Heisserer wasn’t really playing hard to get - he had a show he was readying at AMC. “They said, ‘Well, we don’t have rights to that.’ And I said, ‘Well OK, good luck.'” I don’t see a show without both,'” Heisserer recalls.

“I told them at the time, ‘I’m not going to touch this series unless I also have the “Six of Crows” duology and have those characters. Tickled that his resolve to read for pleasure had somehow still brought him a professional opportunity, Heisserer gladly took the meeting with Netflix - but he was far from an immediate yes. “He just happened to be an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. “As soon as we had locked on the rights, I mentioned the fact that Eric Heisserer had read ‘Six of Crows’ and was a fan - he tweeted me about it,” Bardugo says. (They had been with DreamWorks for years but went nowhere, and reverted back to her.) While Heisserer had been busy reading, Bardugo had been busy shopping the rights to the “Shadow and Bone” trilogy over town and eventually landed at Netflix. “And I was like, ‘Are you in the room? How did you…what?'” “They said, ‘Eric, we know you like the Grishaverse books,'” he recalls with a laugh. True to his commitment, he just kept reading all of the Grishaverse books, with nary a thought of adaptation entering his head.Ībout a year later, Heisserer got a call from Netflix. Part of Heisserer’s resolution was to publicly acknowledge authors whose work had excited him, so he fired off a tweet of appreciation to Bardugo - and then promptly forgot about it. “I absolutely love the world, and the characters and just the vibrancy of it all.” To start off 2017, on the advice of a friend, Heisserer picked up “Six of Crows,” one of Bardugo’s other fantasy novels set within the same creative universe as the Grisha trilogy, but years later with a different set of characters. “Just diving into something for the pure joy of it.” “So I had a resolution of, ‘I’ve got to get back to pleasure reading,'” he tells Variety. But all that success had put Heisserer into a kind of perpetual work mode, in which every book or story he read was filtered through the lens of its potential to be adapted into a feature or series.

Were it not for a tweet, however, the show may not have happened at all.įour and a half years ago, “Shadow and Bone’s” executive producer and showrunner, Eric Heisserer, was earning the best reviews of his career for his script for the cerebral sci-fi thriller “Arrival” - adapted from Ted Chiang’s acclaimed short story - for which Heisserer earned an Oscar nomination. His adaptation of Josh Malerman’s sci-fi novel “Bird Box” was also about to get picked up by Netflix as a vehicle for Sandra Bullock.

Shadow and bone netflix