To start, George was asked to talk a little about the genesis of the project. He told us of how he sat down to lunch with David & Dan and ended up discussing the show for hours, when all the lunch folks had left and the dinner rush was beginning. He knew then that David & Dan would do right by the books and gave them his approval to attempt to pitch the show. All three men agreed that HBO was the best place for this show to end up. So David & Dan pitched it to HBO and they decided to go ahead and option the rights. And, of course, we know that since then HBO has gone on to order the full series.
“It was an exciting journey,” Martin said. “Although, at every step of the way, you hold your breath. OK, they ordered the script but will they order the pilot? OK, they ordered the pilot, will they order the series? So far, everything has worked out well, I’m very happy with what we’ve done.”
But what was it about that initial meeting that allayed Martin’s fears? “Well, they loved the books, for one thing. Their whole approach was how to do the books in a different medium, how to do books on television.”
This was different, Martin explained, than other meetings he had had with producers who would sit down and propose they just follow Dany or Jon or whomever, and cut away the rest of the story. “Well they may have made a decent movie that way. But it wouldn’t have been my story, it would have been a vastly truncated version of my story,” Martin said.
Martin then talked about being in the unusual position of adapting himself. “It was actually very easy. I was a little trepidatious, when I started it, because it had been so long since I’d written a script,” Martin explained. “But it came back easy and I was working with my own material and it’s a faithful adaptation, so I was just taking scenes from the books and transcribing them.”
The hardest part, Martin admitted, was actually mastering the new script-writing software. “As my assistant Ty can tell you I don’t like working with computer things that I’m unfamiliar with, I find something I like and I stick with it for a long time.”
Despite that, Martin said, “writing the teleplay was fun.” He added, “I would gladly do more of them, and be a bigger part of this production, except of course the series is not finished. So one script a year is about all I can manage while still writing these enormous 1400-page books.”
At this point, Martin was asked what it was like handing his characters and his story over to David & Dan. He’s often compared his characters to his children, did he have any apprehensions about handing over his children?
“Yeah, a certain amount of that. It’s like you have these kids and they’re at home and you are raising them but then comes a day you have to send them off to school and now you are entrusting them to teachers and you hope they are good teachers… you hope that they’ll take good care of them and love them and nurture them the way you do.”
“But you never quite know, you’re always a little nervous, so I’m putting my children in that sense into the hands of David & Dan and also the directors and the actors who were cast for the role, all of whom will bring their own input to them. And yeah, it is a little bit of empty nest syndrome that occurs there.”
Martin was then asked which character he thought was most changed from the books. He answered, “They’ve done a marvelous job, most of the characters are not different from the books. They are doing an excellent job of capturing the books.”
He did bring up Osha though, as maybe the biggest surprise or change from what he had envisioned. “When I was looking at the auditions for Osha and this actress [Natalia Tena] came up I said, ‘This is all wrong. She’s 10 years too young, she’s too pretty.’ Osha is this hard-bitten older woman. And then I watched her audition and her audition just blew me away, she was sensational. And I said, ‘It’s gotta be her.’”
“So my task now is when I bring Osha back [in the books], I’m gonna have to make her more interesting, so I can match the wonderful actress portraying her.”
The next question was about the infamous torture scene that we got a glimpse of in the recent behind-the-scenes video. Do you know if that is any sort of flashback or is it a dream sequence in which Ned is putting himself in his brother’s shoes?
“You would really have to ask David & Dan about that particular image but my impression is that it is a flashback scene. That that’s not Sean Bean. That that is someone who has been cast to play his brother. But I don’t know, ask David & Dan when you do your session with them. I think that is a flashback. I know they cast the Mad King, they cast Aerys, and of course he doesn’t actually appear in the books.”
Aha! There we go. Flashback confirmation! Well, sorta. He did confirm that Aerys was cast and led us to strongly believe that that particular scene was a flashback. This is a topic we would revisit with David & Dan during our session with them, as George suggested.
Martin continued on to say, “You know it’s a different, not to be too much of a cliché, it’s a different medium. And each medium has its strengths and weaknesses.”
“Now as a prose writer, writing books, I have the tool of internal monologue. I can take you inside a characters head, I can tell you what they are thinking. I can have the character standing and looking at a sunset and thinking, ‘This reminds me of the day my father died. And it was a beautiful sunset but it was a sad day.’ And suddenly I’m taken back twenty years. Well you can’t do that, you just have an actress standing, looking at a sunset and who the hell knows what they’re thinking, unless you have a voiceover, which is clumsy.”
“So there is a lot of backstory in Game of Thrones and the books, that I get across by taking you inside the characters’ heads and have them doing associations and thinking about things. And David & Dan have to approach that some other way with new scenes, or older scenes, or actually showing it or the reader is not going to get it.”
