GEORGE R.R. MARTIN | Master Class | Higher Learning

please welcome george RR martin thank you have you always been a writer George yeah pretty much it's set in at an early age and I did indeed make up stories and Psalms the other kids in the projects for you know I started out with a penny but i rep idli raise my prices all the way to a nickel which could buy a Milky Way bar so two story sails and I get a comic book so but it ended that that little professional career in my childhood ended abruptly when one of the other kids who was my regular customer started having nightmares about the stories and his mother came to my mother and no more so damn do you know what inspired those even those early early stories where they came from even then you know I don't know where any of this stuff comes from it just it comes thank God and I'm glad it does I if I want to get all psychological I can say maybe I was trying to fill a need in my life for I don't know for adventure for travel and all that I mean we were we were poor I we lived in the projects we didn't even own a car we never went anywhere I lived in a world of there was five blocks long from first Street where I lived to fifth Street where my school was so I would you know read of these other places and dream of other planets and distant lands and darkest Africa and Far East and the ancient Rome and all of the places that one could read about in books and making up stories about these places allowed me to go there in my imagination even if I couldn't go anywhere beyond fifth Street in reality and were their books or shows or comics or those that were inspiring to to then that may be influenced to the direction your stories duck well I always loved that the weird stuff as my father call that the you know we're talking now the the early mid 50s which there wasn't a lot of science fiction or much less fantasy or horror around so I seized eagerly on the shows that were like the original Twilight Zone with Rod Serling but even before that the science fiction shows of the early fifties things like tom Corbett space cadet and captain video which I barely remember that was I was very young when Captain video was on a little later rocky Jones Space Ranger which had a huge impact on me a very cool show sort of the precursor to Star Trek if you actually kind of look at it and you know we're science fiction and horror movies a science fiction movie the 50s were about atomic bomb growing grasshoppers - the size of 747s which was you know pretty cheesy but the you know anywhere they were cool in their own in their own way and and when did you realize that writing could be you know beyond those that sort of early penny and nickel sales when did you realize that writing could actually be a profession a career you would want to pursue oh about three years ago no I in my early childhood I was confusing to reality for the for the imagination I decided I actually wanted to be a spaceman which is what we called it before the word astronaut was coined and nobody had ever heard or an astronaut until uh the mercury program when they didn't want to use the word spaceman but but before the mercury program you know in the in the days of rocky Jones and all that it was guys one at the space for spacemen and you know you could choose among the kids of my neighborhood they were the ones wanted to be Cowboys and the ones wanted to be cops and uh you know the ones wanted to be spaceman and I was on the spaceman side and later upgraded to an astronaut but at some point I decided no I'm never going to do this so how about I just make up stories about outer spaces that have actually going to outer space and that was fine until I I think it was like junior high school they they gave us an assignment to researched a profession we we propose to enter so I research fiction writer and discovered that the average fiction writer made $1,200 a year from their fiction and even in you know 1965 $1,200 a year was not a hell of a lot of money so and you know what some of my relatives her dad they said you know maybe you should be like an electrician they make good money plumbing have you considered plumbing people always need a plumber and then you can make up these crazy little stories of yours on the side and collect that extra $1,200 so I didn't go into plumbing but I did follow journalism since I was good with words and good writing I went to college I majored in journalism and the plan was well I would I would write a few stories on the side and things like that but my main profession would be as a as a journalist but it turned out that I started selling even when I was still in college selling my first short stories to the magazines and then I did a couple years in Vista alternative service and continued to sell more stories and by the time I got out of this and finished those two years I had enough stories under my belt and being you know kind of young and I didn't have a lot of expenses then I could live very cheap with with roommates and a bad neighborhood in Chicago and all that and I said well I don't want to really try to go out and get a real job here I'll just continue to write this story thing and see where it lead it led to some pretty good places for me so I'm glad I I continued debt and did this the studying in the journalism to that effect your writing in any way or or or directed of any different way well journalism school certainly affected my writing I don't know if the since I didn't actually practice journalism I don't know if it did but the training for journalism I found was very good and in in several ways so first of all it was it was good for my style you know I mean I wrote those monster stories as a kid I wrote for comic fanzines when I was in high school little amateur stories about superheroes that were published in the amateur magazines of the day but but my style at the time was let us say purple you know I seem to be operating under the assumption that if one adjective was good three were better so as so I would just pile on the the adjectives and I mistook that kind of verbose prose for rich and textured and poetic prose and journalist who cured me of that you know as the professors kept drawing lines through all my wonderful adjectives and you know hardly an adverb survived the entire four years it and it was also good for me I mean I was as a younger kid I was very shy I was a kid who lived in my imagination who as they said always had my nose in a book and training as a reporter actually forced me to kind of come out of my my little shell a little and go out there and meet people and I had to approach total strangers and ask him questions and you know set up interviews and and some of them with some pretty fearsome like authority figures and and people that I would not normally have liked dared to talk to in in my ordinary life you know so it made me more outgoing it sort of opened me up as a as a shell which I think was also good for a writer the ability to talk to different sort of people and so forth and so on and how did you get to then to Hollywood to be a writer for television well that was you know I never actually wanted I liked watching television but I never wanted to be a writer for television it was not part of my dreams I just wanted to write books and it all had to do with commercial vagaries of the market and actually with uh you know there's a lot of truth to the old saying it's not what you know it's who you know especially in in Hollywood where contacts are a huge part of it I was a science fiction writer and AB in my early career and I published a number of short