too. (Laughs.) That was our priority because we’re going to be working on this show for a very long time. It has to be fun. And because we’re having fun, hopefully it’s fun to watch. Even though it’s an apocalypse show, we wanted to make sure we focused on human behavior – which I don’t think can be erased by nuking. Our idiosyncrasies would survive. We didn’t know all the episodes were going to come out at once, so we asked ourselves, “Which apocalypse show do you want to go back to next week?” It can’t be a trudge through the wasteland. That would be awful.
ROBERTSON-DWORET That is why we ultimately focused on three characters, three perspectives. Graham had just The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and asked, “What if we did our version of this?” I thought it was brilliant because Stand out is all about faction formation, about humanity being doomed to continually split into warring factions. We were able to create three characters with different narrative perspectives, each from a different faction.
How far are you with the second season and what hopes do you have for the future of the series?
WAGNER We write and work as fast as we can without losing quality. The real excitement of season two is that you want to get it done as quickly as possible without compromising on quality. Writing this season was much easier because we have a show to focus on. In season one we were still setting the tone of the show, right down to the sound mix. The work we did in season one will accelerate season two.
ROBERTSON-DWORET It’s been fun to play with a lot of the same ideas, but also expand on them and address other world issues that we see in our show. Graham and I have loved these characters for five years, so we’re excited that the audience seems to have connected with them as well. There will also be a lot of things from the Stand out mythology that we couldn’t play with the first season. We only had eight hours! That was the painful part, getting things out of the Stand out Universe that we couldn’t do justice to in the first season.
This story first appeared in an August single issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine and subscribe, click here.
