Philip K Dick: king of the sci-fi adapted again

It may be time for androids to stop dreaming of electric sheep. For more than 30 years, when there has been talk of screen versions of Philip K Dick adaptations, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick’s story Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, has hijacked the conversation.

Since the early 1980s, Hollywood has made some very big budget adaptations of other works by the prolific sci-fi author, among them Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and two different Total Recall films. Richard Linklater’s mind-bending A Scanner Darkly broke new ground as a Philip K Dick adaptation, shot with real actors whose performances were then animated. These are all honourable efforts but none has come close to usurping Blade Runner’s place as the one Philip K Dick movie that everyone knows.

The new Amazon Studios series The Man In The High Castle (executive produced by Ridley Scott) is a new Philip K Dick adaptation which looks almost certain to develop a huge cult following of its own.

The drama, based on Dick’s “alternate history” novel of the same name, imagines what might have happened if Germany and Japan had won the Second World War. The Nazis have the East Coast. The Japanese are in control of the West Coast. Post-war America is portrayed in familiar fashion, complete with Rock Hudson and June Allyson movies, midwestern towns that have picket fences and New York streets with yellow cabs. The difference is that there are swastikas plastered all over familiar American landmarks.

The project has had a very lengthy gestation indeed. Its Scottish producer Stewart Mackinnon of Headline Pictures first read Dick’s novel in the 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam war, and had long dreamed of adapting it. “It was a book that really caught the imagination of my generation.”

Mackinnon met Ridley Scott when they were working on a completely different project. He asked Scott why he hadn’t considered making The Man In The High Castle as a movie. Scott replied that he had never been able to secure the rights. Dick had always planned to write a sequel. Reportedly, he had begun work on it but the author found it so depressing to imagine what the future might hold under fascism that he didn’t complete it.

In partnership with Scott’s company, Scott Free, Mackinnon finally managed to secure the rights from Dick’s estate. Initially, the BBC and Fremantle Media were set to make it with Frank Deasy (Prime Suspect) as the writer. When Deasy died in 2009, Mackinnon approached playwright Howard Brenton to take over the writing duties. “There was a great excitement about the [Brenton] scripts but in the end, they [the BBC] didn’t feel able to put a film of this scale into production.”

Sci-fi Universal was the next company to take on the project. They wanted an American writer – so Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files) was brought in. Then, after a change in management, the project was put into turnaround yet again and was set to be abandoned. “We were very close to the end of our option,” Mackinnon recalls. At the last minute, Amazon Studios stepped into the breach. The result is a series that Dick fans have welcomed with a relish not seen since… Blade Runner. Mackinnon has no doubts about why it is so popular. “Dick is asking if your world is turned upside down, what values do you hold on to. What do you take with you if you’ve lost everything. That resonates with audiences.”

All 10 episodes of ‘The Man In The High Castle’ are available from 20 November on Amazon