stories I was nominated for awards I won some awards six or seven years into it I wrote my first novel which was pretty successful then I wrote a second novel in collaboration and that was even more successful and my third novel was was a vampire novel that that kind of broke out of the strict genre things and that was yet even more successful and I was getting higher and higher advances for all of these and then I wrote my fourth novel which was a book called the Armageddon rag which was a rock and roll mystery dark fantasy kind of hybrid novel that my editors said well this is going to be it this is your big breakthrough the book this is we're going to make this book a best-seller and they paid me a six-figure advance for it and came up with this big advertising campaign to make it a best-seller and it was great I was looking forward to my you know incipient career as a as a famous best-selling writer the only problem was the book failed to best sell in fact it failed to sell at all it became like my worst selling book that I had ever written and suddenly my career as a novelist was over because after that I couldn't get arrested you know I'd been like a hot rising writer for for a number of years and you know publishing is not unlike Hollywood in that it's it's not a profession and I know you guys are film students and and into this thing it's it's not a profession built for security if security is important to you don't go into this profession because you know you can be the hottest thing in town on Tuesday and on Wednesday nobody's going to return your calls all those dear friends that you think you had that you've been having lunch and that certainly happened to me suddenly I couldn't sell another novel at any price I thought okay well the Armageddon rail failed I'll have to come down in my price I won't get a six-figure advance again but I'll get like a high five figure advance like I did for fever dream no you know I'll get like a low five-figure advance no you know by the end I was willing even listen to offers for a four figure advance but nobody was offering anything as the the book had sold so just like that great reviews but oddly enough this self same book too destroyed my my career in publishing also open the door to Hollywood for me because my my film agent showed it to another client of his a guy named Phil de Guerre and Phil was a experienced television writer he'd been on a number of shows as a staff writer and producer and he'd recently gone on to to do his own show and he had a hit show called Simon and Simon that he had invented and he was coming up with another show called whiz kids one of the first shows about computer hackers and but what what our agent we had the same agent Marvin knew was that Phil was also a dead rock-and-roll guy and he was a Deadhead and he loved to go to a Grateful Dead concert she knew all the dead he had backstage passes and things like that and he knew the rag would appeal to him so I showed him arm again rag and indeed Phil did one uphill he wanted to get into feature film so he optioned Armageddon rag for a feature film and he was going to write it himself write the screenplay himself he was going to direct it himself and the first thing he did was fly me out to Los Angeles to talk to me about it now I'd sold other options before I'd you know you if you have a lot of books and short stories and they get any kind of attention in those days especially you'd find some one option them in Hollywood world this little changed a lot we're talking now the the early 80s so it doesn't work quite the same way anymore but in those days these cheap options were we're all over and I would have four or five or six of my short stories and things under option simultaneously but normally they just they send you a check you know you never actually met an eighties people or talk to them they didn't care you just the author of the original material they didn't necessarily want to involve you in the process but Phil did and so he flew me out and we had some meetings and we discussed how he would do the Armageddon rag and you know few - tricky points about the novels and so forth and I got the visit TV sets and watch I'm filming Simon and Simon and watched him filming the whiz kids which sort of was his Armageddon rag that should sank without a trace after a short time but he was still hot enough so that I made that contact with Phil and we remained friendly so like a year two passes and suddenly CBS has said to Phil well we want to get another show from the assignment Simon is doing real well what else do you got and Phil says I want to bring back Twilight son I always love Twilight Zone okay well sure we own Twilight Zone you can bring it back so Phil ramped up to to do Twilight Zone and he turned to a lot of science fiction and fantasy prose writers and called me up and said hey ever think of doing a writing for television doing a Twilight Zone episode and you know since I was rapidly well in fact I had run out of money and was wondering how I was going to pay my mortgage and Quinn sell another book because of the failure of American Rag I was eager to try this new thing and I said sure I'll I'll do some Twilight zones and I I wrote a script for him and led to another script and etc etc next thing I know I want myself as a staff writer moving to LA for six weeks or so to work on the under Twilight Zone staff and after that came Beauty and the Beast and it was two seasons of Twilight Zone and a brief flirtation what max headroom was in there briefly and then then beauty and a beast for three years and then five years in you know development which sometimes known as development hell so all told I spent about ten years primarily working in Hollywood we're going to take a look at a scene from an episode of Beauty and the Beast this is a episode called brothers we're the beasts Vincent played by the legendary Ron Perlman connects with a character called the dragon man who's as you'll see also ostracize trip Society for his appearance much like a beast so let's take a look at Beauty and the Beast yeah that was from the second season of beauty and a beast which is probably of the three seasons we did the one that's the most representative to show that we actually wanted to wanted to do you know I enjoyed my my 10 years of Hollywood I learned a lot from it it was very valuable to me in a number of ways not only financially where it certainly was helpful to me after the situation I'd find myself in after Armageddon rag but also you know as a writer I learned things I but they were also frustrations there's just no doubt that while working in television and film requires a certain temperament and skills that prose writers book writers don't necessarily need or or often have and I found that on both Twilight Zone a beauty and a beast and and even later in development the thing that really I think drove me back to prose well there were a number of things but but one of them was the constant the constant arguments with with other people the the politics the the fighting of it it's it's you know when I sit down to write ice and fire I can just do the work and ultimately I am the judge yes I have editors and my editors make suggestions to me they say well we don't think this thing is working and I give where there were its consideration and I change things if I think they should be changed but in television film of course you're you've got all these people the studio in the network and the standards and practices department and and the actors and the directors and the producers and sometimes it's hard enough to do