What We Learned from the "Making The Witcher" Documentary on Netflix
It’s been eight months since Netflix unveiled one of their most high-profile original series of 2019. The Witcher, based on a series of fantasy novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, went on to become globally ranked on the steaming giant with eleven days left in the year. With Season 2 currently in production and two spin-offs in the works: Nightmare of the Wolf, an animated feature film, and The Witcher: Blood Origin, a limited series, it’s clear that Netflix is investing heavily in the universe, its potential, and exploring its uncharted territories.
Here’s what we learned from the new behind-the-scenes documentary, “Making The Witcher”, about the Continent, Chaos, and Destiny—always title case.
From ‘The Source’: The Challenge of Adaptation
Executive producer Tomasz ‘Tomek’ Bagiński knows firsthand the expansive universe of The Witcher and its relevance in Polish pop culture. “The Witcher is many things,” he says, “it’s hard to box it in.” From its beginnings as a contest entry in Fantastyka, Poland's leading science-fiction and fantasy literary magazine, author Andrzej Sapkowski went on to write thirteen short stories and six novels set in the Witcher universe, which in turn spawned their own video games, comic books, and Polish and English screen adaptions littered throughout the last thirty-five years.
Every iteration of the story centers on Geralt of Rivia, the titular witcher. Showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich went on to share a unique part of the world that interested her: the women surrounding Geralt. She was surprised by the strength of the Continent’s female characters, developed in the 80’s. The author told her in response, “You’ve never met my mother.” According to Hissrich and Sapkowski, ‘for a war-torn nation, [Poland] lost a lot of their men in [conflict] and women became the centers of the community’, homes, and the workplace. Saplowski’s personal experience and environment influenced the fantasy world he created.
“These characters are survivors,” Hissrich declares. Her final pitch followed through with that statement. While the two compilations of short stories that established the world focused on Geralt, she proposed an expanded concept for the most recent adaption from Netflix. The Witcher would broaden its scope to also follow Yennefer of Vengerberg, a sorceress, and Cirilla, the Princess of Cintra.
The source material is renown for its unwavering plot-centered march. Unlike other fantasy epics, such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and A Song of Fire and Ice that could fill extensive tomes with their unreleased backstories, Sapkowski chose to glaze over any world-building details unrelated to the immediate plot. “The characters are only there to serve the plot!” he exclaimed at a packed session at the Lucca Comics and Games Festival in Italy in October 2019.
(Best guess is that sparse details were likely due to the initial limitations of a short story format. The world-building that’s achieved throughout the series is done exclusively through the eyes of primary, secondary, and tertiary characters. The frequent shifts in perspective throughout the series prove to be a minimalistic world-building technique that provide maximum payoff in scale for readers.)
Gaps in the lore left plenty of space for original content from the Netflix writers’ room, particularly when it came to Yennefer and Ciri’s origins. Anya Chalotra, the talent behind Yennefer of Vengerberg, says, “Initially from the audition, I didn’t really know anything about Yennefer. […] I was curious as to why she was presenting herself in the way she was and I wanted to figure out what her struggle was. And I think for any actor… the arc that she goes through is an incredible challenge. And I love discovering more about her, the more I read, the more I play her, I suppose.”
Freya Allen, who won the role of Ciri, says that she enjoyed the range and depth shown in her character’s audition pieces: one that focused on her stubbornness and another on her empathy.
Writer Sneha Koorse, who adapted “The Last Wish” into Episode 6, “Bottled Appetites”, painted the image of the writers room through Season 1 production. The writers worked together to define the season-long arcs before diverging to expand and detail their own piece of the story. Ironically, The Law of Surprise was the unwanted child of the writer’s room, according to writer Declan de Barra, who took the challenge of weaving this crucial plot point into his adaptation of the short story “A Question of Price” from The Last Wish into The Witcher’s Episode 4, “Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials”.
Despite the magical elements of the universe, the adaptation aims to explore ‘normal people in a fantasy world’ according to Episodes 5 and 6 director Charlotte Brändström. Writer Beau DeMayo, who wrote Episode 3 “Betrayer Moon” and will write Nightmare of the Wolf, supplements, “When you’re coming into a world like this, it’s finding those metaphors for, you know, adolescence, which is what Ciri’s journey is in some cases. It’s kind of finding those touchstones where you can take the fantastical and root it in something that everybody can kind of relate to and has experienced in their own lives.” The realization of translating shared experiences to screen, began with productions’ interest in diversity.
Beyond The Limits of Our World: Diversity in Production
Diversity was the cornerstone for every aspect of production, from the writers room, to the sets and costuming, to the performances. DeMayo says the story of the Continent is a story of lots of different ideas from different groups, which was reflected in the writers’ room. The writers drew upon universal, cultural, and personal experiences to deepen the relationship between the adaption and audience.