Martin also brought up the challenge of how to show when a character is lying. He said, “The other thing that is also a challenge, a challenge for the directors and the actors as well as the screenwriters, is the fact that since I’m inside the characters’ heads you are hearing what they’re thinking, which is not necessarily corresponding with what they are saying, since my characters, as you know, are duplicitous.”
“So someone may say, ‘Are you gonna do this thing?’ And the character is thinking, ‘Of course I’m not gonna do this thing.’ But what they say is ‘Oh yes, yes, I’ll do that thing, don’t worry about that.’ Well, you don’t have that. So how does the actor sell that, or does the actor sell that? These are the questions that David & Dan had to wrestle with, that thankfully I don’t have to wrestle with.”
George was then asked about his visits to the set where he explained how he went to visit the sets both during the pilot filming and, more recently, during the filming of the series. And what was his reaction, to seeing it come to life? “Oh, you know, I loved it. I loved it.”
But was it like what he pictured it would be? “No. It’s not the way I pictured it. But I’ve been picturing it since 1991, and I’m a very visual writer anyway, so I have a very strong look in my head as to what it looks like.”
“So frequently walking into a set it was a double-sided process, ‘Is it the way you pictured it?’ ‘Well no. But on the other hand, it’s pretty great. It looks really good and it’s gonna look good on film!’”
He went on to mention that much of the detail he adds to the books is not integral to the story. He said, “I describe things in quite a bit of detail, because my approach as a writer has always been to, I want the reader ideally to experience the story and not just read it. I want them to fall through the page. My goal is vicarious experience. And that involves a fair amount of detailed description, but the detail isn’t integral.”
“If somebody changes the kind of chair that someone’s sitting in, I don’t think it makes two tinks worth of difference. I know on some of your blogs you’ve had giant debates about a chair. Didn’t you have a huge controversy about a chair?”
Martin was also asked about whether he feels any pressure to finish the books soon, so the HBO series does not catch up with him. “I feel definite pressure to get these things done. I don’t want the series catching up with me.”
“You know, it’s no secret that this last book [A Dance with Dragons] has taken much, much longer than I thought it would and much, much longer than anyone wanted it to. My editors and publishers are not happy with that, there’s an element of my fans that are vociferously angry about that, and most of all, I’m unhappy about it. But my goal has always been to make it the story I want to tell and to make it as good as I can.”
He then talked about how he had to change his approach on writing Dance due to the mounting pressure. “At a certain point, when the stress really got to me, I said ‘I gotta stop thinking about how long it takes me to write a book and just write one page at a time, one sentence at a time, one word at a time.’ That’s all I can do. I can’t say, ‘Oh God, I got 40 chapters left to do. How am I ever gonna do it?’ I just gotta write this chapter, this scene. Get it down on paper and stop worrying about that.”
During this discussion, he reiterated his opinion that they will need to split A Storm of Swords into two seasons. “And then they hit Storm of Swords, which is a monstrous long book. It’s 500 pages longer in manuscript than Clash of Kings, which is itself 100 pages longer than Game of Thrones. So when they hit Storm of Swords, they’re gonna have to, I think, make two seasons out of it.”
Adding it all up, Martin concluded, “I have like, a five, six year headstart here, so hopefully I can take advantage of that.”
Lastly, Martin was asked whether he thought it was a good or bad thing that the mainstream audience will compare this to Lord of the Rings. “Well I suppose it will be a bit of both.”
But he also states that his books have been referred to as “fantasy for people who don’t like fantasy” and that he hopes they will get people tuning in who would never go to Lord of the Rings.
But, of course, there are some people who are just not into fantasy. Martin closed the session with a funny stor about how he was reminded of that fact. It was when he went to an exclusive screening of the third Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King, for writers, directors, and actors in his hometown of Santa Fe.
“The theater was mostly empty for this screening, there were only a handful of people there. And about five rows behind us, there was, a uh… how do I describe him? A flaming asshole.” At this point the room busts out laughing.
Martin continued, “And all during the screening, this guy is loudly laughing at inappropriate places, or shouting ‘Oh come on!’ or shouting out, ‘What crap!’ like when Shelob, when the spider attacks him, ‘WHAT CRAP! What is this? A fucking old horror movie? Giant spiders!’ I don’t know why he felt the need to broadcast his opinions to the other nine of us in the theater there, but he was very loud.”
“And that reminded me, that experience, and this is of course a movie that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar and I think most people consider it a huge achievement, but this was a guy, who would never accept any fantasy film. Elves and dwarves and giant spiders and trolls and all of that stuff, it was beyond him, and he would never like anything like that. And there are such people out there like that. Will they like this show? I don’t know. They might have a better chance but again, I do have dragons and things like that. So it will be interesting to see.”
Source: Winter Is Coming
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