the good work and then you do the good work and then does other people want to mess around with it or they have their own idea and all that and so you have to have a temperament not only to do the good work but to fight for your work and I don't necessarily enjoy fighting after after I mean I did it and I defended my work as best I can and I want someone I lost some but after a while some of it just just wore me out you know that if you know beauty and a beast the show we always wanted to do show us like this character base shows I think from the very beginning the network wanted us to be the Hulk they were they wanted a much more formulaic show that was much more action-oriented where Catherine would get in trouble every week and Vincent would be stout and come to a rescue and and there are more shows that fit that criteria I think you'll see in the first season where you know and they even said well can we you know the Hulk EO is beasts out twice he he would be stat or would Hulk out as they called it at the end of the second act and then he would have a bigger Hulk at and the climax where he would solve the situation and they really wanted us to do the same thing well can we like to be stout in episodes and could we have less of the poetry reciting and all that and you know we wanted more of the character pieces and all that and of course you're in a constant struggle depending on your ratings if you had the stronger your ratings are the more you can do it the way you want and the weaker your ratings are the more help they will give you and we we did pretty well the first season and a half so by the second season we were really doing the shows we wanted to do and and was kind of disregarding the the network pressures but they were still there waiting and we were winning our time slot for the first season and not we weren't it like a top ten show or anything but we were winning the timeslot which was very good and then I think NBC we were on CBS NBC made a change up in the lineup opposite us and it had a couple sitcoms on opposite us and they they replaced one of them with a new sitcom a cold I think it was full house and starring the Olsen twins and this goddamn thing became a hit and suddenly suddenly we were not winning our timeslot anymore and the network was coming more and more down on us of oh my god you're losing your time slot and you know that's why I've always hated the Olsen twins and still do to this day you've given me another reason to right that's right were there were there things that you learned when you were writing you know serial television that it would inform your books later on yeah certainly I mean one of the structure of Song of Ice and Fire with his viewpoint things and and cutting between the viewpoints and all of them ending essentially with I don't know cliffhangers or interesting points is is a structure I learned in television you won't see it in my earlier novels but of course working for network television you have to have act breaks and depending on the structure show is it a for 4x show is it for X plus a teaser or five acts or said a teaser and a tag you know what have you but you always have to go out on an act break before you go to commercial and it can be a cliffhanger that's a good act break it doesn't have to be it can be just a twist point or a new revelation or a piece of information or you know something is resolved but you know it's it's for you watch the law and order it's always due to the dull moments you know where right before the commercial that uh oh my god something has changed here and the idea is to bring you back after the commercial of course but it's a good way to end a chapter or or an act and sometimes it's pretty hard when you're designing your story to come up with those act breaks but you know that's why you get the big books and it certainly works in the books too I mean it's keeps people reading you know they reach the end of the chapter and and they want to know what happens to that character because they're in gross deuterium but gosh there's not another Tyrion chapter for a while yet first I have to read this are you a chapter or this Jon Snow chapter before they finally get back to Tyrion and those in them by the time they finish the argue chapter it isn't kind of an act break there too and that hopefully draws them back for the next one so yes and also I think it helps your dialogue when working in television and you're actually hearing actors speaking your lines you know I look at my earliest scripts and and you know I would have people giving long speeches you know that take up a substantial chunk of the page and it's you know it's too much uh you get much better readability and and for especially for contemporary audience if the characters aren't giving speeches to each other but are having much shorter back-and-forth kind of kind of dialogue and in it's interesting because I think the the in Game of Thrones that idea of leaving people wanting more is as a constant thing and there's also the idea of you know Game of Thrones in the books you know songs right so far are not like other books that one might compare them to or other shows they often break the conventions of the varies on earth at then what might assign them to how does that play into how you you write well you know I've always liked breaking conventions I mean I I love the genres I'm not one of these guys who's trying to burn everything down with a flamethrower I love science fiction I love fantasy but I hate familiarity I love whether I'm watching television or going to a film or reading a book I I want it to surprise me I don't want to know where it was heading you know maybe I get that from my childhood with my mother I mean we would sit at home watching TV as a family and my mother would always say aloud exactly what was going to happen oh it's the butler who killed him yeah and sure enough it would be a butler who killed her you know you know she would you know be watching I Love Lucy and oh that belt is going to start going much faster she's not gonna be able to keep up with the chocolates and yeah sure enough that would happen so I learned pretty early the trick of watching these shows and predicting it where they were going to go the one we she couldn't predict with course maybe was one reason I loved it so much was the original Twilight Zone which the famous twist endings it's hard for for you know a crowd looking around I see a lot of young people here in this audience and to know what a revolutionary show Twilight Zone was in 1959 and 1960 and how surprising those twist endings were when we revived Twilight Zone in the mid 80s you know the network was always honest weren't one of the things we had on that show is why can't you have more twist endings as as the original show did and we tried man but you know what worked in 1959 I really did not work in 1986 I tell you you know people the audience had become so much more sophisticated and they could see those twist endings coming a mile away you know it's the minute somebody walks into the store as she's mannequin yeah pushes Medicaid the minute you know you don't show the face of a bandage characters oh she's need they're all the ugly ones haven't you noticed that they're not showing at faces yeah you know these great techniques that Rod Serling invented in 59 in the ensuing twenty thirty years had become so familiar to the audiences you couldn't put it over in them anymore so coming up with a with a really genuine twist ending that worked became harder and harder someone should tell that to em night he should he should drop trying