“Tales From the Loop,” an original science fiction series from Amazon Prime Video, premieres on Friday. If you’re curious about what this new show, which is set in a community located above “The Loop,” is all about, TheWrap has an exclusive clip. Alessandra de Sa Pereira plays a tough young girl named Beth in the movie, which you can watch above. She and her father are playing with a rather huge robot in a large field when the police arrive to inform them that the other citizens of their town perceive the robot to be a threat.
Tales From the Loop, an Amazon science fiction series, is loosely based on Simon Stlenhag’s book of the same name, but it’s really a televisual adaptation of the Swedish artist’s paintings, which show picturesque landscapes punctuated by robots or futuristic technology; Edward Hopper with a sci-fi flair. Creator Nathaniel Halpern admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that when producer Matt Reeves (Batman) and his partners first saw Stlenhag’s artwork, he was “very taken” by the painter’s distinctive approach.
It’s incredibly difficult and uncommon to discover a distinctive aesthetic in science fiction these days. He has this great marriage between the ordinary and the fantastic. Usually, it makes you think of another thing. Here, it truly just stands by itself,” said Halpern. “So I was tremendously moved by the paintings’ quality, but I also got the impression that they were quite emotional. The photograph has a poignancy that drew my attention. Following that, the idea of turning paintings into a TV series felt incredibly original and like a tremendous opportunity.
Yes, Beth controls their powerful AI with a gadget attached to her body, but her father Ed (played by Dan Bakkedahl) isn’t having it. He claims that nobody is bothered by their enormous AI. Even when they leave, the police don’t appear to believe the tale of the neighborhood robot friend.
What Inspiration Did You Draw for The Show from The Book’s Narrative?
The book itself is a collection of paintings, with a few text drawings here and there, but the paintings take up the majority of the volume. He undoubtedly imagined a scenario in which there was this town, the Loop underground facility, and the byproducts of experimentation were all over the place. I borrowed the core idea that underlies all of his work and applied it to the series as well.
However, the actual stories that are in the show must be treated completely, and the way it was done actually just involved finding a painting that matched each episode. My main sources of inspiration were paintings, where I would ask myself, “What is the story I see here? Asking yourself “What is the context?” would set the stage for each story’s development.
There is a tonne of TV built on existing IP, but this is unquestionably a unique circumstance. I think it’s fantastic and different to move from one visual medium to another and actually have it be a hyper-visual adaptation rather than simply adding visuals to words. We’re more used to different forms of adaptations, like from a book or text to the screen.
How Did the Creation Process Go? Since when Have You Started Producing the Series?
I estimate that it has been nearly five years since Simon’s work was first launched and up until this point. I believe that I had the storylines and the structure fairly early on in the process as I look back on it all in retrospect.
I believe that the first story was one of the things that took the longest to produce because it presented a particularly difficult challenge in terms of how to convey the essence of the show, which is to tell these straightforward but moving human stories, while also having to explain the show’s setting. How do those two gracefully complement one another? Finding a method for those to coincide took some time. The burden of needing to construct the world is then lifted for [episode] two and subsequent episodes.
