Martin: Game of Thrones Couldn’t Work On A Network

Author George R. R. Martin has not only thrown his weight entirely behind HBO’s adaptation of his A Song of Ice and Fire novel series, he’s writing one of the 10 episodes in the first season of Game of Thrones.  And in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin talks about originally thinking the story would be “unfilmable” — and how it just couldn’t work on broadcast network television.

“I knew it couldn’t be done as a network television series,” he said. “It’s too adult. The level of sex and violence would never have gone through. I said, ‘The one way this could be done is by HBO.’ And when I met with David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss, executive producers], we had the same ideas. When I left, I thought I was in good hands.”

Martin was approached previously by other scriptwriters, most of whom wanted to turn his fantasy world of Westeros into a feature film.  But he knew that even J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings took three movies to tell properly — and the page count of that trilogy is equal to about one of Martin’s books.

In the full interview Martin also talks about how happy he is with the show’s cast, and what sticklers for continuity may have to endure when the novels are translated not just to the small screen, but to a finite number of hours there.

“I wrote episode 8,” he said. “It is the episode where everything comes to the boil at the Landing. I titled it ‘The Pointy End.’ It’s got the aftermath of the fight for power. I enjoyed writing it. It had been like a decade since I’d written a screenplay. Fortunately, I did remember how to do it. The biggest adjustment was the software has changed. It was easy in this case, because David and Dan are being quite faithful. It was a process of taking scenes from the book and putting them in script form. Even with ten hours [in the entire season], you can’t get in every line.”

Game of Thrones premieres Sunday, April 17 at 9/8c on HBO.