The HBO fantasy drama Game of Thrones, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s best-selling Song of Ice and Fire books, is one of the most highly anticipated series in recent memory. And, all of the hype that you’re hearing about it is completely deserved, as it is also one of the most intriguing, well-written and believably acted epics that I’ve seen, in a long time. As someone who is normally not what I would consider to be a fan of high fantasy, I got so engrossed in the story and characters that I watched the screeners for the first six episodes in one sitting. It’s that good. I’m sold, as I’m sure countless other viewers will be as well.
During a recent interview, executive producers/writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss talked about tackling the complex and compelling work of author George R.R. Martin, casting such a wide variety of characters, the challenge of revealing the basic information in a way that doesn’t overwhelm viewers who aren’t familiar with the book, and often wondering what they’d gotten themselves into. Check out what they had to say after the jump:
For those not familiar with the story, here is HBO’s synopsis:
Game of Thrones follows kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars and noblemen as they vie for power. When the series opens, King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), who is married to Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) of the wealthy and corrupt Lannisters, asks Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark (Sean Bean) to come south and help run his kingdom after the questionable death of his right-hand man. Meanwhile, there is a threat to the throne from the east by the exiled teenage Princess Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) and her brother Viserys (Harry Lloyd), whose family ruled the Kingdoms for many years before being ousted. As there are rumors of strange things happening at the edges of the Kingdoms, north of the Wall, Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Ned’s bastard son, goes to be part of the brotherhood of the Night’s Watch, which is sworn to protect the Kingdoms.
And, because Benioff and Weiss were so generous with their time, I’ve broken down the interview with a list of the 10 coolest highlights. A full transcript of the interview follows.
- They were first approached to turn Martin’s books into a PG-13 movie, but knew there was no other way to bring them to life than with HBO
- They had a major “Oh, my god!” moment when the Dothraki wedding sets from the pilot were washed into the sea by a hurricane
- They had an opportunity to go back and re-shoot the pilot, fixing all of the mistakes they felt they made with it, including script adjustments, re-shooting in Malta instead of Morocco, and the re-casting of Daenerys Targaryen and Catelyn Stark
- The first scenes and the last scenes of Season 1 are very close to those of the book, with only minor deviations in between
- Their biggest trepidation in bringing this story to life was that so much of the story rests on the children, until they found young actors who delivered beyond their imagination
- The two roles that they didn’t audition for were Ned Stark and Tyrion Lannister, as they couldn’t see anyone other than Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage in those roles
- They saw 300 actresses for the role of Daenerys, finally choosing Emilia Clarke, who was straight out of drama school and had only done one episode of a British soap opera, prior to landing one of the most important roles in the story
- The author was not only a resource they could turn to if they had questions, but he also had a hand in the cast and wrote Episode 8
- They hope to know about a Season 2 before all 10 episodes of the first season air
- In order to tell the entire story, they hope to get seven or eight seasons to bring what will eventually be seven books in the series to life
Question: George R. R. Martin has said that, when he wrote the novels, he considered them unfilmable. What ended up convincing you that it could be done?
D.B. WEISS: Well, who doesn’t like a challenge? George had worked in television for many years, and is intimately familiar with the restrictions of television budgets and schedules. And, as somebody with a massive imagination that eventually started to wear on him, he felt the need to let his mind roam free. That’s why we’re lucky enough to have his Song of Ice and Firebooks. But, HBO does give you a much wider playing field and, frankly, a much bigger budget than is customary in television. The technology has also moved on since when George was working in television. There were things that were not remotely possible, even in big-budget feature films, that are now things you can do on a television budget. So, while he devoted his life to these books that he created, the playing field of television changed, in such a way as to make it a possibility, where it wouldn’t have been before.
DAVID BENIOFF: When the books were originally sent to us, they were sent over to consider as feature adaptations. In reading them, the very first decision that we made, probably a week after we started reading the books and having more fun than we have had reading anything in years, was that these were not going to work as features because there is such massive sprawling tapestries, so many characters and so many plotlines. The movie version of this would have to simplify everything and cut it down to maybe one storyline, so that it’s the Jon Snow (Kit Harington) movie, or the Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) movie, or whatever else, and you are probably going to end up eliminating about 95% of the characters, storylines and complexities. That wasn’t interesting to us. We did want to adhere as closely as possible to George’s world, knowing that there were going to be certain deviations, but we didn’t want to get rid of so much of what made it special. Beyond that, these are books written for adults. This is not fantasy written for 12-year-old boys. Not to say that there aren’t 12-year-old boys out there who would love it, but for the most part, it’s a more sophisticated readership, and we wanted to keep that. We wanted to keep the sexuality of the books. We wanted to keep the profanity. To have a PG-13 movie where Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) never gets to say the “C” word, it just wouldn’t be Tyrion anymore, and we wanted that. We wanted the brothel scenes. We wanted the bloody violence. You know that someone’s head gets chopped off and you are going to see blood spurting out. You don’t want to not do that because it’s a PG-13 movie, and you only get two blood spurts per hour.