for those twist endings let's take a look at one of the many what we will call it a twist but surprises perhaps in that Game of Thrones okay I mean not many shows or books have the guts to kill a ten-year-old let alone yeah after the him catching an incestuous relationship that's true probably more surprising in the book where Chrissy's the first viewpoint character you know he's the viewpoint character of the first chapter and then we switch wait a couple of you points don't come back to him but since he was first I think the assumption of most readers is that he's going to be you know the main guy through that and then suddenly you think he's he's dead or maybe he's dead but we find that more later but you know it's by what I we we write what we want to read and I as I said a minute ago I don't like stories or books that are too familiar to too predictable that I feel like I read a thousand times before so I want to keep you on edge and surprise you and make you think that no one is safe and that was that was certainly the intent there and that scene has I think gotten a lot of people hooked on these books and said you know I I thought I was reading just another fantasy till I hit that scene and then I realized that this was something a little different so so that moment has worked very well for me it's I mean it's an interesting point because you know in the 60 odd years since the Twilight Zone these sorts of stories have really gained an enormous foothold in popular culture you know you look everywhere from the literary world to movies to television to videogames to everything it's you know fantasy stories superheroes these sorts of stories that are so dominant why do you think we've seen such as such a dramatic shift in terms of acceptance and compete weeks of conquered world actually I'd yes doing an injury yesterday I one of the reporters interviewed me said he we his TV station specializes in in geek and nerd culture and it it really took me back to my own high school days where Deacon 'red were not things that you want it to be called and now they've become you know proud badges of a group that has a culture so you know the world really has changed you know my father called all this stuff weird stuff you know he couldn't understand why this interesting weird stuff science fiction fantasy horror because it wasn't like real he liked westerns which of course as we know we're very real all those gun fighters meeting in the center of the street to practice their quickdraws yeah that would happened every day I don't know but it's nice to be part of the the culture that has that has conquered the world and taken over popular entertainment uh I think there's these are all flavors of imaginative literature to put it in a room of the Romantic tradition as another way to put it as opposed to realism which in a great literary tradition I think split off at the end of the 19th century and to be in a twentieth century and into two currents one of which was considered more respectable than the other the the realistic tradition became the literary tradition and all the genre fiction which followed the Romantic tradition sort of that shuffled off into ghettos but it still appeals much more to uh to a much larger audience and science fiction and fantasy especially as the as the world has shrunk around us and with the television news and and you know our technology there's no longer you know lost cities in Africa or the exotic Far East or Oh these colorful places where old adventure stories used to take place these these corners of the world all now have you know Starbucks in them and so we go to outer space and we go to realms of the Hyborian age or middle-earth or other alternate worlds to define the kind of color and of and a Verve that we used to get out of romantic there were the traditional romanticism and adventure stories and things that people like Robert Louis Stevenson wrote and yet in even in your stories these imagined it to the stories there is a sense that there's a grittiness there's our there's a realism to the characters in the situations well you know I think the characters have to be real characters to my mind at a heart of all of all fiction and characters fascinate me human beings fascinate me and and always have they're such wonderfully perverse and contradictory you know creatures you know my quarrel with a lot of a lot of fantasy as it as it was written particularly by the Tolkien imitators not Tolkien himself but the writers who followed him into high fantasy in the in the 70s and early 80s was that they presented a very simplistic view of human nature and you know the war between good and evil as a subject for for fantasy I think is legitimate for the subject for any fiction but to my mind a war between good and evil is is not fought between armies of heroes and white cloaks and armies of really ugly guys in black cloaks but rather is fought within the individual human heart in in the choices that that we make in times of crisis uh I mean I think all human beings have within them the capacity for good and the capacity for evil and in fact we're all you know I look at history and all of the greatest heroes have have flaws all of the greatest villains have moments of humanity or redeeming qualities about them and to my mind that doesn't make them less interesting that makes them that makes them more interesting I was talking last night I don't know how much I'm duplicating myself here how much of you were at last night's thing as well but one of the great things about working for HBO is they they have shown not only on my show but on on a variety of their other shows beforehand shows like The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire and and other shows that they're they're willing to present as the center central characters of their shows very flawed and human characters who are full of contradictions I mean a character like Tony Soprano who is at one point a family man who obviously deeply loves his his children and he loves his wife which doesn't prevent him from [ __ ] around with all sorts of other random women that he encounters and you know you'll see him feeding the ducks at his at his back at his backyard pool and being very upset that the Ducks have flown away and then a couple acts later he sees a guy who owes him money and he runs him over with the car and gets out and starts kicking him in the head I and yet you you do you like Tony Soprano I don't know if you if you like Tony Soprano or not but you certainly find him fascinating yeah and I think you do find him sympathetic on some level his humanity makes you kind of want to root for him but then he starts kicking someone in the head and you sort of have to exhibit whoa why am i rooting for him what am i doing there at you know that sort of reaction to me is very healthy and the frustration about working for a traditional network television is that for for most of the history certainly the period I was working for them they were not interested in presenting anyone that was that was flawed or or unlikable and and you know they were trying to pretest everything with their focus groups and all that I mean one incident from my own career after Beauty and the Beast I did development and I wrote a number of pilots for them only one of which was filmed which was a an alternate world show called doorways and in the opening sequence of doorways it's a it's a parallel world show this sort of feral girl from from an alternate dimension appears suddenly in the middle of a freeway on earth you know at night an old is all that she's never been on a