We’re a week away from the debut of Game of Thrones on March 31, and you get the feeling the show’s probably going to be bigger than ever this time around.
Thrones has been steadily growing, even to the point where you can buy real prop swords from the show as well Thrones inspired beer, which got very good reviews.
As the third season of Thrones is getting ready to air, Collider covered a press conference with the powers that be behind the show, including George R.R. Martin, who created the Thrones novels. As Martin said, “At a certain point, as the books were doing well, I started getting interest from Hollywood who were initially interested in doing a feature film.”
Martin didn’t see it as a movie,”“and I decided the only way it could be done was with someone like HBO, with each book being a season.” Enter show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. “They had actually read the books, and they gave me the right answers. “We shook hands, and they took the ball and ran with it.”
As Weiss recalled, this was “a singular opportunity. There would never be another series of books like this. There’s nowhere else in the world, besides HBO, where you could make a show like this.” Martin also had a cameo in the pilot, which wound up on the cutting room floor, but Benioff also promised George will have his long awaited cameo this season.
Not surprisingly Martin loves the fantasy genre, “But I wanted to put a somewhat different spin on it. The whole trope of absolute good versus absolute evil, which was wonderful in the hands of Tolkien, became cliché and rote in the hands of the many Tolkien imitators that followed. I’ve always preferred writing about gray characters and human characters.
“As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate,” Martin continues. “I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy…As someone who’s read Tolkien and Robert E. Howard [Conan] and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.”
There’s even been talk of a possible Game of Thrones prequel, based on Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas, and as Martin told IGN, “We have been playing with the idea of doing those as prequels. They would be prequels in a sense [as] they’re a hundred years earlier but in the same world. They’re somewhat lighter in tone than the main series, a little more adventurous. But my fans love them and I love the two characters too, and it all ties into Westeros history.”