WEISS: And, the blood has to be green.
BENIOFF: Yes. There are so many goofy rules involved with the Ratings Board. HBO was really the one place where we could have the time to tell the story, and be allowed to have the freedom to tell it the way we wanted to.
In taking on a project, this epic in scope, with major locations, sets, costumes and looks for so many characters and kingdoms, while still making it accessible to people who aren’t normally fantasy fans, how many times have you wondered if this is something you could really pull off, and did you have moments of, “Oh, my god, what have I gotten myself into?”?
BENIOFF: Every day.
WEISS: There were a few, “Oh, my god!,” moments when I watched our Dothraki wedding sets from the pilot being washed into the sea by a hurricane. I know that was an, “Oh, my god!,” moment right there.
BENIOFF: One thing that gave us confidence about being able to lure in fans who are not normally fantasy fans was just knowing how these books have attracted readers that don’t normally go for fantasy books. I can think of my own family with that, whether it’s my wife or my father, or whoever. They started reading these books and they became incredibly engrossed in them because the characters are so vividly drawn, and you become so tied into their fates. You just want to know what is going to happen to them, and you are terrified about what’s going to happen to them because George is brutal on his characters. It’s one of the things that he is famous for – just a willingness to kill anyone. That keeps you nervous, as a reader, and I think it will, as a watcher of the show as well. Anyone and everyone is at risk of getting his or her head lopped off. That is something that makes the show very tense and would, hopefully, keep people tuning in every week.
For those who haven’t read the books, would you recommend that they start reading the books, or just enjoy the show in its own?
WEISS: I think you can really come to it either way. The show is definitely designed to stand on its own, and reading the books is not a prerequisite for understanding the show. They are two different experiences. Each one will give you something that the other one doesn’t, and each one will also give you different perspectives on what is very much the same story. We’re very indebted to George, and we feel very grateful that the books have so many fans, because that has given the show a lot of excitement that otherwise wouldn’t be there. But, the idea of people watching these shows who don’t know what’s going to happen is very exciting for us because we do have to make the show for people who haven’t read the books and who have no idea what’s going to happen to these characters. You’ll have the same level of surprise that you would, the first time you had read the books. Ideally, the show works either way. I can’t wait to watch it with friends of mine who have never read the books, just to gauge their surprise level for all the various calamities and unexpected events that happen.
What are the differences between the original pilot that you shot and what it looks like now?
BENIOFF: It was a good experience for us, in that we got to go back and do much of the pilot over again and learn from some of the mistakes we made the first time, some of which were scripted ones. You take certain things for granted, from reading the books. You think certain relationships are clear. We would show the original pilot to friends of ours, who are very intelligent friends that watch very carefully, and they would get to the end of the pilot and have no idea that Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) were brother and sister, which grew into the last scene of the show. So, we clarified some of the relationships. We also had shot the Dothraki wedding scenes in Morocco, originally, which made a certain amount of sense, practically and budgetarily. We had great sets that we could use there, which had been built forKingdom of Heaven for Ridley Scott. But, Malta ultimately made a lot more sense for a location than Morocco had. And, there were a couple of re-casting moves, which had been made, that necessitated re-shooting all the scenes.
Which characters were re-cast?
BENIOFF: We re-cast Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, and Michelle Fairley as Catelyn.
What was your thinking behind some of the changes to Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley)? In the novel, she’s all for her husband, Ned (Sean Bean), becoming the King’s Right Hand, but she is opposed to it in the TV series. What was your process in coming up with those changes?
BENIOFF: The series is quite faithful to George’s books, but there are going to be deviations. There are times where something works very well in the books, and we can feel it work as well in the show. When there are those forks in the road, where veering left means adhering absolutely and literally to the text, or going right means doing something a bit different that we think is going to be better for the television series, that’s the way it is. But, by and large, fans of the books are going to find a faithful incarnation for television. The first scenes of the season are pretty close to the first scenes of the book, as are the last scenes. There haven’t been major character deviations or inventions. I don’t think we have totally changed very much, but there are alterations. This is an adaptation.
With such a huge cast of characters and so many storylines, is there anything, in particular, that you feel drawn to and maybe spent a little bit more time on?
WEISS: All the characters that remain in the show are characters that we are personally very invested in. If there is a center of gravity to the first season, it is definitely Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean. It’s his journey down south, to unravel the mystery surrounding his foster father’s debt, that really drives much, if not all, of the action in the show. And, if that is the spine of the story, we definitely wanted to make sure that that was solid. Sean can convey more with a look than many people can convey with a monologue.
