“Apple asked me if I could pitch it in one sentence,” Goyer told The Hollywood Reporter in a deep-dive career retrospective interview covering his past hits and future projects. “They sort of asked it laughingly. I said: ‘It’s a 1,000-year chess game between Hari Seldon and the Empire, and all the characters in between are the pawns, but some of the pawns over the course of this saga end up becoming kings and queens.'”
So, a bit like Game of Thrones in space — but over a much, much longer time span.
In adapting the seemingly unadaptable, Goyer determined there were a trio of problems others had faced along the way.
“There are three tricky aspects to Foundation that I think have tripped up all the other adaptations,” he said. “The first is that the story is supposed to span 1,000 years with all these massive time jumps — that’s hard to tell. It’s certainly hard to capsulize in a two- or three-hour film. The second aspect is, the books are kind of anthological. You’ll have a couple of short stories in the first book with main character Salvor Hardin, then you’ll jump forward a hundred years and there’ll be a different character.”
He continued, “The third thing is that they’re not particularly emotional; they’re books about ideas, about concepts. So a lot of the action happens off-screen. In the books, the Empire, which is on 10,000 worlds, literally falls off-screen — like, it happens in between chapters. Obviously, that wasn’t going to work for a television show. So without giving too much away, I figured out a way to have some of the characters extend their lifespans. About six characters will continue from season to season, from century to century. That way it becomes half anthological, half continuing story.”
Goyer has pitched the project as a potential 80-hour story spread across eight seasons. “No one knows if it will work, but I can say there’s definitely never been a show like it on TV before,” he said.
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Cyberpunkd
observation. It'd a gorgeous series. Watched first episode 4k HDR and oh boy, amazing. The story was also very interesting and the scope seems massive.
