It’s seen in terms of hills and mountains and battles in forests. Whereas for Laeta and most Americans, the words have an instant connection to Washington and the Battle for Independence, which is a rural concept. I think about the streets of Budapest in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 rebelling against the Soviet machine there. So when you say to us to write down our associations with the world revolution or revolutionary, they’re going to be two very different things for us. Laeta comes from a hardscrabble American background. I come from a middle-class British background. One of the things I found fascinating was with the Quellists being this revolutionary movement. It’s inevitable to have these kinds of changes in order for it to work. But obviously it’s also its own creature and was written by different people with different obsessions and ideas, so it has to mold itself to accommodate the medium. There’s almost nothing in the novel that doesn’t come through in the show in some shape or form. The show really honored the book and it’s fantastic. How do you view the adaptation and its transition to a new medium? I’ve been living on full-spectrum delight ever since!

So when Laeta said to me that Netflix picked this up and they’re really going to run with it, you just don’t believe it. I’d be seventy-something years old and everyone will talk about the movie that could have been. Even when Laeta Kalogridis took the option on in 2010, and she was shooting for a movie, it got bogged down and there were logistical problems. It’s got to be.” I think I reached a point around 2008 or 2009 when I started to think it was never going to happen. I sat there thinking, “It’s going to happen next week. They renewed the option for seven years in all. I assumed if someone paid you that much money for the option on your property that they’d get on and do something with it. The book got optioned by Joel Silver for a movie back in 2002 when it was published. And I’m thinking, “I wrote that line!”īut in a way it was about time. They’d taken lines that I’d written down sometime in the mid-nineties and they were pretty much exactly as they are in the book. A lot of the dialogue was lifted directly from the book. On one occasion I was sitting watching them shoot this scene with the characters of Kovacs and Miriam Bancroft.

When they were shooting the show three years ago, I went out to Vancouver to watch them film. What does it feel like seeing Altered Carbon make the leap from page to screen?

Altered carbon books in order