HBO

There are wunderkinds, there are late bloomers, and then there is George R. R. Martin, who at 62 is on the verge of the most prominent visibility – and possibly the greatest success – of his literary career. Though Mr. Martin has worked steadily in fantasy and science-fiction since the 1970s, with a detour into television writing that he’ll discuss momentarily, he gained a wider following beginning in the 1990s with the publication of his “Song of Ice and Fire” series: an epic fantasy, starting with “A Game of Thrones” in 1996, that takes place on a fictional continent called Westeros. Mr. Martin envisions it as a seven-book cycle.

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

While Mr. Martin puts his finishing touches on book No. 5, “A Dance with Dragons,” another opportunity looms more imminently: on April 17, HBO will broadcast the premiere of “Game of Thrones,” a 10-episode series adapted from Mr. Martin’s novel. (The network is also showing a 15-minute sneak preview of the show on Sunday for diehard fans and curious newbies.) It’s a turn of events that Mr. Martin finds particularly strange, given his own experiences in Hollywood and his long-held belief that “Game of Thrones” could never be filmed.

Mr. Martin spoke recently to ArtsBeat about his transition from screenwriting back to novel writing and the adaptation of “Game of Thrones.” These are excerpts from that conversation.

Q.

A few days before we spoke, it was announced that “A Dance With Dragons” would be published in July. Does that mean you’re done with the book?

A.

It’s not actually completed yet. I’m still working on the last few chapters here. But I’m close enough so that Bantam felt confident in announcing a publication date.

Q.

I take it you’ve been asked this question before?

A.

Yes. [laughs] Yes, actually quite a bit. But on the other hand, I’ve been feeling the pressure for oh, about five years now, steadily mounting as the book got later and later. So, you know, pressure comes with it.

Q.

At least you know that a lot of people are looking forward to the novel.

A.

Well, it certainly beats the alternative, which is that no one cares at all when you finish a book or even notices. I’ve been there, too.

Q.

HBO has shown me two episodes of the “Game of Thrones” series so far, and –

A.

You’ve seen two more episodes than I have, then. I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they’re very conscious of security, so they will not under any circumstances cut a DVD or anything like that. They will show it to me if I would like to fly to L.A. But right now with the pressure on about the book, I don’t have time to go. I have to get the book done and then I can see some episodes. I did see the original pilot, a year or so ago, before we had the series greenlit. But of course it’s changed quite substantially since then.

Q.

Were you pleased with what you saw at the time?

A.

Yeah, actually I was quite pleased. It’s my story. Yes, there are changes, there are alterations. I think that’s inevitable when you move from a novel to television show or film. But there were no unnecessary changes. That’s always been my grievance with a lot of the films and television out there that are based on books. Certain changes are necessary simply because it’s a different medium. But other changes are just made because the screenwriter or studio or network says, “Oh, this will be better.” But almost always, it’s not better. I liked the fact that basically what [the “Game of Thrones” producers] Dan [D. B. Weiss] and David [Benioff] and HBO have done here is a television version of my story, which my readers will recognize and hopefully enjoy.

Q.

Did you conceive of “A Game of Thrones” as a reaction to Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels?

A.

I always wanted to do something in epic fantasy. But not just to rehash Tolkien. I wanted to do something to make it my own. To some extent, the project was also a reaction to my own Hollywood career. I was out there for 10 years, from roughly 1985 to 1995. I was on staff on “The Twilight Zone” and “Beauty and the Beast” as a writer-producer, and then I did about five years of development, doing pilots for shows of my own and some feature film scripts. The theme of that whole period for me was, I would always turn in my first draft to whatever network or studio or producer I was working for and the reaction was inevitably, “George, this is great. It’s terrific, it’s a wonderful read, thanks. But it’s three times our budget. We can’t possibly make it. It’s too big and it’s too expensive.”

Q.

Then what would happen?

A.