freeway she's never seen cars or trucks before and they're all these vehicles rushing at her at high rates of speed you know and she has this alien weapon with her this gun that shoots explosive needles and the cars were all honking and all that and they're slamming into each other as they try to avoid this dispersal on foot who suddenly appeared in the middle of the freeway and then she sees this huge tanker truck coming toward her and it can't possibly get out of the way it starts to break and it starts to jackknife and it's obviously going to hit her and kill her so she whips out the alien weapon and blows - out of it and it's a spectacular sequence that it was in the you know was in the script and it got proved all the way through it's the opening scene of the of the thing and done right it could it should have been very effective here and we're reaching the screening stage and suddenly the network realizes something and I say wait a minute what happened to the driver at a tanker truck well she blew the [ __ ] out of him he's he's dead oh no oh no we can't have that he's just an innocent teamster he's just driving his truck and suddenly there's this girl and he breaks he tries to avoid her he doesn't deserve to die well no but you know she doesn't know any of that she just sees this a big iron thing heading toward her and she has this weapon that'll stop it from killing her so she uses it it's like a monster well yes but if she kills this teamster this truck driver the audience will hate her no one watched a show they'll turn it off right there oh I'm not going to watch a show about a murderer but we never even see this guy we don't see a driver we see a truck coming at us and she blows it up you know I'm saying she don't it's just not gonna care they're not even gonna realize that there's a guy in the truck know what it's gonna make this intellectual thing but no no the network the network was locked it on that so we had to go back and boot up the cameras again and shoot a scene where the driver unharmed leaps from the flaming truck and goes running away scampering safety so we know even though his truck is is Llyod pieces of a sidewalk that no harm has come to innocent Joe the truck driver who has gone home to his wives had children so the focus group would like my character and not dislike her because she blew up the truck so that's the difference be working for HBO and working for a network well let's take a look at another that I suspect a focus group would also disapprove of I'm just gonna get the old knife through the eye is not a popular focus group moment I and I don't know if the focus groups would like that very much we I mean that brings me I don't want to slag on Beauty the Beast I learned a lot on that show and I think we did some very good work but we did have our troubles with the network on that one which again is indicated of what's going on Beauty to be how many of you ever watched beauty and a beast okay a good number there it was a very romantic show and we were nominated for Emmys we're a very well-regarded show and and we had pretty decent ratings never never hit ratings we were watched like 97% of our audience was women however which I thought was fine but the network wanted some men to watch the show and they were always on us to increase the action because they thought if we had more action then that would get more men to watch action is the network word for violence they can't actually ever say violence because then someone might find it on a memo and they would be accused of trying to put more violence on TV and you know and they have the standards and practices group that always reviews your scripts as telling you Oh notice is too violent it so be too disturbing to the audience at home rip please remove it please tone it down or something like that and from the very first time I started work even on Twilight Zone where you know we had some of the same problems but certainly I'm feeding the beast I bristled at the hypocrisy of this you know because it seems to me that if you're going to present violence and then you there's an obligation to present violence honestly and to present it as things like this as - as the knife through the through the eye I mean Vincent was killing people he was ripping people apart with his claws is what he was doing in the action scenes where he rescues Katherine but we were never allowed to show any blood you know at one point we thought you know there was the classic beauty and a beast that Cocteau did labelled and Labette where the beast when he came back from hunting his hands would smoke and that was of course a symbolic way of showing an artistic way of showing blood and we kept trying to come up what's our thing well we can't use smoke Cocteau's already used the smoke will you know people will say we're just ripping him off so we can't do that but we can't show actual blood either so you know and a network didn't even like the fact that he was killing people they said we can't the Hulk never killed people couldn't he just destabilize them and like like what well you know he should pick them up and throw them a long distance and they could they could bounce off the wall and then we could see them get up and you know say feets don't fail me now and run away and terror I said then wouldn't a city be full of like thugs who have been thrown across the room by a lion man you know so no we finally got them to allow that he would rip them apart and they would go down and they would not get up but we still would never allowed to show any blood which means that although in Oh centrifuge the episodes you know that he's killing people but you never really feel it in a visceral sense and it is necessary to to feel it in a visceral sense and you know we would do episodes like where he kills almost no one or where it's all character based that you know an episode like brothers that you saw earlier that's a great deal of it is is psychological um and and they wouldn't like that they wanted more action episodes more and more get more action and we got to get some men watching this show it's all just women watching the show it's you know how are we going to balance our demographics here they're wildly unsecured and we never succeeded in that but we became unbeknownst to anyone we became the most violent show on television there was a period there where the show hunter which was on the same time as us was really getting criticized as it was so violent hunter hunter was you know like shooting people with every episode and they were dying and we actually like I said we're like three times as violent as hunter Vincent is killing way more people than hunter you know hunter is killing like barely one guy in episode you know Vincent is going in there with three or four thugs and ripping them to shreds and leaving their entrails and pools on the floor but across we're not allowed to show any of that you know and then after he does that he reads a poem so so the lesson is that if you're going to have a lot of real violent stuff have your character read a poem afterwards and it just cancelled it all out of course you'll never you'll never get any men to watch it then because oh my god he's reading a love poem quick turn to Hunter yeah I might have to hear more of this stuff so but of course thankfully on HBO we don't have any we can present that but that scene is an interesting scene because they in in the book those have you read the books know that it is a somewhat different scene in the book in the book all of the characters are on horseback you know he is he is riding back with jewelry