'Game Of Thrones' Creator George R.R. Martin Doubles Down: "When You Adapt A Work Of Art, A Novel, A Short Story, You Should Do A Faithful Adaptation"
Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin doubled down when Hollywood does an adaptation it should be a “faithful adaptation.”
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin stated, “Maybe I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who still thinks that when you adapt a work of art, a novel, a short story, you should do a faithful adaptation.”
He added, “[It] annoys me too much because they change things and I don’t think they generally improve them.”
Martin has made similar comments in the past. In a blog post back in July discussing the dragons in Game of Thrones, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Smaug, Verimthrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer, and Toothless in How To Train Your Dragon he wrote, “Fantasy needs to be grounded. It is not simply a license to do anything you like. Smaug and Toothless may both be dragons, but they should never be confused. Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper.”
A month before that he bashed Hollywood writers and producers who they can “improve” on the source material of writers such as Ian Fleming, Stan Lee, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others.
He wrote on his blog, “Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it.”
He continued, “’The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
Martin made similar comments back in 2022 during an appearance at New York City’s Symphony Space alongside Neil Gaiman.
Variety reported that Martin rhetorically asked, “How faithful do you have to be? Some people don’t feel that they have to be faithful at all. There’s this phrase that goes around: ‘I’m going to make it my own.’ I hate that phrase. And I think Neil probably hates that phrase, too.”
Gaiman responded, “I do. I spent 30 years watching people make ‘Sandman’ their own. And some of those people hadn’t even read ‘Sandman’ to make it their own, they’d just flipped through a few comics or something.”
Martin then detailed, “There are changes that you have to make — or that you’re called upon to make — that I think are legitimate. And there are other ones that are not legitimate.”
READ: George R.R. Martin Jokes He Might Never Finish The Winds Of Winter In New Interview
Variety’s Ethan Shanfeld then detailed that Martin recalled Roger Zelazny adapting The Last Defender of Camelot for The Twilight Zone and that “due to budget constraints, being forced to choose between having horses or an elaborate Stonehenge-esque set for a battle scene.” Martin did not want to make the decision so he left it up to Zelazny who chose to cut the horses.
Martin explained, “That, to my mind, is the kind of stuff you are called upon to do in Hollywood that is legitimate.” He even noted this is why the Iron Throne is not depicted in the show as it is written in the books, “Why is the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones not the Iron Throne as described in the books? Why is it not 15 feet high and made of 10,000 swords? Because the ceiling in our soundstage was not 15 feet high! We couldn’t fit in in there, and they weren’t willing to give us St. Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey to shoot our little show in.”
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This is why GRRM can't finish his last book. He's too busy living on X.