So then I would go in and I would start cutting. I would combine characters and trim out giant battle scenes, make it produceable. Although the later drafts of those scripts were always more polished, because I’d revised them several times, my favorites were always the first drafts, which had all the good stuff in it which I had to take out because it was too expensive and too big. When I returned to prose, which had been my first love, in the 90s, I said I’m going to do something that is just as big as I want to do. I can have all the special effects I want. I can have a cast of characters that numbers in the hundreds. I can have giant battle scenes. Everything you can’t do in television and film, of course you can do in prose because you’re everything there. You’re the director, you’re the special effects coordinator, you’re the costume department, and you don’t have to worry about a budget.

Of course the irony of all this is the project that I thought most unlikely to ever be filmed – the project that was actually unfilmable – is now going to be this big show on HBO.

Q.

Did you sell your “Song of Ice and Fire” series as a seven-novel franchise?

A.

When I sold it in 1994, my agent sold a trilogy. But as Tolkien said about “Lord of the Rings,” the tale grew in the telling. So I got back to writing it, and I’m writing it and writing it, and pretty soon I have 1300 pages for the first book and I’m not anywhere near close to the end. So at that point, I said, “Ah, maybe it needs to be four books instead of three.” And then at some point I said, “Maybe there needs to be six books instead of four.” I skipped right over five. And then for several years on book tours, I would say, “Yes, there are going to be six books.” And my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, Parris, would be standing behind me and she would hold up seven fingers. [laughs] Finally I acknowledged that she was right. Seven books is good. Seven kingdoms, seven gods, seven books. It has a certain elegance to it. So that’s my story now and I’m sticking to it.

Q.

I’m sure your agent was thrilled that the series kept growing longer. But what about your publisher?

A.

My publisher is quite excited, as long as I don’t take 10 years to write each of the books. That part, they’re not too excited about. They would like me to write a little faster. Thankfully they are patient and they wait for me.

Q.

Did Hollywood come calling for “Game of Thrones” right away?

A.

Well, not entirely. The second book, “Clash of Kings” was the first to make the best-seller lists, and I got inquiries from various producers and filmmakers who were interested in the rights. Especially after “Lord of the Rings” was such a success and they were looking for other fantasy projects. But they wanted to do it as a feature film, and even then I said it cannot be done as a feature film. You would have to cut it to shreds. It took three films to make “Lord of the Rings,” and the entirety of “Lord of the Rings,” all three of Tolkien’s books, is only the size of one of my books. So we’re talking 20 films. What studio’s going to commit to 20 films? We could do it as a TV series for network. But what happens then? You run into the standards and practices issues – the censors, who are going to say, no, no, you can’t have all this sex and violence. Take all that out. I fought those battles for five years on “Beauty and the Beast” and “Twilight Zone,” both of which were eight o’clock shows, and it drove us crazy. So then it occurred to me, it could be made by somebody like HBO, as a series of series. Each book could be one season. And that was perfect. But of course there were only a few people who were doing that sort of thing.

Q.

What got you past your misgivings about the industry and convinced you to let the books be adapted?

A.

Meeting David and Dan was a big part of it. We had a lunch together and they had read the books, and I did not know them beforehand but they said all the right things. They seemed real. You meet a lot of people in Hollywood who say, “Yeah, I love it, love it, love it.” But it doesn’t seem quite real. But I could tell, or at least it seemed to me, that David and Dan were real and they wanted to make the kind of show I wanted made.

Q.

Are they privy to information about what’s going to happen in future novels?

A.

We’ve had various meetings where they’ve asked me stuff like that. It’s a little tricky because of course the series is not finished. And the structure is quite unusual. Minor characters in the first book become very major characters three books later on, which is a challenge for any producer, because how do you deal with that in the series? We have many challenges yet to come, assuming the show is successful. But fortunately David and Dan have to solve all those problems, and I don’t. [laughs] I just create the problems for them, and then they have to solve it.

Q.

Of the pilots you developed in your television career, which came closest to getting on the air?

A.