on their horses from brothel and he is accosted by Jamie and his men who are also on horses also is it is at night and it is during a rainstorm so the rain is pouring down all around us and that is exactly the way that Dave and Dan wrote it when they did the first draft of the script at night in the rain on horses and the course as filming time approached and budget overruns happened one by one each of these elements got lost oh okay well it doesn't have to be during the rain does it will lose that do we really need it to be night it would be fit the schedule better if it was day you know and horses does do we have to have horses yeah so we wound up instead of at night in the rain on horses we wound up on foot in the day know nice and dry would have been great to do it the way it was originally written very atmospheric and cool in the rain and horses but this way they certainly got it a lot quicker and it still worked and I think the realities of television television production means you do have to sometimes make make these changes to fit your budget and your shooting schedule the the trick is to know we're Detroit of wine and and what to what to fight for what is a something where you can change the fundamentals of scene without harming the scene and other changes that rip machine to shreds because you you're accidentally ripping out the heart of it or maybe deliberately ripping at the heart of it as you make a change to make it more suitable because the show really is very faithful to the books yes not exactly quite faithful yeah if not exactly a representation of them the major change of course is really around perspective because the books do change perspective and that the show does not as much but it's it's all through well I mean as a novelist you have certain tools at your disposal to tell a story with and these tools are not available to a filmmaker I mean as a novelist you are you know you have internal monologue you can you can do exposition simply as part of the the narrative you know you have access to the character's thoughts you can do unreliable narrators where you you really can't do any of this as a filmmaker or television director your external you're never inside the character I mean yeah you could try to be there are those occasional experimental films where you're looking out through someone's eyes and there's a voiceover telling you your thoughts they're mostly terrible and don't work very well you know the voice-over and film is a usually a technique that says something really doesn't working here and we're having to patch it over with this clumsy voiceover technique and it's frequently added at a later point like the famous voiceovers in Blade Runner which I think really detract from the from that film and weren't necessary but but you have other techniques that make up for that as a filmmaker or television writer you have you have tricks that are not available to anomalous you can you can bring in music to heighten suspense or to build up the emotional impact of the of the scene you you can do things with lighting and of course you can your actors can bring a tremendous amount to it with just a just a look just the expression on their faces I mean though the scene we showed last night when I referred to in the comments afterwards where the King Robert is arriving in Winterfell and he also of his horse and walks up to Ned and you know looks at Ned and says you've got fat and Shaun being just sort of raises his eyes and looks them up and down and the whole audience hell's with laughter because of where this Robert has really gotten fat that was something that the two of them two of them did I doubt it was even in the script I bet it was I don't know some by play of the of the actors but maybe it was in the script but I certainly could not have done that in prose I mean imagine trying to write that in prose and how would it go you know Ned you've got fat Robert said Ned flicked his eyebrows head raised his head up and dad doesn't have the same impact as actually seeing Sean beans face as he does that does does that little trick so you have to always be aware of what medium you're working in and and what things will work in it and what things don't work in now as a as a fan I have to get to season two just just quickly we're going to take a look at I had a cat I've seen here I think from season two and then I'll ask you but afterwards now as a fan there's I know there's a whole heaping of Awesomeness that occurs in book two how just how excited should I be George I don't know if I can get more excited what set us up for season two what should we expect well of course I haven't actually seen season two either so I'm also pretty excited I was able to visit the the set Durney filming an original pilot and then when we got season one I was able to visit a couple of the sets for a couple weeks but you know last year when they were filming season two I was just too busy Dance with Dragons had just come out and I was on like a 12 city book tour and having to attend some major conventions and you know then I had to go home and do some work so I wasn't able to actually see them shoot any of this so I'm seeing so these trailers and such for the first time I know I'm pretty excited about my own episode which again I haven't seen but I know it was in the script then it's episode 9 which is the Battle of Blackwater probably the biggest battle in in the books and it's a massive set piece and we hired Neil Marshall to directed first time he's ever done television very well-known British director who's done Centurion and the descent dog soldiers relatively low-budget movies but with terrific visceral action sequences and a great visual look to them so we're hoping he'll he'll bring all of that to to the screen and capture give us a very exciting battle those of you who watch the first season's know that we did a lot of things right but our battles were not our high point battles are very hard on a television budget even an HBO television budget if you've seen the battles in like Rome for example or well they did very well with the Pacific but the Pacific was a had had much bigger budgets and and you can do a lot with explosions too which I am so so I'm excited about that and I'm excited about some of the new cast members will be joining I have seen their auditions and their you know some marvelous marvelous actors that we've got we have Stannis will be joining the thing Stannis and Melisandre Jon meets Ygritte for the first time we introduce Brienne Davos Seaworth Margaery Tyrell lots of lots of great new characters will be joining to mix so even though I am notorious for killing my characters I I do keep throwing new ones in there too so you won't miss the dead ones that much got it got to keep a full larder in case I want to kill some more oMG I am so excited we're going to turn it over to you folks for a QA I'm going to ask that you wait you raise your hands and wait for the mics to get to you so we can actually properly hear you so raise your hands that we have a mic over there yes hi George my name is Gloria um I love your work love it love it a little bit thank you yeah I remember when I first discovered Game of Thrones I jet I couldn't stop reading it I just it was like I'd be so tired and I'd want to throw up because I was so tired but I couldn't stop I guess a question when is your next book coming out well you know that's a good question uh the next Ice and Fire book will be a few years I mean I'm working on it but these are gigantic books the last one was fifteen hundred pages in manuscript I suspect this next