Not limited by Earth-bound history, production designer Andrew Laws, was intrigued by the opportunity to ‘create an environment from the ground up.’ He recounts, “We wanted to give the Continent a slightly more global feel. In many ways, the Witcher world has a very European basis. […] We wanted to grow that world with influences from lots of other places, lots of other cultural references. We looked to, you know, Japanese architecture, Indian architecture, middle eastern architecture, where we could give the Continent a sense of scale, so we didn’t feel like it was all happening in one region.”
This diversity of inspiration extended to the other-worldly aspects of production as well. Laws worked collaboratively with Bagiński to explore Slavic elements, monsters, and fairytales. When Laws needed to bring to life a world with thousands of years of history, he sought to contrast our known reality with fantasy: “[Playing with architectural realities, the external visage of Aretuza and Thanned] is quite elevated, you know, there’s a bit of a question of like, ‘Wow, where did that come from? How was it achieved?’ Cause we want to juxtapose that with the more human architecture of, ‘Okay, we understand how a castle gets built.’ But I think mixing those two things up is really important."
On his part, costume designer Tim Aslam drew upon a range of Gothic influences, citing a combination of medieval dress, modern high fashion, and fabric manipulation techniques such as pleating, draping, and smocking to create architectural shape and bring compelling visual surfaces to the costumes. In doing so, he developed a language of wear unique to the Witcher world.
Beyond monsters, sets, and costuming, producer Simon Emanuel gave an example of the way production leveraged the natural strength of their diverse talent pool, “[Henry] does all his own stunts, which is a producer’s worst nightmare. If it’s Geralt on the screen, that’s Henry. […] And it’s interesting, because what the fight team will do is to really lean into Henry’s strengths. I mean, he is a, you know, he’s a huge, strong person […] and it’s really interesting when you lean into people’s natural skills, how much more believable something looks.”
The Conjunction of the Spheres—the ‘Big Bang’ of the Witcher universe that saw “a bunch of different dimensions smashing into each other”, as Hissrich puts it—seems an apt metaphor for the challenge of merging their eclectic range of influences into a unified show. Eamon Farren (Cahir) praises the production, “It feels to me like a found world. It’s not that we’re make-believing or creating, it feels like we’ve found this world, and for a story like The Witcher, I think that’s really important because it grounds it in reality.”
Bottling Chaos: Defining The Magic System of The Continent
Throughout the feature, we learn more explicitly about one of the key fantastical elements of the adaptation. What we call ‘magic’, the inhabitants of the Continent call ‘Chaos’, according to Hissrich. “What we didn’t want to do was have a show where our characters could perform magic to get in or out of any tricky situation. There’s no sort of drama there.”
Although the Law of Equivalent exchange, as Hissrich describes, does have earthly origins, book readers know that the rules that govern the Continent aren’t Earth-bound per se. Adam Levy, who plays the druid Mousesack, an important figure in Cintra’s court, shared the experience of turning written direction into a fantastical performance. When the direction says ‘Mousesack conjures a wall’, he worked with his directors and Hissrich to discuss how his character should ‘bring energy into the room.’ He said, “It has to be other worldly and it should come from something unique that you feel would give you power. […] Out of the Chaos comes control.”
What Should we Expect for The Future of ‘The Witcher’?
Toward the end of the feature, Hissrich leaves viewers a clue for the future direction of the main show: “How are Geralt, Yennfer, and Ciri going to factor into this Content that is at war, and appears to be at war over Ciri?”
Season 1 was an introduction to the characters, world, and lore. Season 2 of the Netflix show will begin adapting the five books that comprise ‘the saga’, the series of novels that comprise Geralt and Ciri’s core story: Blood of Elves, Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire, Tower of Swallows, and Lady of the Lake. Hissrich, Emanuel, Laws, and Bagiński all voice enthusiasm for the future of the show.
Unlike the short stories in The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny, Sapkowski’s saga creates space for explorations of the greater landscape: a morally gray and dispassionate world of king and emperors, humans and non-humans, monsters and money. Future seasons of the adaptation are likely to do the same. De Barra defines some of the themes of the universe that were broached in Season 1 that will certainly be dissected more deeply in the future: “The fallout of colonialism, class disparity with the haves and the have-nots, indigenous cultures getting fucked over. Racism, sexism. The world gone mad. People having power that shouldn’t have power, people rising up, constant flux. This world is an ocean and is a tempest and that’s what The Witcher is.”
Writer Beau DeMayo shares a theme that will likely steer the upcoming spin-offs, Nightmare of the Wolf and The Witcher: Blood Origins, “The humans were the ones who were barbaric enough, war hungry enough, and also co-opted magic from the Elder Races to actually take the Continent over and push the elves out of their lands.”
De Barra and DeMayo point toward the beauty of The Witcher and the Continent: its timelessness in theme, content, humor, and character. True to Jaskier’s poetic nature, actor Joey Batey defines the spirit of The Witcher that weaves a common thread between writing, production, and performance: “Every single day has been an exploration in that natural feeling and feeling at home. And finding—creating a new family.”
Alyssa is the host and producer of Breakfast in Beauclair, a global Witcher podcast, and creator of GoodMorhen, a visual exploration of Andrzej Sapkowski’s the Witcher universe. She is based in New York City.