How ‘Game of Thrones,’ new cult favorite, came about
SEAN BEAN: “It’s a good thing to be typecast, isn’t it?”
A great big buzz has preceded the coming to the country of the fantasy series “Game of Thrones,” which HBO Asia will premiere on August 28, 10 p.m. The interest it has generated among technology-savvy viewers, from precocious teens to their conspiring elders, could reach cult-following proportions.
It is the TV version of “A Game of Thrones,” the first book in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” a series of epic fantasy novels by American author George R. R. Martin. First published in August 1996, “A Game of Thrones” has won a slew of literary awards, and became a New York Times bestseller, reaching the top slot in July this year, three months after the series premiered in the United States.
In January, Martin and three of the lead actors, Sean Bean (who plays Eddard Stark), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), met with members of the Television Critics Association at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, California. Also in the entourage were executive producers/screenwriters David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
TCA members come from across the United States and Canada. Also present during the press conference, as guests of HBO, were a handful of journalists representing news organizations from around the world, including the Inquirer. Excerpts from the Q&A:
Emilia, this is your first big role. When you were thinking of becoming an actress, did say to yourself, “The first job I’d like to get is going to be something really huge”?
Emilia Clarke: Obviously that was the dream. I never thought it would actually happen, though. It’s incredible.
What is it about this genre that makes certain groups of people so fervent and avid?
EMILIA Clarke: “Class me as a rookie.”
George R.R. Martin: Fantasy and science fiction fans are very intense. I think part of the reason is that there’s relatively little of [such materials] out there. I mean, television is full of lawyer shows and medical shows and situation comedies, but fantasy shows … fantasy is something that’s been largely restricted to books for a long time, and the readers of those books … are really hungry to see some good fantasy brought to television.
David Benioff: George is being a little modest there. It’s not just the genre that people are so obsessed with. It’s George’s books, in particular. I met someone at a wedding and I told him I was working on the show, and he sent me this two page e-mail about how excited he was. He is the dean of Stanford Law School and he’s completely obsessed with George’s books. There’s something about them that even people who aren’t normally into fantasy, like my 72-year-old father who, because I was working on the series, started reading the books and is now a complete addict.
Did any of the three actors happen to have read the books before they got the roles … and did you envision yourself in one of the roles?
Peter Dinklage: Yeah. I read “A Game of Thrones” and I loved it. That was one of the reasons I signed on for the show.
George, did you think this novel would ever be made into a movie?
Martin: No. Some of you may know that I, in fact, worked very actively on television from the mid ’80s to the mid ’90s, and I was on several shows, and I did pilots, and I did feature films. And during all that period, every time I turned in a first draft, it was always, “George, this is great, but it’s too long, and it’s too expensive. If we had five times our budget, maybe we could do it, but we don’t.” I would cut and trim and combine characters, and eventually, by the first or sixth draft, I would have something they could actually produce.
GEORGE R.R. Martin, author: “Some of the casting choices were surprising, but for the most part, I think this is an extraordinary cast. Even the three kids that we got for the major children’s roles were amazing. I don’t know how they were found, but the world is going to fall in love with them.” WEBSITE PHOTO
After a decade, I was sick of that, and I wanted to kind of spread my wings, and I sat down and said, “I’m going back to prose. I don’t have to worry about a budget. I don’t have to worry about it being producible. I’m going to have hundreds of characters in giant battles and magnificent castles, and they’ll never make this in television or film, but I don’t have to worry about that.” Now David and Dan have to solve those problems that I created, and I’m just glad it’s them and not me.
How gratifying is it for you that this ended up with HBO? How did it end up in the home of “Deadwood” and “Sopranos”?
Martin: HBO is associated with quality, and I wanted this to be a quality production. HBO was always my dream for this, and as to how it actually got to HBO, I think David and Dan could probably answer that better. I remember our very first meeting. I said, “We gotta go to HBO with this.”
D.B. Weiss: It was sort of a one-shot opportunity. HBO was the only place we ever envisioned this being done and done properly. They’re the only people who have the experience in doing epic television that really feels epic in scope with shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” and “Rome” and “Deadwood.”
George, how much control did you have as an executive producer and what was that like?
Martin: I didn’t really have any [control]. I have a very good relationship with David and Dan, and we consult and we talk, but ultimately, they’re the show runners, and the ball is in their court. Sometimes they listen to me, and sometimes they don’t. But for the most part, it’s been great.
David, I think I saw a quote from you that said this is “The Sopranos” meets “Middle Earth.”
Benioff: Ugh. Did I say that? Yes. I think that’s from four years ago, and I kind of wish I hadn’t ever said that. George’s fantasy is not a for-children fantasy. It’s sexy and it’s violent and it’s brutal, and none of the characters are safe. Characters that you might think are going on for six seasons meet an early end. One of the things that was so exciting about tuning into “The Sopranos” was, you never knew who was going to get whacked. We’re not a gangster show, but it’s got elements of that within it.
You shot in Northern Ireland with a primarily British cast. Do you have any thoughts on why high fantasy—even if it’s people faking the accent like Elijah Wood—why the British accent seems to be the accent we associate with high fantasy?
Weiss: That’s a really, really good question. We don’t know.
