🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
The Witcher: Blood Origin is set 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher and further develops the setting created by novelist Andrzej Sapkowski. To make his version of the Continent feel like it fit with the source material, showrunner Declan de Barra knew his inspirations needed to be just as diverse.
“What I love about Sapkowski is he takes a bit of pick ‘n’ mix from every culture and every mythos,” de Barra tells Tudum about the prequel, which explores the creation of the first prototype Witcher. “We’ve got Slavic stories and Russian stories and Norse stories and Celtic stories. He mixes them all together and comes up with these wonderful stories, so that was kind of the aim in terms of my world building.”
By the time of Geralt of Rivia, humans have conquered the Continent and most elves have been killed. The survivors either hide in the wilderness or live as second-class citizens in human lands that were once theirs. Even the great city of Xin’trea has fallen, becoming Cintra, though it remains the Continent’s crown jewel. De Barra looked to history to tell a story of the Elven Golden Age.
“I was thinking about what got lost in the fall of the elven civilization,” he says. “All these technologies get lost. When the Roman Empire fell, they forgot [how] to make Roman concrete. It’s the strongest thing in the world. We still don’t know how to make it. What did [the elves] lose?”
Rather than using the architectural style of the Roman Empire for the Golden Empire, de Barra says he wanted a clean, minimalist style, which he developed with head of franchise design Andrew Laws.
“I said to Andrew, ‘To me in my brain when I’m writing this, it’s the Assyrian Empire, their beautiful architecture, mixed with a touch of Blade Runner, and he got it straight away, and he came back to us with this beautiful style,” de Barra says.
The design combines aspects of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization with touches of Japanese, Mesoamerican and Eastern European aesthetics. For instance, the port city of Gaylth has onion domes common in Russian architecture. The ornately carved buildings in the capital city of Xin’trea, which was meant to have originally been built by dwarves but conquered by the elves, were inspired by La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, a gothic church that began construction in 1882 but was never finished.
The same attention to detail that was applied to the sets went into designing the show’s costumes and props. “We didn’t want everything looking like The Witcher, which feels like a more medieval world,” de Barra says. “We wanted there to be a lot of color and fine work in the costumes and jewelry.”
The Witcher’s master armorer Nick Jeffries designed the show’s weapons, which were based on the bronze-infused steel weapons used in Egypt and Europe. Some Xin’trean soldiers carry a khopesh, a sickle-shaped blade wielded by Egyptians and Assyrians.
Empress Merwyn’s dramatic makeup and regalia draw on looks found in French courts and the last imperial dynasty to rule Russia.
“Her crown was very Romanov to me,” says de Barra. “We took inspiration from a lot of Eastern European, European and Prussian monarchs, but at the same time we wanted also just to have a graceful minimalism with a lot of stuff, and that played in with hair and makeup.”
Hair and makeup designer Deb Watson and costume designer Lucinda Wright, both of whom also worked on The Witcher, helped de Barra develop looks for a wide variety of characters in the show’s story ranging from court sages to crude mercenaries.
“It was a lot of work and we spent a lot of time getting there, but we’re all just so happy with what we landed with,” de Barra says.
Sapkowski’s work was always front of mind for de Barra. Just as The Witcher books include monsters from many cultures such as Arabian djinn and Persian manticores, Blood Origin features a hydra from Greek mythology. The final episode even references vodniks, a Czech creature mentioned in Sapkowski’s short-story collection The Last Wish. De Barra says he hopes that fans will appreciate the way he tied Blood Origin back to Sapkowski’s books and the main series and that his interpretation will spark their own imaginations.
“Thirty to 40 million people have read [The Witcher] books so there are now 30 to 40 million different versions of these books existing in people’s heads,” de Barra says. “No two people are going to have the same version of that, and that’s what I love about storytelling. Once this drops on Christmas Day, it belongs to the viewer. Say 50 million people watch this — there’ll be 50 million different versions of this story that exist, but it no longer belongs to me or the writers or the producers or Netflix. It belongs to the person whose head it lives in.”
