David Bowie? Elastic Suits? Ridley Scott Explains His Inspirations for the New HBO Max Original Series RAISED BY WOLVES

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede What does music legend David Bowie have to do with Ridley Scott’s new HBO Max Original series RAISED BY WOLVES, which debuts Thursday on Crave? The subject of Bowie came up while Scott – the acclaimed English film director and producer whose past work includes Alien, Blade Runner, and The Martian – was having a virtual chat with TV writers to promote his latest project. The ambitious RAISED BY WOLVES follows two androids tasked with raising human children on a mysterious planet, where danger, both fresh and familiar, lurks at every turn. Being so experienced with groundbreaking sci-fi, Scott – who is an executive producer and also directed the first two episodes of RAISED BY WOLVES – was asked for his thoughts on the current state of the genre. “I think it’s much in need of something fresh,” the 82-year-old Scott said bluntly. “I think when something good happens, then there seems to be a generation of copycats, and therefore it kind of neutralizes what was necessarily really good at a certain point. I think one is in constant thought about, how do I make this original, without doing what has been seen before? My mind works that way. The script from Aaron (Guzikowski), the way it was written, with its cadence and its thoughtfulness, was inspirational. And when I get inspired, I start to see images. That’s how it begins.” So if Scott’s goal was to create something original, how did he go about casting the two main aliens in RAISED BY WOLVES? They needed to have a certain robotic quality to their movements, and yet there’s incredible depth in the performances of Amanda Collin, who plays “Mother,” and Abubakar Salim, who plays “Father.” “Well, I thought that Mother … I hope she doesn’t slap me, but I thought Mother, actually, is anything but androgynous, and I really mean that, but I was thinking of David Bowie,” Scott said. “So that’s how we ended up with the haircut, and then the hair went red, and she was just great throughout the whole thing. And then I felt that we should certainly be very logical, and therefore Abu was cast as Father, who should be as handsome as Harry Belafonte was. You know, all of this is intuitive.” But Scott then admitted that he had to work around his intuition with one element of RAISED BY WOLVES. “Well, because it’s Adam and Eve, really, they should be naked – and I thought, that may be a bridge too far for HBO,” Scott said. “They might have a heart attack.” An answer presented itself to Scott while he was walking in Soho, near his office in London. “This is a funny story, but it’s real – I’m walking past a shop called Agent Provocateur, and in the window, there’s all this fancy clothing that some people go in there and buy – not me – and there was an elastic suit,” Scott recalled. “So I called up and said, ‘Get an elastic suit-maker immediately, let’s see how it fits, and let’s see what it does.’ That’s how we went for the elasticity, because they became a metaphor for nakedness. So the reason why they look the way they do comes from that logic. They should be naked. They can’t be naked. Besides, it would be too distracting. But I think the way they look is spectacular.” Looks aside, Scott was asked if the future-set RAISED BY WOLVES is trying to say anything about contemporary life. “Yeah, it’s a bit like making history films – we realize we don’t learn too much,” Scott said. “We don’t learn from past events, and we keep making the same mistakes. I think we’re witnessing that right now. So it’s relevant to me in that way, because the use of science fiction, looking forward, it’s useful if somebody pays attention, because in a funny kind of way, it’s like striking a warning bell.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv