THE WORLD OF RAISED BY WOLVES
A MOTHER AND FATHER HEAD to a new home to begin a family. Sounds simple enough, right? But in the world of HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves, the world is anything but simple.
The Ridley Scott-driven sci-fi series takes place 150 years in the future, when a world war between a religious cult, the Mithraics, and those who won’t accept their life, the Atheists, has led to the Earth becoming uninhabitable. The Mithraics send a large space “Ark” vessel, Heaven, holding 1,000 settlers and military in suspended animation for the 13-year journey, to a distant planet, Keppler-22b, to begin resettling humanity. But they are beaten to the punch by an Atheist rebel, Campion Sturges, who converts one of the Mithraics’ levitating killing machines—a “Necromancer,” a female-appearing android—into a nurturing, maternal edition, known simply as “Mother.” Sturges pairs her with a generic service android—“Father”—and places them aboard a small craft, along with six human embryos, and sends them ahead to the planet.
They land and begin their new life, Father constructing a simple settlement, while Mother births the children in small gel-filled tanks inside a red dome they have brought with them. But five of the six children mysteriously perish as they grow, after eating the “carbo” tubers that emanate from the bones of large serpents which once inhabited the planet. After an exploration team from the Mithraics' Ark meets them and attempts to take over, Mother accesses her buried Necromancer talents, destroying most of them with her terrifying “death scream” (which causes them to be eviscerated in an explosion of flesh). She then takes their small Lander vessel, goes to the Ark and captures another handful of children, for a fresh start, before crashing the Ark into the planet, killing nearly all on board.
And, after that, it gets really interesting….
The series came to Scott in mid-2018 as a spec piece written by eventual showrunner Aaron Guzikowski. “We were explicitly seeking material, a flagship piece, that Ridley could direct,” says executive producer David Zucker of Scott Free Productions. Scott would direct the first two of ten episodes, working with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, ASC, and production designer Chris Seagers, who all developed the look and tone of the series, which would be followed by subsequent directing and production teams.
The first step was to find a location in which to film. After considering the usual landscapes for “planet surface”—Iceland, Morocco and Spain, which would be in winter during the filming period—the production settled on South Africa.
Upon their return, Scott and Seagers sat with Guzikowski, the director making use of his well-known talents for creating hand-drawn storyboards to flesh out his visual ideas. “Ridley’s real superpower is his ability to use very elaborate