one will also be fifteen hundred pages and I've given up predicting how long is going to take me to write that because every time I do make a prediction I'm wrong and then people come howling with torches and pitchforks outside my house my god you said it would be in Thai the end of the year and it's not you lied so so I don't want to predict anymore I just write one page at a time and it'll be out I hope eventually and even more important I hope that it will be good it's worth waiting for folks who's got a mic yes hi George my name is Matt you mentioned earlier that you wrote mainly to explore and discover new worlds and Westeros in the world of song and ice and fire is so rich so I'm wondering with what's left in the books how much of Westeros do we have left to discover and how much do you write because it's necessary for the story or do you write mainly because oh hey this is a cool place to tell a story you know the story takes over the story makes its own demands there are other parts of Westeros that you will see in the last last few books I mean I haven't I haven't brought the action to to Casterly Rock yet you've never seen Casterly Rock you've never seen Highgarden I think both of those locations will will play key roles and in the books to come but there is a lot of and you know I may do when I'm going years ahead now so who to hell knows what will happen but the world that I've created there is rich enough to sustain many stories and the Song of Ice and Fire is only one of those stories so if I finish these last two books that will be the end of the story but not necessarily the end of the world I think I would probably want to do something else after I finish that something very different and maybe some short stories or maybe a science fiction novel or or or a novel I've been thinking of some time but eventually if assuming of course I live long enough and keep writing I might return and tell other stories set in Westeros at different parts of Westeros different historical epochs or different continents and geography so that might be fun hi George um how difficult do you think it is for a new science fiction or fantasy writer to break into the industry it's actually if you're good of course that's always the purvey so you have to have to have that talent it's pretty easy to break in actually you know I always advise new writers young writers - to break in with short stories that was the way I did it in the in the 70s and that's still the best way I mean we're fortunate that science fiction fantasy still has half a dozen magazines that are looking for new material every month and therefore have to read their slush pile in a fairly timely manner to find the contents you know the established writers there's there's not much money in short fiction you're not going to get rich writing short fiction by any means and the result is that most established writers don't do very much short fiction past a point a certain point in their career they switch to novels which is where you could actually make a living so as a result there's a lot of openings for new talent in in the pages of analog and the magazine of fantasy and science fiction and Asimov's magazine and even nuit magazines things like Lightspeed and toward calm and and so forth and my mind a good career path still as it was in the seven days is to is to write a whole bunch of short stories and sell as many of them as you can and build a name for yourself in the world the short fiction because science fiction readers and fantasy readers will will notice these stories and then when you finally do write your first novel and it hits the stands it's not just going to be the the first novel by some new person that you've never heard of in your life and why should you pick up their novel when you don't know who they are it's going to be the long-awaited first novel by this person who's published 20 short stories and you know you've been seeing their name in all the magazines and you kind of like what they did so it gives you a it gives you a leg up when you do move to the to the world of novels and that's a that's a good way to start up front hey George big fan of yours and on your right side so I just wanted to ask you in terms of writing renly a lot of people were taken aback in terms of that one scene that had shown up near the end of the season and I guess they weren't necessarily picking up on a lot of the subtle hints that you had written in the series so I was wondering if you had wondered in terms of what fan reaction would have been at the earlier stages of the series towards writing a more explicit scene like was seen between Renly and the native flowers and how that might have played out differently if you had written it earlier in the series in other words if I'd had a explicit scene in the books is what you're saying yeah um well I don't know I don't know what the reaction would have been um you know I do like to do certain things I don't know subtly I think subtlety is is a virtue there there are things in there that that some of my readers pick up on and that other readers miss until it's pointed out to them one of the things of course that's changed in recent decades with the advent of the Internet is that the readers are sharing their reading experiences so if if there's something there and some readers pick up on it and other readers don't the readers who missed it soon become aware of it by reading the dogs and bulletin boards and and the people were trotting out their theories and showing all the hints and things like that so that changes things but I like to I like to reward the readers who are reading closely and paying attention because there there are a lot of thing I like to write the books to reward rereading you know I think the first time you read a book you're reading for plot URI what happens next it's my hero is where the guy go to live or die or something like that and but then if you go back and you reread the book you may pick up things on a second reading or even a third reading that you missed the first time and you and you see oh my god look what he's doing here they look at his piece for shadowing or look at this he said this and I didn't notice it the first time but it's R it's right there etc you know neither renly nor loris is a viewpoint character and since I'm following a very strict structure of seeing everything through the eyes only of the viewpoint characters there was really no way to present explicit details of their of their relationship without having someone like walk in on them when when which is sort of a I suppose I could have done but it's a it's a clumsy technique but a television show is is a very different animal and doesn't doesn't have to have the restrictions the camera is your viewpoint there and that viewpoint can be pointed anywhere on any character it doesn't have to necessarily just follow your six or seven designated viewpoint characters you're going to see a much larger example of that of course in the second season episode one of the things in Clash of Kings is that the a lot of stuff is happening to Rob Rob takes his army west into the westerland's and is ravishing the the Lannister lands and and as those who read the books know various important things happen at the at the crag in particular and we don't learn about any of them we learn about some of the victories from a distance well Rob has won this battle Rob has been wounded you know Rob is coming back now he didn't die of his wound we hear about this whole third hand through message to his mother back at Riverrun and finally he shows up and there's