As ‘Westworld’ Returns, the Creators Discuss Twists, Reddit and Rickrolls

“When we emerged to see that the story had been picked up all over, it was amusing and a little terrifying,” Nolan said. “But given that a lot of theorizing on Reddit got picked up by other websites and run in the first season, it sort of followed suit.”

But the joke was on the hand-wringers when what HBO actually released was an elaborate twist on the classic Rickroll, which traditionally shuttles users to the video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” A brief tease of the new season’s opening moments was followed by two of the show’s robot “hosts,” Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Clementine (Angela Sarafyan), performing the Astley hit on set, and then, finally, a white dog sitting in front of piano while the score plays on a loop.

Reddit is “a community I’ve gotten to know and love over the years,” Nolan said. “Given the incredibly talented cast that we have — Angela Sarafyan is a concert-grade pianist, and Evan Rachel Wood is herself an accomplished singer — we couldn’t resist.”

A fresh round of theorizing is sure to follow the new season, which hads its premiere Sunday night. Dolores and the other hosts started a bloody revolt against their human oppressors in last season’s finale, and “Westworld” has now shifted into a wide-open space where the androids are getting their first taste of freedom but discovering a new set of challenges.

The day after a screening event in Los Angeles, Nolan and Joy discussed anticipation culture, the coexistence of puzzle-solving and storytelling, and how much they can and can’t plan ahead. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

JONATHAN NOLAN: We spend a lot of time layering the show and thinking about how the show will lay out, so it’s a delight to watch people engage with it on that level. In another life, when I was watching movies and shows instead of making them, I was more often than not the guy who was trying to guess the narrative ahead of schedule. I was often wrong and occasionally right and ruined movies like “The Sixth Sense” and “The Usual Suspects” for friends of mine. So this seems like perfectly fair Karmic revenge.

NOLAN: I’ve never been terribly interested in twists for twists’ sake. I’ve been interested in the limitations of human — or in the case of “Westworld,” not-human — perception. The way that we see the world and the way that our biases and our hang-ups and our flaws impact the way that we see this world. So with this project, we were interested in the ways that an artificial mind would perceive the world differently. Memory, which is something Lisa and I have long been fascinated by, and the clarity of memory felt like a really interesting thing to play with, and the story followed from that. We had initially turned it down because I couldn’t see past the “Fantasy Island” version of it, like we’d have different guests each week and the hosts would help through their relationship problems. (Laughs.) But Lisa saw it very clearly. She said to me one night when we were having dinner and talking about it: “God, this is everything that we think about and talk about. Everything that we’re interested in right now in one show.”

LISA JOY: We’re in this really lovely creative moment right now where people aren’t holding themselves back anymore and saying, “Well, this is the genre or this is the world that I’m working in, so I can’t step outside of this box.” Previously, you might have thought that this should just be a kind of horror film, or a dystopian thing where robots chase humans around. And now as tastes evolve, as TV evolves, you can do an episode that has an amazing fight scene but also a scene that poses legitimate philosophical questions and also contains character elements that speak to the most simple and enduring elements of the human condition.

NOLAN: I think a little head-swimming is not a bad thing. For “Westworld,” Lisa and I go through three distinct phases. We write — or rather, we pull together a writers’ room and we plot it out. The original film is packed with cool ideas, but there isn’t really a single shared character between the film and our series. We had to build the world out from the ground up, so that means we spend six months thinking and writing. Then we turn our attention — Lisa and I both direct on the show — to the production. Then we turn our attention to the editing phase. The short version is we definitely didn’t get a vacation in between the two seasons.

NOLAN:It’s not, with all due respect to the original film. About half of my career has been adaptations of other people’s work, and half of it has been original work. This show feels somewhere in between because we’re adapting a 92-minute movie into many, many hours of television. I never think you’re doing the source work any favors by feeling harnessed to it.

Crichton was a polymath, and he understood on a sort of breathtaking level the technologies that were emerging and where they might take us. He almost perfectly anticipated open, sandbox gaming. There’s no version of “Westworld,” but there is “Grand Theft Auto,” and they are almost exactly the same thing, and they’ve prompted a similar level of moral hand-wringing. As virtual gaming gets better and better, we’re going to wander into what we’d call the Canny Valley, which is the place where you can no longer distinguish reality from illusion, and therefore the moral consequences of your actions get much more complicated. Crichton wrote his film in the same year as the emergence of Pong, and he perfectly anticipated not just open-world gaming, but also computer viruses. He thought about the way that these things would be networked together. There’s an awful lot of cool thinking that’s gone into his movie, and so we remain influenced by that.

JOY:In the broad strokes, “Westworld” is about the journey of a new life form. It felt like with such kind of lofty stakes, we should have a direction and posit a solution to some of the questions that we’re exploring here. So in that sense, we’ve talked about how the series as a whole will end and the broad directions of every season. We’ve talked about different worlds that we’re interested in exploring, and different characters that we’d like to meet, and the broad strokes of their arcs. That being said, even though there are kind of tentpole and major moments you want to hit, there’s still room to dance in between those moments. I think of it not unlike a sonnet or something. You have the sort of formal structure, but a lot of the magic occurs in the actual moments, of words chosen within that iambic pentameter. That’s a little bit of what TV is. You set some boundaries so that the scaffolding holds.