Actually I did like six pilots. The one that came closest to being produced was a pilot called “Doorways” that I developed for ABC, which was an alternate-world show. We did film that pilot and we screened it for the ABC executives and they loved it, and they gave us an order for six backup scripts, and they said: “You’re almost certainly going to go on the air. We’ll probably use you as a mid-season replacement.” Then I spent the next six months supervising the development of those backup scripts, looking over budgets and planning how I was going to do the show. Then there were some personnel changes in the ABC executive staff where people moved onto other jobs, new people came in, so it was something left over by the previous regime, and suddenly we weren’t on the schedule after all. And then, like a year later on another network, a very similar show came on. [chuckles]

Q.

What did you do when that happened?

A.

I didn’t do anything, ultimately, except lick my wounds. I did do other pilots after that, a pilot called “Starport,” a pilot called “The Survivors” – all shows that to this day, I think, ah, that would have been a great show. It would have been fun to work on that. So in some alternate world, maybe I became Joss Whedon or J. J. Abrams.

Q.

There was a point during the development of “Game of Thrones” when HBO went through its own executive changes. Did you start having flashbacks to your television career?

A.

I did have a few days there where I went, Oh, my God, it’s happening again. But then David and Dan called me up and talked me off the ledge. [laughs] In any television project there’s always hurdles. First we had to convince HBO to buy the project. Then we had a period of suspense where we sit around – well, are they going to film the pilot? And we filmed the pilot and delivered that and you’ve got the next thing: O.K., are they going to order the series? Or is it just going to be another failed pilot like “Doorways,” or many, many failed pilots every year? So there’s always these moments where you hold your breath.

Even now on “Game of Thrones,” I’m very excited, I’m really jazzed. It’s all great. But there’s a little part of me that’s saying, You know, it could be one and done here. Are people going to like it? What are the critics going to say? What’s the audience going to say? You don’t know, don’t count on anything.

Q.

Do you think the readership that already exists for the novels will make the television series a success?

A.

Well, there’s an enormous appetite among my readers, that’s obvious. At the same time, to be successful, the show has to win an audience that has not read the books. Although my books are very popular and hitting the best-seller lists regularly, the amount of readers that buy even a No. 1 best-seller is small compared to the audience you need to sustain a television show. So if the only audience we get is my readers, then the show is going to be short-lived indeed. But from the very start, my publishers have said, this is the fantasy for people who hate fantasy. [laughs]

Q.

Is the fantasy component of “Game of Thrones” still a hurdle that it has to clear to reach a wider audience?

A.

I suppose you could call it a hurdle to some extent. But on the other hand, I’m 62 years old and in my lifetime I’ve seen an enormous change in this. When I was a kid, reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction, it was considered, like, total trash. Teachers would take away the books from me in school – this is Heinlein and Asimov they were taking away – and say, well, it’s good that you’re reading, but you should read a real book, not this [stuff]. Science fiction and fantasy have both gotten considerably more respectable and certainly the audience has gotten larger. In literary culture, you see writers using science-fiction and fantasy tropes. In many cases, they’ll say, “I’m not writing science fiction or fantasy – it may look similar, but it’s not.” There’s still that little thing: “I don’t want to be put in a cave with the geeks.”

Q.

But the more fanciful elements of “Game of Thrones” don’t come at you right away. Is that by design?

A.

To have an epic fantasy, you need some magic. But I believe in judicious use of magic. With each book that I write, the level of magic rises a little. It’s a gradual introduction. I suppose it’s like the crab in the pot. You put a crab in hot water, he’ll jump right out. But you put him in cold water and you gradually heat it up – the hot water is fantasy and magic, and the crab is the audience.

Q.

If the television series is a success, do you think that could dramatically change your life?

A.

I’m not planning to go into any lock-down but we shall see. People keep warning me that, oh, your whole life is going to change if your series is a success. We’ll see. If my life changes, it changes. But I haven’t hired a security contingent yet.