Inside the 42-Year Journey to Bring ‘Neuromancer’ to the Screen

Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Briana Middleton has something to show me. “Wait!” she says just as we’re about to end our Zoom call, reaching for something just beyond her screen. “When I found out we were going to be doing this,” she says, “I was at the thrift shop in my neighborhood and I found this .” Then she points it at the camera: an issue of WIRED from 1995 featuring Keanu Reeves on the cover alongside the line “ William Gibson on the making of Johnny Mnemonic .” Very apropos. The 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story by Gibson, who also wrote the screenplay. Molly, the “razorgirl” Middleton plays in Apple TV’s forthcoming Neuromancer adaptation, made her first appearance in that short story. Her relationship with the protagonist Case, played in the series by Callum Turner, mirrors the one Reeves’ Neo had with Trinity in The Matrix , which is steeped in Gibsoneque lore. For Middleton, to be giving an interview to WIRED about Neuromancer ’s epic journey to the screen not long after finding a 1995 issue of the magazine in a secondhand store is so uncanny it almost feels like a glitch. “Dude, it was eight bucks,” she says, agreeing that eight dollars is a steal for a vintage WIRED. “I was like, ‘This is crazy.’” Maybe all things happen exactly when they’re supposed to. Gibson originally released Neuromancer in 1984, back before hackers were cool. Back before hackers were CEOs. It focused on Case, a young computer jockey who can get online through a jack in his head. He teams up with Molly and a former military man named Armitage to break into the offworld home of the Tessier-Ashpool family, who became astoundingly rich thanks to the tech company they founded. The book’s novel ideas—cyberspace, brain-computer interfaces, all-powerful AIs—were years away from being mainstream, let alone possible. In the years since, there’s been much talk of turning Neuromancer into a movie or TV show, but it never took off, even as Hollywood mined sci-fi for hits. On January 22, all of that will change when Apple TV releases its long-anticipated adaptation . Ahead of its release, WIRED got in touch with Middleton, Turner, and showrunners Graham Roland and JD Dillard to find out how they became the first to bring the book to screens—and the burden of taking on one of sci-fi’s classics. On adapting an iconic sci-fi novel: Graham Roland: It's a huge seminal book. I had not read it until the summer of 2020, but I was aware it was one of those white whales. It inspired a lot of things, and people had been trying to adapt it for years. Callum Turner: The world will be taken on a wild ride. It’s an epic. It’s Blade Runner ; it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ; it’s The Fifth Element . This is the first time it comes onto our screens, and that's a big moment for us and fans of sci-fi. Callum Turner as Case. Photograph: Courtesy of Apple Briana Middleton: When we were shooting it and in the thick of it, it was easier to not get freaked out by the expectations. It felt nice to be in a little bubble with the world that we had created. I tried to look at the expectations that people clearly have and the love that people have for this book and what these characters mean. I definitely get freaked out sometimes and I just have to shut my computer and not think about it. On getting the rights: Roland: I had a meeting at Skydance, and they had given me the book and said, “Hey, the rights of this book are going to come available again. We’re going to try to adapt it as a TV show as opposed to a movie or several movies." It made so much sense. So I read the book, and really responded to it right away. JD and I had been friends for years prior to that, and were looking for a way to work together. He had also had a meeting at Skydance, and they had also given him the book. JD Dillard: Yeah, there was a wonderful kismet of this moment, and we were like, “Wait, we’re both talking to people about this. Why don’t we do it together?” On how Drake became a producer: Dillard: Drake has always been a fan of Neuromancer and as a storyteller has great taste, but that's only part of it. The real magic is that he’s built an incredible team at [his production company] DreamCrew that he trusts to bring things to life once he identifies something he loves or believes in. Jason Shrier, who leads film and TV for DreamCrew, is one of the folks in our little brain trust on this show, and someone we pride as always having his finger on the pulse. But he has a relationship with [entertainment company] Anonymous Content, and Skydance, so it was kind of serendipitous that as Drake and DreamCrew had identified the books, all of these parties were starting to form and realize that they could work together to go get the rights. Drake, individually and by way of DreamCrew, is part of the mix and remains an important part of our process. On working with William Gibson: Roland: The way it was set up was that William Gibson was going to be the decider of who was going to get the rights when they came available. So we went to work on a pitch and with the hope that we would be the people he would choose. We had heard that there were some bigger names, much bigger than JD and I. I just felt like there was a counterculture vibe about him and I was like, I don't think it matters that we're nobodies. I think if we can somehow communicate our passion for his book, and not just go and say, “Oh, obviously we’ll take care of your book, you can trust us,” but actually go in and do the work and come up with a thoughtful presentation and a thoughtful pitch, then I think we've got as good a shot as any. Dillard: I'm sure Bill would not mind us sharing this part of it, but it's very easy to look at these big pieces of literature or movies that have stood the test of time and just think that they were immaculately conceived. Just to hear him talk about where he struggled and what he was self-conscious about and then what he was surprised worked and what he wished he could have done, what he wished he had time to do—it was the first time Graham and I both looked at Neuromancer as a living text. On making Neuromancer their own: Dillard: One of the first questions we asked ourselves was “How do you make this feel new in spite of inspiring so many things that have now already come out ahead of this?” It was never going to be our ambition to out- Cyberpunk 2077 Cyberpunk 2077 . But what we could do is talk to Gibson and find out where, for him, some of those big tonal touchpoints are. An interesting one that came up really early in talking to him was that he had never perceived the world of Neuromancer as a dystopia. Even that was a nice thing to just remember as we found our way through it. Photograph: Courtesy of Apple The best we could do is bring people to the experience of what it felt like reading it for the first time in 1984. Because anything beyond that, your reference points are already going to be derivative. If you put up Blade Runner reference art, you're already behind it. The joke that we were even making when hiring [production designer] Luke [Hull] was like: Here's someone who's done Chernobyl and Andor , and in our minds Neuromancer is Chernobyl plus Andor . It's old-school and hi-fi and colliding those things together. Roland: We didn't want the world of Neuromancer to feel like X amount of years after the world that we were living in. In the teaser that opens the show, you see this piece of technology in the late '60s, early '70s that we know did not exist back then in our world. We wanted to announce right out of the gate: Don't be looking for the iteration of whatever phone you have in your pocket 50 years from now. We want this to be its own world. Dillard: Watching someone hack will only be exciting for so long. But what is stakes-driven is the danger to Case in doing it and the toll i