More coverage in the UK’s second-biggest SFF magazine, SciFiNow.
The new issue, #51, has two articles on the series. The first is headlining the news section and again features some of the same, traditional responses the writers and actors have been giving out in other interviews. A few different things though (and there’s a lot more in the magazine: this is a bigger article than the SFX one):
Bean on GoT versus Lord of the Rings: “It was a trilogy of films, it was a while ago, and it dealt with different issues. I think this is different, this is a kind of edgier piece in the sense that there is more brutality, more incest, more betrayal and sex. So it’s very edgy.”
Weiss on having a huge budget: “It has to be, just because of the nature of what we are doing. The castles and the costumes all have to be designed from scratch and there’s a huge visual effects element, and horses and fighting. Those are things that take time and cost money. You don’t normally see that on television.”
Benioff on downplaying the use of CGI: “We didn’t want to showcase what a computer can design, we want to showcase what our actual carpenters have built. There are exceptions: we can’t build an 800-foot wall of ice, so that has to be CGI, but with only a few exceptions, that’s what we did and the sets were gorgeous.”
Bean on his character: “All the characters that George has written are very complex, so you are not struggling to find things to add to the character because they are already there in the book. I think a lot of the stuff you get offered these days, the characters tend to be very one-dimensional.”
Benioff on Bean: “Sean has that ability that when you turn the character on him, you can hold it on him in close-up for 45 seconds for that dialogue, and you wouldn’t be bored because there’s so much going on there.”
Martin on fan reactions to the books: “One of the things I am proudest of about these books is that the characters I have created are very grey, so I see very different reactions to them which is great: people debating whether they like Daenerys or they don’t like Daenerys: is she a good person, is she a bad person? I don’t know, you judge that. That’s the way we debate about real people: no-one ever questions whether Sauron was misunderstood.”
The article writer: “There are currently four books in the series, with a fifth one due for release next year, and two more in the pipeline.” I wouldn’t read too much in that though.
There’s also a mini-article following on from the main one which makes an important claim: that Game of Thrones is hugely important to the future of genre television. The writer points out that in a few years we’ve gone from the glory years of Lost being hugely successful, BSG getting massive acclaim and “Heroes wasn’t completely appalling,” to almost nothing (the failures of FlashForward and StarGate Universe are mentioned, the rocky performance of V and Fringe is alluded to). “The truth is the success of Game of Thrones is extremely important to the future of genre television – far more important than the success of True Blood or The Walking Dead.” The writer points out those two shows are surfing the zeitgeist of vampires and zombies, whilst epic fantasy on television does not exist. If Thrones is a success, it will open the possibility of other fantasy properties making it to the big or small screen.
“The modern TV audience, one well-versed in high-end TV drama like The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, have never seen mature fantasy like Game of Thrones before.”
But that’s not all! There’s also a smaller article in the book section speculating on how Thrones will affect the book sales, drawing on data showing the massive boost in sales that the book of Boardwalk Empire and the complete graphic novel collection of The Walking Dead received after their TV series debuted. Their conclusion is that the books should do very well indeed, helped by the Voyager TV tie-in edition due for launch on 31 March (ten days later than previously announced; either they got it wrong or Voyager has changed the date).
Finally, that’s only what was in this issue. The Next Month page reveals that the next issue, on sale 16 March, will feature much bigger interviews and features with the cast and crew of ‘the TV event of the year’.
Source: Winter-Is-Coming.net
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