BENIOFF: One of the great things about having a 10-hour canvas to develop a story on is that we can spend so much time with the characters that we wouldn’t have been able to, if it were a feature. We were also still writing, after we began shooting. You see the actors and how they interpret the roles, and that inspires you to write for them. There are several scenes in the series that are inspired and suggested by the books, but that don’t take place in the books. For instance, you know Varys and Littlefinger, played by Conleth Hill and Aidan Gillen, are so phenomenal and so beautifully inhabit their roles that we just wanted to see them together. We were very curious about what these two guys, who are the grand conspirators and masterminds of so much that’s going on, would be like if they were talking. Or, what would happen if Jaime Lannister, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, ran into Jon Snow (Kit Harington) in the courtyard of Winterfell? There were other moments like that. It became a lot of fun. First, you are writing really in the abstract, without knowing which actors will play the roles. But, once all the roles were cast and you saw the actors doing their thing on screen, and had a sense for how they read their lines and how they performed in those roles, it was even more fun to write for them and to come up with new ideas and possibilities for what those characters might be up to.
he children of this story are so important, especially in the books to come. Was there any trepidation with casting child actors to do such mature things, especially in possible future seasons where they will play an even bigger role?
WEISS: One of our single biggest trepidations was that so much of the dramatic weight of this season, and the story in general, is on the shoulders of people so young, who, at least in television and in film, are just not customarily carrying this kind of weight, or dealing with these very adult, sometimes disturbing situations. With the help of our amazing casting director, Nina Gold, we laid eyes on many, many children for Sansa, Arya and Bran, specifically. I don’t know how she found Sophie [Turner], Maisie [Williams] and Isaac [Hempstead-Wright], but she did. None of them had a great deal of prior acting experience, except for school plays or maybe a television commercial, here or there. They all just really electrified us with their auditions, and continued to do so with their performance. An audition is one thing, but when you stick someone who is 11 and 12 years old, in front of 200 people and lots of cameras, cranes, lights and people running around, frantically watching the sun go down, to be able to deliver under that kind of pressure is a different thing entirely, and these kids did an absolutely amazing job.
BENIOFF: We are so used to seeing child roles, in television shows or movies, and in stories like this, being peripheral, and they don’t have to say much. If they’re doing much, it’s really just acting as little innocent creatures. The kids in George’s books are very, very different. Those three Stark children have amazingly important roles, and they each go off in their different directions. For the most part, they’re without their parents around. They’re following their own storylines. So, it was amazingly important to find the right kids, and we were terrified. Especially in Hollywood, you see so many kids, and they’re adorable and very poised, and they have got mannerisms already worked out, but there is nothing very real-seeming about them. We wanted kids who were going to feel like real kids, and who had to perform in amazingly difficult scenes, watching horrible things happen to family members and just be tortured. And, those three kids delivered, beyond our imagination.
In this series, you are taking a more sophisticated approach with fantasy on screen and not having a lot of effects sequences. Has that been intentional?
BENIOFF: Yes, it’s something that we talked about, from the very first time we went in to pitch the book to HBO, and I think it’s very much following George’s model. This is a fantasy world, and magic does exist in the world, but it tends to be more on the outskirts. It’s not front and center. George didn’t want it to be a story about wizards throwing fireballs at each other. That was important to us, partly for practical reasons. We can’t compete with Peter Jackson, in terms of the high effects spectacle. This is never going to be The Lord of the Rings. And, at the same time, what makes this story so compelling and so different from something like The Lord of the Rings is that it’s really about the human interaction. The great majority of the story is about characters – men and women in conflict with one another, not with supernatural forces. That said, this isn’t our world, and there are major differences. This is a world where winters can last for 20 years, and there are dark forces lurking beyond the wall. There are dragons that existed, at one time, and perhaps they will again. It’s very important to us that we create a world that seems completely real to the people within it, and it doesn’t seem like a fake world, but at the same time, it’s not our world.
What are your greatest concerns or fears, with bringing this out to the world?
WEISS: There is always going to be a lot of trepidation, when you spend five years working on something that you love as much as we love this. It’s our baby, so we’re very biased, in favor of it, and we want other people to love it as much as we love it. There is no way of predicting how many people are going to love it, but we hope it’s a lot. And, we really have no idea who it’s going to connect with and how it’s going to connect with them. I suppose there is a certain level of edge-of-the-seat until we find out what happens, but that is probably inevitable with anything that you would invest yourself in, as fully as we have invested ourselves in this show.
BENIOFF: It is nerve-wracking. We just really want to keep telling the story because we know how much great stuff is to come. It would be a shame not to get to the third season. The roles of those child actors in Season 1 become even more interesting, as seasons progress. To watch them grow up, onscreen and off, would be so much fun. So, we’re just really hopeful that we can get that far. In the next few weeks, we’ll know if it works or if it doesn’t.
Have you been given any indication from HBO, as far as when they might make a decision about future seasons of the series?
BENIOFF: Hopefully, we’ll know something a little concrete about our future, one way or another, before Episode 10.
WEISS: Believe us, no one is more on the edge of their seats than we are because it determines where we are going to be living, and where our families are going to be living.
BENIOFF: And, it determines what kind of accent my kid is going to grow up with.
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