Dinklage: A New York accent wouldn’t work.
Weiss: I agree. Peter tried.
Martin: Most written fantasy, even if it’s set in an imaginary world, is inspired by the history of the Middle Ages, and it’s full of castles and lords and swords and knights and all of the other trappings that, in this country, we associate with England. So that seems natural. It would be hard to do it with a bunch of actors who had thick Southern accents.
Weiss: I’d do it with a German accent.
Martin: The more curious question is why Romans always have British accents.
Pretty much, by fans’ consensus, Peter Dinklage and Sean Bean were the choices for their roles here. Do either of you feel additional pressure knowing that people basically hung their hopes and dreams for this series on both of you?
Sean Bean: Yeah, that’s quite a responsibility. Thanks for letting me know. I was delighted when I first met David and Dan [to] discuss this, and I had read the book, and found it very exciting, very luxuriant, very dangerous, very edgy, very sexy. And so, you know, that’s very flattering. I’m sure [Peter and I] are both very flattered that we were chosen to play our parts.
We posted a notice on the boards [outside the hall]—if there were any questions the fans wanted to ask any of you, and the first question that popped up was, “Could we get Emilia’s phone number?”
Emilia Clarke: That’s very flattering.
You can say no.
Clarke: Maybe I will.
Sean, having been in “Lord of the Rings” and now doing this, I guess you had no fear of being typecast as a powerful warrior or anything like that … not that it’s a bad thing to be typecast.
Bean: It’s a good thing to be typecast, isn’t it? I do happen to enjoy playing roles with riding horses and swinging swords and having fights and wearing wigs and growing beards, even though … it takes you about three hours to get ready.
George, were these the images you had in your head for these characters, or were you sort of surprised by the casting? For the producers, do you have a safe place to go in case you got it wrong, because these fans are crazy?
Martin: I was part of the casting process, although I was not physically present. David and Dan sent me computer links to all of the auditions, so I would weigh in with my opinions and thoughts on who I liked and who I didn’t like. So I had a voice in that process from the first, which meant a lot to me. Some of the choices were surprising, but, you know, then you see the actual performance, and you do it, and for the most part, I think this is an extraordinary cast. I’m not going to claim I was familiar with the work of every actor we’ve cast—there are, I don’t know, 742 of them—but as I watched the auditions and checked the credits, you know, it’s just an extraordinary group of people … even the actors who are not here [today]. The three kids that we got for the three major children’s roles are just amazing, and they come from nowhere. I don’t know how the hell these guys found them, but the world is going to fall in love with them. I’ve been very pleased with all that.
Benioff: We had a wonderful casting director named Nina Gold who managed to find these kids who, as George said, hadn’t worked before, and she plucked them from some strawberry field somewhere, and they’re just remarkable, and the fact that they were able to perform as well as they did with no experience, and the fact that Emilia, who has such an incredibly huge role, came in with that much pressure, big sets with lots of extras and a lot of lights shining down on her, and I never saw any fear.
Clarke: I was hiding it really well.
Benioff: And for the fans and their anger, I think we got it right, so I’m not worried about it.
George, do you have any desire to write for television again, now that you’ve seen what can be done?
Martin: I did Episode 8 of this season. It was actually fun. It had been 10 years since I wrote a teleplay or a screenplay, so when the time came for me to sit down and do my script, I thought, “Boy, I hope I still know how to do this.” What do you know? I did. So that worked out pretty well. The biggest challenge was mastering the new software. There’s part of me that would love to be more involved, that would love to write several episodes per season and be there every day on the set with these guys. On the other hand, I still have the books to finish, and the books are 1,500 pages long and take me years, and I have a mob outside of my house with pitchforks and torches that are already very irritated about book five being late, and after that, I have books six and seven.
Can you name some of the episode directors who might surprise us?
Benioff: I don’t think there are going to be any that are too shocking because they’ve all worked on previous HBO shows, excepting Tom McCarthy, but Tim Van Patten and Brian Kirk and Dan Minahan and Alan Taylor …
Emilia, how much actual professional experience did you have before this?
Clarke: You can class me as a rookie. I had done some camera work, but a lot of my theater had been at school … but I had the best character ever, so it was really wonderful and easy to just kind of fall into the acting side.
Have you read the books? Describe that audition experience.
Clarke: As the audition process went on and on, the gravity of it kind of hit home a little bit more. I knew from the start that she was amazing, but by the end of reading the first book, by the time I had gone into the screen test, it was like, “Whoa! Oh, my goodness!” And the screen test was scary.
George, in terms of writing your novels, do you make it a point to crank out a certain number of pages per day, or is it kind of day by day or whatever you get done?
Martin: I’ve never been able to write away from my own place. Some writers can; I can’t. When I’m not traveling, I pretty much work seven days a week. I don’t crank out a certain number of pages. I sit down, I look at the work I did yesterday, and I usually wind up revising that for a certain period of time because I hate some of the stuff I did yesterday, and then I get into new material, and some days I have good days and I get a lot of pages done, and some days I work all day and maybe I’m a paragraph further on. I’m a slow writer, and these are huge books, so it takes a long time. But it seems to work for me; I’m probably too old to change at this point, so I’ll stick with my methods.
