This interview contains spoilers.
Silo is a dystopian subterranean city where people are detached from their pasts and living under strict regulations ostensibly to protect them from the toxic elements of the outside world. Those who question the authorities are sent outside to clean the external sensors and predictably perish soon after.
After Sheriff Holston (David Oyelowo) breaks a cardinal rule by believing the outside world is indeed habitable, he’s sent outside to clean the sensors while wearing a protective suit and discovers the beauty of life outside of the Silo.
Residents die mysteriously, engineer Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) starts to uncover secrets and the truth about the Silo. Creator Graham Yost spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about adapting the popular Wool novel series for television.
Planning The Season
Wool was originally published as a standalone short story. Following its popularity, it was followed by four more novellas which were eventually published as a collective novel.
We asked showrunner Graham Yost how he broke the first season arc. “We had a mini-room for Silo back in January 2020 and started with the Sheriff Holston and his wife Allison (Rashida Jones) story for episode one,” says Yost (The Pacific, Justified, Band Of Brothers) when adapted the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel series by Hugh Howey. The audience also gets a glimpse of Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) in the pilot episode to give them a sense of the trajectory of the series. “There are images of Juliette going over the hill and disappearing from view and then doing a pullback to reveal other Silos,” adds Yost.
The next stage of breaking the season was to figure out the end point. When they did that, the writers’ worked backwards to write what happens in between.
Graham Yost. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
“We needed to build out a story, so we took the one nugget in the book, which talks about how Juliette had met Holston when she was investigating the death of her boyfriend George (Ferdinand Kingsley). We decided that would be the spine of the season. And through that, we can give her more time to build up her relationships, spend more time with Billings (Chinaza Uche), and spend more time with Bernard (Tim Robbins),” he continues. Yost wanted to conceal that Bernard was the villain until Episode 8.
Then he put down markers of what events might comprise an episode such as fixing the generator and the death of the mayor. Juliette becoming the sheriff and losing an ally became another episode. Once Juliette ran the investigation, she can figure out who killed George. Another marker was when Juliette finds out that there are cameras in the silos.
What Is The Silo World?
According to the novel, there are 144 silos a mile deep with 10000 people living in them. “One of the great gifts that Hugh Hovey gave us is the notion that these people have been cut off from their history. They don’t know when the silo was built, why the silo was built, why it’s deadly outside, or when it might be safe to go outside?” adds Yost. These are presumably the big questions that the audience is wondering too. There is a subtle thought police which controls the narrative shaping people’s lives by subtly controlling access to information and dealing with people questioning their methods.
The allegorical Silo represents a “soft dictatorship. It’s more East Germany, or Czechslovakia during the communist era. There’s a secret police and there is secret surveillance,” mentions the showruner. “People have their lives, they’ve got their jobs, and they’ve got their families, so life is normal if they obey the rules.” The people are kept placated and uninformed through espionage, brutal force, and bureaucratic tactics.
The Silo community has a shared purpose to survive with the hope that they may be able to go outside in a future generation.The fact that the people have been cut off from their history means that they’ve forgotten to be racist and sexist because there’s no knowledge that they were brought up with those values.
The Silo equilibrium is upset when Juliette starts asking questions that aren’t supposed to be asked. “Juliette starts pulling at threads and she becomes our hero, even though she has no proclivity for that. She doesn’t set out wanting to be a hero by any stretch. She just wants to find out who killed George and why,” adds Graham.
Depiction Of Time
Silo straddles three depictions of time – past, present, and future without travelling to different time zones. This was shown in Gavin Bocquet’s production design. “He designed the central shaft, the stairs, and the bridges. And then from that, the alley ways, the apartments, the offices, everything is very lived in. It’s old. This is like us walking through a small village of the 1700s or something. There’s damage and there’s been stuff that’s changed over the years.” The inhabitants of that Silo are only aware of the last 140 years of history.
The mystery in Silo is meticulously planted and paid off throughout the season while maintaining the tension in the story. This was the subject of numerous discussions in the writers’ room.
Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) Photo courtesy Apple TV+
Yost refers to a scene where Juliette finds a book with pictures of the world the way it used to be and gives her an insight into the unknown past. “She’s never seen an ocean. She doesn’t know what a forest is. She’s looking at these pictures. It’s like looking at an alien planet that fills her heart with this yearning and a loss,” says Yost. Juliette’s triumphant moment is shattered when she discovers the cameras.
We asked Yost if there is a scene in Silo which defines the essence of the show. “Frank Golan co-wrote Episode 10, which was the final episode. Juliette knows the truth and has been caught. She’s in leg shackles and handcuffs. She asks for some water. They give her some, but she can’t get it to her lips because of the shackles. Bernard, the bad guy, takes it, and holds it for her so she can drink. And it’s in this little moment of humanity where you realize Bernard may be the antagonist, but he’s not an evil person.”
Writing Voice
Graham Yost got his start in television writing half-hour comedies. Then he wrote Speed and it catapulted his career trajectory. “I wrote features for a while, but I will always maintain that my writing changed when I worked on From The Earth To The Moon because I was writing about real people. And especially I wrote the episode about the fire in Apollo One. I was writing about people who died on a launchpad fire. The responsibility of that really made me dig in and become a better writer.”
Yost enjoys writing villains. “They’re the hero of their own movie. H e asks, ‘Why are people doing what they’re doing? What’s going on?’ And really trying to sit with that. One of the reasons I’m a veteran writer is because of the people who’ve been in writers’ rooms with me have said, ‘Let’s go deeper.’ I’m interested in what the real root of the humanity is.”
Graham also reference another TV show he worked on called Boomtown “which is basically a Rashomon kind of thing. The whole point of that was everyone’s got their own point of view and trying to try to pay attention to that.”