big revelations but David and Dan in the in the show are actually going to follow Rob and we're going to see some of the things that are occurring in the westerland's so it's it's going to be just as with the Renly Loras thing it's going to be a lot more explicit and you're not going to have to rely on third hand reports or rumors or you know Ravens coming in to tell you what's happening you'll you will see what's happening with your own two eyes we're here yeah this question comes from reading your blog and I was just very curious as a as a football fan just the in the flesh personal experience of the roller coaster ride that the Giants put you on this season and I have to say I'm not too happy because as a Packers fan I was not happy about losing that playoff game to jpp and mr. Cruz so I'm just curious about what happened and what you were feeling as you watched the losing streak and then them come back and win the Super Bowl I was the winning the Super Bowl part was amazing I tell you I love that there were points where I was really ready to give up on the Giants I may even have written on my blog I mean it that second loss to the Redskins was such a gutless loss I thought their season was over at that point it's like they didn't show up and neither of those Redskins games is they showed up to play but the second one was particularly galling you know because they were competing for you know a playoff berth and how how could they lie down and gets an awful team like that and lay another egg especially when a team had beaten them morally earlier in the season but you know that's my history as a Giants fan I've noticed even back into Parcells days that the Giants are always one of these teams that seems to play to the level of the opposition you know if they are playing a good team like the Packers or the Patriots they're really tough they're really good they played tough against these teams and even when they lose like in the you know that the game to the Packers in the Giants Stadium which I actually attended that was a terrific game it could have gone either way their only mistake was leaving 58 seconds for Aaron Rodgers after they scored tying touchdown and but then they play the Redskins or a terrible team or the Seahawks they played early in a year and they played down to the level opposition it's like they think well they're a better team they just showed up they should win but it they never seem to actually crush anyone 42 to 3 like some of the other good teams do when they're playing a bad team so it is a roller coaster ride with the Giants and with the Jets my other team I often tell Paris my wife that she ought to get one of those home defibrillators because I'm sure I'm gonna I'm gonna die during the last 30 seconds of a Jets game as they as they're in the process of either blowing it or somehow miraculously pulling a win out uh so you know I don't know I love that we got a football question in over here next yes hello George I was wondering if you had any reservations about making your books into a TV series if I had any reservations you know it's it's there's always a certain trepidation when you when you can assign the deal you know is this going to turn out well or are they going to you know are they going to ruin it you know I liken it to a mother sending her children off to you know daycare for the first time I mean you had this kid and he's your kid and you spent all the time with him and you've been in charge and now you're entrusting up to strangers and all the strangers going to take good care of them is he going to get his milk and cookies in time or they actually a bunch of child molesters who are just lurking there and they're going to get the kid off and you're going to be gone and who the hell knows what they're going to do but you know I mean with it I'd met the people involved you know I love the HBO shows I love what they did with Rome and Deadwood so they had a they had a terrific track record and Dave and Dan I had several meetings with we discussed what they wanted to do and they said all the right things I and I'd read their their own work they were both established writers themselves and David Benioff in particular had done some amazing work with 25th hour and Troy and his his novels city of thieves and 25th hour was actually a novel before was at the movie Kite Runner you know heat so they've done terrific work so I didn't I didn't think they were child molesters it seemed pretty good and you know you have to you have to take a chance sometime wonder what is it look at Mariel Hemingway says to Woody Allen in Manhattan there sometimes you got to trust someone so I did that too and also the large dump truck of money did they pull up in front of your house sometimes sways you and and you know the other thing to keep in mind is that the the books continue to exist by themselves that Roger Russia Zelazny who was a good friend of mine had the misfortune of having his novel damnation alley made into something that purports to be a film and it was too terrible as a piece of [ __ ] but uh they completely ruined the book but Roger built a whole new wing on his house with the money they paid him for damnation alley and when he was asked about it he would always quote James M Cain the famous noir writer who went when asked famously well mr. Cain what do you what do you think about what Hollywood has done to your books he would just point to the wall and said well Hollywood hasn't done anything to my books they're they're right over there they're under shelves there exactly the way I wrote them not a word has been changed so you know go go forth and enjoy them and indeed the original book sell more copies one thing I've been adamant though from the from the very start of my association with Hollywood and and for every project I've ever done in Hollywood is to retain full and complete publication rights in any deal and to forbid any novelization so if any if any movie is ever made of my work we will rerelease my original novel and it will sell we will not have a movilization you know even if they completely trashed a novel and changed everything about it people have to go to the original book and the original book will benefit from from any sales generated by the movie or the television show we won't have some cheesy novelization written by a hack which they like to do too but that's one point where I draw my own personal line as it always a deal-breaker for me if they insist on novelization rights so so yeah there's always trepidation but it's it's worked out well in this case and that's fine you have to know who your who you're doing business with when you're when you are dealing with Hollywood you know if if Steven Spielberg comes to you or guillermo del toro comes to you when they want to option your work that's one thing if Jerry Bruckheimer comes to you you know you got a different situation there and yet you got to know why you're what you're looking at going in I'm afraid that's all the time we have this morning I want to thank you mr. Martin very much for joining us and for all your amazing work well thank you very much my pleasure you

Channel: TIFF Originals

Views: 825,415

Rating: 4.9265361 out of 5

Keywords: Whats New, 2013, Twilight Zone, New Releases, george r.r. martin, film, Game Of Thrones, tiff, hbo, toronto, Higher Learning, A Song of Ice and Fire, Television (Media Genre), International, Festival, Bell Lightbox, Master Class

Id: DDIZnKujSa4

Length: 70min 10sec (4210 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/permafr0st]

her question cracks me up. still waiting, sister.