A quartet of interviews

Three Four new Game of Thrones interviews have popped up on the web over the past couple days, all of them good reads with some interesting quotes.

First up, is this fascinating interview with John Bradley-West, who plays Samwell Tarly, over at Westeros. Bradley-West talks about the audition process, his approach to playing Sam and his time on set. It’s a great read, so be sure to check out the full interview, but I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

I think that’s what attractive about Sam to Jon. I think he sees Sam as someone with great humanity and a humour rooted in intelligence and self awareness. Samwell knows what he is and doesn’t fool himself into thinking he is something he isn’t. I think jon finds that quite appealing. I decided early on after reading the script that with such a lot of violent and unpleasant things happening elsewhere in the story, a comfortable and familiar atmosphere needed to be established when Sam and Jon are together to provide a little light relief.

The second interview comes from Blastr and they talk with George R. R. Martin. Martin talks about some now-familiar subjects, such as the children actors and what kind of changes we can expect. However, he adds a new insight into his work on the script for episode eight:

Teasing what fans can expect from his episode, Martin sighs, “Well, as usual I put in a montage that would have cost 10 times the budget of the entire episode. I wanted all the Lords Bannerman of the North assembling and going to eight different castles, with the Lords arming up and riding out. It read beautifully, but to produce it would have bankrupted them, so I knew writing it my poor montage would be done.

The last interview is at Variety and it has quotes from Martin, as well as David Benioff, D. B. Weiss and HBO president Michael Lombardo. GRRM, David and Dan talk about the challenges of bringing a story of this size and scope to the small screen. Most interesting to me was how close this project came to never being made, as the below excerpt from the article describes:

HBO, however, initially saw the project as too big. “HBO has held out itself as a network that doesn’t skimp on production value, and this is a genre in which the bar has been set very high,” says programming prexy Michael Lombardo.

With precedents like “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and the Harry Potter movies, Benioff and co-creator D.B. Weiss would have to prove that they were capable of delivering the kind of audience needed to justify production costs.

What changed his mind, Lombardo says, was the pilot script written by Benioff and Weiss, along with the pair’s conviction. “David and Dan were incredibly passionate about this,” says Lombardo. “They laid out the entire first season and wrote backup scripts to convince us that there was an undeniably great world here.”

Winter Is Coming: I can personally attest to David & Dan’s passion for the story (and the pilot script’s quality) and it seems that both were a big reason we are only 36 days away from seeing this story come to life on our TV screens.

UPDATE: One more interview to add is this excellent interview with Jamie Sives (Jory Cassel) at the Sweet on Sigma Films blog. Jamie talks about his filming experience and the thrill of working with so many respected actors. He also shares this funny story about when he first found out he had the role:

No, I hadn’t heard of the books before being offered the role. I met with Frank Doelger and Dan Weiss, who along with Dave Benioff are fantastic fellas as well as brilliant producers. It was great when those guys were around on location, which in the case of Dan and Dave, was pretty much the whole time. A short while after meeting those guys I received a call from my agent to say I had the part. I then thought, I really should check out what this is so looked on the net and the first thing I saw was that headline [Jamie Sives is Jory Cassel], along with 80 or so comments. I had only just been told. The 81st person to know. It then struck me that this series of books had a huge following.

• Published on 03/12/2011 at 6:23 PM CDT
• Last updated on 03/13/2011 at 1:18 PM CDT