GRRM talks Thrones at C2E2

If you haven’t been following my Twitter you may have missed these two interviews of George R. R. Martin at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. (Pro tip: you don’t have to have a Twitter account to keep up with my tweets, just bookmark the page or add the feed to your favorite RSS reader.)

First, is this article from Monroe County Community College’s newspaper, The Agora, in which Martin reiterates that certain things from the books, including characters, will be cut during the adaptation process.

Martin admitted the impossibility of including every detail from the 674-page novel.

“You can’t get every word or every line of dialog, or even every character in,” he said. “But 10 hours is a lot of time, so we hope to be able to capture most of it. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be quite faithful to the books.”

Second, we got a short snippet of an upcoming interview with George R. R. Martin from the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan.

“The irony of ‘A Game of Thrones’ and where we are now is, I wrote the books almost in reaction to my years in television,” said Martin, who confirmed that he is writing the eighth episode of “Thrones” first season. “My scripts were always too long, they were always too expensive. I was always having to cut them. There were too many characters, too many matte paintings. ‘We can’t have all these matte paintings, we can’t have this giant battle scene that you’ve written because we can only afford 12 extras.’

“So when I went back to books, I said, ‘I don’t care about any of that any more. I’m going to write a story that’s going to be as gigantic a story as I want. I’m going to have hundreds of characters, gigantic battles, magnificent castles and vistas — all the things I couldn’t do in television, I’m going to do in these books and I hope people like it.’ So now here we are doing it for television. But fortunately it’s David and Dan [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the executive producers of the series] who have to figure out all the problems, not me.”

Lastly, you can read Martin’s recap of the convention on his blog, where he teases the interview with Mo Ryan by saying, “I could tell you what we talked about, but then I’d have to kill you…”

• Published on 04/21/2010 at 10:06 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/20/2016 at 5:14 PM CDT