Peter Jackson explains why he could never make Game of Thrones
By Corey Smith
From The Lovely Bones to his Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson loves to adapt novels for the big screen. His latest is the steampunk post-apocalyptic Mortal Engines, based on the first of four novels by Philip Reeve, although we should mention that Jackson is producing and writing this movie, not directing it:
Anyway, Reeve’s books are rich in mythology and dense in plot. Jackson and his screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens explained to SyFy Wire how they dealt with those difficulties when bringing the novel to the screen, and Jackson explained why he could never make something like Game of Thrones. “When you are adapting a book, by the time you’re adapting it, you’ve read it 10 or 15 times and you’ve read it in bits and pieces, and you’ve read it backward and forwards and frontwards,” he said. “What I find is really important to remember is what that first experience of reading it was, and why did you like it? What was it that really made you enjoy it, on the first time that you read it?”
"My idea of a nightmare as a filmmaker would be something like the Game of Thrones situation, where you’re adapting the books and the author’s still trying to figure out how he’s going to end it, and yet you’re having to make it without knowing what the ending is. From an insecurity point of view, that would sort of freak me out."
It’s been hard on us, too, Mr. Jackson. Author George R.R. Martin remains adamant that the Song of Ice and Fire novels will get finished, but the show has long since overtaken them.
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Anyway, circling back to Jackson’s comments the importance of remembering why you liked a book in the first place, how does that fit into his Hobbit trilogy? Was what he liked about J.R.R. Tolkien’s original book that it was slow and unnecessarily split into three parts? Because that’s not how I remember it. The closest Jackson and Boyens came to addressing this was when Boyens talked about something a Disney executive once told them about the movies. “The movies have to be what you’d call a full meal,” she said. “That’s what Alan Horn from Disney always said about The Hobbit. It should feel like you’ve had a full meal when you’ve seen the film, not like you have to wait for the next course, so to speak.”
Well, we were definitely full after The Hobbit trilogy.
Boyens also talked about her approach to adaptation. “In the end, you have to care about the characters that that action is happening to and that’s always a trick,” Boyens said. “And the trick in this one is that you’re already starting in a world that is quite complicated to understand, and at what point do you trust your audience and not overwrite it and not over-explain it and not overwhelm them with buckets of grievous exposition?”
In other Lord of the Rings-adjacent news, star Andy Serkis recently channeled his iconic performance as Gollum to mock British Prime Minster Theresa May..
…and the YouTube channel Polyphonic explores the well-established connection between The Lord of the Rings and classic rock:
And in the background, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series is always there, hanging on the horizon like the Eye of Sauron glimpsed over the Ephel Dúath.
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