Ask straight questions of the creators and cast of “Westworld” and you may not get straight answers.

When does “Westworld” take place? Where in the world — or beyond it — is this weird, adult amusement park where humanoid robots cater to all whims and fantasies of visiting guests, located? Are you real?

Executive producers Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who envisioned the seductive and scary HBO update of the 1973 Michael Crichton film, and the all-star ensemble of actors who populate “Westworld” aren’t ready to talk specifics ahead of the series’ Oct. 2 premiere. (Some won’t even cop to whether they are humans or “hosts,” the show’s nom de robot).

But ask them how “Westworld” reflects or could even change the world we live in, and the players can go on at length.

“The movie was way ahead of its time, and Crichton’s mind was light years ahead of the reality,” says Jeffrey Wright, who plays Bernard Lowe, the head of Westworld’s programming division. “We’ve finally begun to catch up a bit, so there are even greater resonances and implications now, and I think Jonah and Lisa are exploring in ways that simply weren’t as topical in 1973.

“But at the same time the issues of the technology marry very well with human ideas and curiosity about the nature of things and what is it that our sentience is comprised of.”

Equally as ambitious as another HBO program — the one about warring kingdoms and dragons — “Westworld” is a high-concept series with high hopes to be more than a show about rich people having sex with robots. As such, it’s impossible to discuss “Westworld” without pondering its broader themes of consciousness, consent, artificial intelligence and the nature of sin.

The similarities between the original film and the new 10-episode series basically begin and end with the premise: Guests pay handsomely to live out their fantasies in the Wild West bacchanalia populated by “hosts.”

Gone are scientists in wrinkled lab coats fretting from their control room of whirling tape decks. The new face of this operation is a smartly suited Anthony Hopkins as the reclusive Dr. Robert Ford, creator of the hosts and father of Westworld. His vision is served by an army of engineers and a vast corporate structure that includes everything from cleanup crews to a Westworld artistic director of sorts who scripts, styles, plans and pitches every single host character and story line and guest interaction for Ford’s approval.

The vintage robots of yesteryear have been shelved in favor of hosts who are nearly indistinguishable from humans. Grown in milky vats, their muscles genetically grafted strand by strand, they can drink, stutter, sweat, cough, bleed and “die.” Splayed out like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” the hosts are treated more like props than works of art, as evidenced in the first footage with outed-host Dolores, played by actress Evan Rachel Wood.

But the showrunners behind the scenes know she’s much more than a generic “fembot.” Just mentioning the sci-fi trope to Joy, former writer for “Pushing Daisies” and co-producer on “Burn Notice,” causes the co-creator to pause and ponder. (But not before pointing out that “Westworld” employs manbots as well; it’s an equal-opportunity amusement park.)

“I think it goes back to the notion of romantic love, from the earliest myths, from Pygmalion and Galatea,” Joy says of what the guests are seeking. “You fall in love with this inanimate creature that you imbue with all your hopes and dreams.

“Oftentimes it’s narcissism, because you just want to see yourself in their eyes as something wonderful. And that’s what a lot of these guests are doing. They come to feel love, to feel special. … I think that there is something enduring about that desire to be loved, unconditionally. It’s an unnatural thing. Another human can’t supply that because humans aren’t made to service each other’s fantasies. So they imagine a world in which a robot would do it. We take that a step further with their own personhood, and things get a little complicated.”

Indeed, at the start of the series the park is undergoing a crisis after a “glitch” in the hosts appears to be giving them sentience.

That glimpse of humanity begins to unravel the world and its players and opens up ethical questions — those questions are why many of the cast members signed on. Though “Westworld” is definitely a shiny, sci-fi artifact with all of the visual trappings, that it is also more than that intrigues the actors.

“That has to be the core of any successful artistic endeavor,” says James Marsden, who plays cowboy Teddy Flood. “There has to be that human element to the whole thing. If it’s just ornamental spectacle, you’ll start to see how hollow it is.”