Q&A session at the C2E2 con

After the reading from A Dance with Dragons George R.R. Martin gave at the Chicago convention, there was time for about 10 minutes of questions, the reader Lady Narcissa reports at Westeros forums. George talked about aging up characters for the series, his favourite characters from the books, and what historical figures influenced their creation. Most interestingly, he also roughly sketched what material the episode he is writing (i.e. episode eight of the series) will be covering! To avoid posting spoiler content, we will not repeat his answer here, but rather invite the readers to follow the link and see the original report. The dicussion of this wee bit of info should keep us busy on this slow Sunday and at the beginning of a new week.

UPDATE: Forum member Trebla reports on some further details about episode 8 they pried out of George at a dinner event.

UPDATE: Lady Narcissa has a detailed report of the question and answer session with GRRM. Below are the parts that relate to Thrones:

He talked about the HBO series and how it is 10 episodes and 1 season right now. Maybe they will move to 2 seasons per book if the series continues but it all depends on how the first season does. HBO does not care about ratings, it cares about subscriptions – so he urged us to subscribe to HBO and to tell them the reason we were subscribing was Game of Thrones. He added that he cannot get anyone a job on the show – he gets lots of letters from people asking him to do this. He knows they are looking for extras with large beards to be on the show but you need to be in Northern Ireland and he has nothing to do with it.

Okay onto questions…

(1) Will we be seeing GRRM as an extras in the show?
There is some chance of this. We need to watch the show closely.

(2) How well is the book translating to tv?
GRRM said that they are doing a faithful “adaptation”. But it is an ADAPTATION. With only 10 hours to cover the entire book there is obviously going to be some difference. Some minor characters will not be there. Some will be regulated to background non speaking parts. Some favorite dialogue will be cut. If you liked Jackson’s LOTR movies, you will be happy because it is about in that realm of faithfulness. He is pretty happy with what he has seen so far. But he said its going to get harder as the series progresses as the characters separate more and more and it becomes more complex. But right now they are all just focusing on season 1 by trying to stay faithful to the book and make good television. He’s got a lot of fans but a large book audience is only a drop in the bucket compared to tv audiences.

(3) Did it give HBO producers “pause” that the book has two separate plots only vaguely connected?
He wasn’t in the room when the HBO producers were discussing the plot so he has no idea if it gave them…”pause” But he pointed out if it did, they seem to have moved beyond that now.

• Published on 04/18/2010 at 3:58 AM CDT
• Last updated on 04/20/2010 at 4:25 PM CDT