George R.R. Martin talks Game of Thrones: “I don’t think it should be the final season”

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin didn’t mince words when talking to The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet at the Game of Thrones season 8 premiere event in New York City last week. “I don’t think it should be the final season,” he said. “But here we are. It seems to me we just started last week. Has it been longer than that? The time has passed by in a blur. But it’s exciting. I know it’s an end, but it’s not much of an end for me. I’m still deep in writing the books. We saw five other sequel shows in development. I think I’m going to be hanging around Westeros while everyone else has left. (Laughs.)”

Somehow I don’t think people are going to be forgetting about Westeros for a while, not after the show has had such a huge impact on TV, and not when HBO already has a prequel show in the hopper. “It hasn’t started shooting yet, but they’re getting very close to that,” Martin said of HBO’s Game of Thrones follow-up show, which is set thousands of years before the main show. “They have a great director and an amazing cast. I’ve been following along closely. I have my fingers crossed. It’s different. It’s definitely very different. It’s set thousands of years in the past. You’re looking at a whole different era of Westeros. No dragons, no Iron Throne, no King’s Landing. It will be interesting to see what the fans make of that.”

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So far as we know, this prequel show — tentatively called The Long Night — is the only one HBO is putting into production, although people like Martin keep throwing out lines about having “five other sequel shows in development,” so we suppose the others aren’t off the table yet. Nonetheless, the pilot for the show that may or may not be called The Long Night goes into production in June, and while Martin says you might find “a sentence or two” about the subject matter in his World of Ice and Fire companion book, the bulk has been imagined by showrunner Jane Goldman and her team.

For Martin’s part, it doesn’t sound like he’ll be too involved, just as he wasn’t overly involved in the final season of Game of Thrones. Instead, he’s been plugging away at The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series. “I’ve been in isolation,” he said. “My loyal staff — I have a couple of them with me — have chained me to the typewriter. They’re making me eat healthy food. (Laughs.) It’s horrible! ” My sympathies.

THR also brought up the legendarily high body count of his story, where lead characters like Ned and Catelyn Stark drop like flies. “I’ll point out that [Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] killed many more than I did,” he said. “I can name 20 characters who are dead on the show but are alive in the books. Whether they will die in the books or not? Who knows.”

"With the major characters, I have had the beats of this planned out since 1994 or 1995. Sometimes, the minor characters, you’re writing a scene about a viewpoint character and then you need someone for him or her to play off of. You add a new character. Sometimes, that character comes alive in a way I hadn’t planned. But there he is, in that scene, and he moves in a new direction. That’s the whole gardener approach. The major characters, though, I know the major strokes. Not with some of the people who have barged in afterward."

Game of Thrones season 8 starts this Sunday, April 14. The Winds of Winter? You’ll know when I do.

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