Exclusive: Gillian Flynn Talks Amazon’s Utopia & Adapting The British Series

Currently playing on Amazon Prime is the ultra drama series Utopia, a twisted, eight-episode thriller about a group of young comic fans who discover that the conspiracy in a graphic novel is real, and embark on a high-stakes adventure to save humanity from the end of the world.

From best-selling author and award-winning screenwriter, Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects), who serves as showrunner and executive producer. the series stars John Cusack (High Fidelity), Rainn Wilson (The Office), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Ashleigh LaThrop (Fifty Shades Freed), Dan Byrd (Cougar Town), Desmin Borges (You’re The Worst), and Cory Michael Smith (Gotham) 

Inspired by the British series of the same name, the new Amazon Original series, Utopia centers on a group of comic fans who meet online and bond over their obsession of a seemingly fictional comic called, “Utopia.” Together, Becky (Ashleigh LaThrop), Ian (Dan Byrd), Samantha (Jessica Rothe), Wilson Wilson (Desmin Borges) and Grant (Javon “Wanna” Walton) unearth hidden meanings cloaked within the pages of “Utopia,” predicting threats to humanity. They realize these are not just the makings of a conspiracy; they are very real dangers coming alive right now in their world. The high-stakes adventure brings the group face-to-face with the comic’s famed central character, Jessica Hyde (Sasha Lane), who joins them on their mission to save the world while harboring secrets of her own. The series also stars John Cusack as Dr. Kevin Christie, Rainn Wilson as Dr. Michael Stearns, Farrah Mackenzie as Alice, Christopher Denham as Arby, and Cory Michael Smith as Thomas Christie.

BlackFilmandTV.com recently spoke with Flynn about spearheading this series and injecting her own style that’s a bit different from the British series.

What led you to adapt this British series?

Gillian Flynn: I love the world and I love that it would challenge me. I thought it was similar enough to the type of stories that I like to write. There are lots of twists. There are lots of turns. There's humor, there's some humanity, and it's seeing something larger while still being pulled through by a genre. That felt comfortable and familiar and interesting to me. At the same time, most of the stuff that I've written in the past has been pretty insular. It's pretty psychologically driven. It's usually a story between two people; a husband and wife or a mother and daughter or two friends. It's pretty small, usually about the psychology of humans up close. I like that this would push me a little bit in that it was an ensemble, I'd have to take on tons of different character personalities. It was about really literally about the world at large.

It was a road trip that moved constantly and had lots of different viewpoints. It was about where we are as a society right now. To me when I first saw it in 2013, it really captured that sense of unease that I think we all feel about. We're really at this turning point in humanity, and we have to make some important decisions about where we are socially, environmentally, politically, economically, and how we want to be human. I love that about it. I thought there would be a lot to play with there.

Can you talk about the violence overall is so essential to what you think is the tone of this series?

Gillian Flynn: Violence is a really useful tool as a storytelling tool. It’s how we view each other as humans, and certainly as you're looking at each character, how they deploy or don't deploy violence is really important and a real signifier here. You have your anti heroine who kills at will, and thinks that humans are fungible, and slowly learns that each person is a person that is on display, and other characters become more aggressive, and more willing to put their themselves on the line and attack or fight back or be aggressive. It's a signifier of that. There's certain things I took from the UK that I really love, like the Wilson eye socket scene and there are certain things that I didn't but for me, it was always about how we feel as humans about the violence and how casually or non not casually we take it.

Could you talk about the comic realism and trying to bring that element to it without making it seem corny?

Gillian Flynn: Yes. That was one of the big decisions I was going to make visually for sure. I decided very quickly, that whereas the UK is very color saturated and beautiful and sleek, I was going to take my visual cues much more from the conspiracy thrillers of the post Watergate 70s stuff like ‘All the President's Men' and ‘The Parallax View' and those classics. In fact, I was pitching this as ‘Marathon Man meets The Goonies' and and visually it should feel like that. I wanted it to feel rooted in those and feel grainy and filmic and textured and layered. I didn't want any Iris out shots or any paneled shots. I wanted the comic itself. I wanted Utopia, the graphic novel, to be a real existing thing that you feel like you could page through. To that end, I did hire a Brazilian artist I loved named João Ruas. I had discovered him doing Bill Willingham fables years ago, and had always been obsessed with him. He’s like Arthur Rackham on acid live. This guy had loved him so much. So to get to work with him, and describe things we're going to see visually and, and to me, that was enough that you could page through this. You can see those different panels to see those different pages. That would be the only real tie to any sort of graphic novel or comic artistic-ness.

Was there a challenge as far as how much gore you want it to show?

Gillian Flynn: It was about what is necessary for each scene. Every once in a while, violence is used to punctuate a moment of humor, and in certain episodes. For the most part, violence is its own character. People talk about using a city as its own character or a place setting as its own character. To me in this show, in particular, violence is its own character. I had never done that before. As dark as my stuff is it's not very violent. Usually in my writing I cut away before any violence really happens and then come to the aftermath. When I was writing Gone Girl, the script for Fincher in the book, when the bad thing happens, I cut away in the book and then jump in the aftermath. I remember Fincher being like, “Here's what I want. I want lots of blood" and I was like, "I guess this is going be an R-rated film." I'm not someone who is necessarily anti violence or pro violence in arts. I just think it should be used sensibly and not used as a placeholder because you're lazy and can't figure out how to write a shock, or how to write a turning of a character or how to write something that is harder to write than just a bullet in the head.