House of the Dragon is “a very faithful adaptation” of Fire & Blood

Game of Thrones is three years gone, but HBO is planning to return to Westeros with House of the Dragon, a prequel series set some 200 years before the original show.

The new series is based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood. Among other things, it details the events of the Dance of the Dragons, a brutal civil wore fought between rival factions of the Targaryen dynasty, which was then at the height of its power. We’re talking brother fighting brother, mother fighting daughter, and of course, dragon fighting dragon.

To undertake this effort, HBO has tapped writer Ryan Condal, who will serve as showrunner alongside Miguel Sapochnik, who directed landmark episodes of Game of Thrones like “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winter.” As it ends up, Condal was George R.R. Martin’s handpicked choice to run things, as the two had known each other for a long time already.

“It didn’t happen immediately,” Martin said during an appearance on the Coupledom podcast, his words helpfully transcribed by Lord_Edin on the House of the Dragon subreddit. “Mostly when I would come out to L.A. once or twice a year, we would have drinks at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and just talk about what we were doing. And over these dinners and these meetings, I learned certain things about Ryan. Number one, he liked my work which was good.”

"He knew a lot about my world because he’d read all the books about Westeros. He knew a lot about fantasy in general…Meanwhile at the same time, HBO was gearing up to try – they could see that Game of Thrones was ending – they wanted a successor show. I pitched them several ideas and one of them was the Targaryen civil war, which I call the Dance of the Dragons. But we did have other writers – you know how this business works – we went through some other writers. Some of them didn’t get very far, some of them got considerably far and did good work. But at one point we found ourselves without a writer and…we were at the Four Seasons, and I thought ‘hey, you would be great for this.’"

Martin has been around Hollywood a long time and knows what pitfalls to avoid. Hopefully it’ll encourage people to know that in Condal, he picked someone with a real love for all things Westeros. “Yes, I was very happy that Ryan knew my world so well,” Martin said. “Because HBO also put into production four other shows with four other writers who were excellent writers. Their television and film credits were excellent, [but] they didn’t really know my books.”

"Now I got to admit I’m not the most objective guy in this discussion, I’m the author of the original material. When you get a writer who is hired to do an adaptation but is not familiar with the material…in some cases they hire people who don’t even like the original material. And you have language in Hollywood, ‘I’m going to make it my own. I have my own vision for this,’ and that sort of thing.Not even discussing my work but discussing myself as a viewer, as a consumer of things, if I go to see The Great Gatsby, I don’t want someone’s take on The Great Gatsby. I don’t want them to make it their own. I want Scott Fitzgerald brought to life in front of my face. I want Daisy and Tom and Gatsby, and the roaring 20’s. And you don’t always get that, so to be able to work with someone like Ryan – not just that he knew my books – the fact that he knew fantasy and loved fantasy was a big thing."

House of the Dragon is “a very faithful adaptation” of George R.R. Martin’s work

As for Condal, he’s loved A Song of Ice and Fire for over 20 years now. “That fateful meeting in Sante Fe and me picking up that paperback of Game of Thrones back in 2001 in Barnes and Nobles when I was touring the fantasy aisle, it all kind of came into alignment that day, and started us on this wild journey we’re on,” he said of getting offered the chance to work on House of the Dragon.

Condal assured fans that he’s aiming to keep the show faithful to Martin’s work, which means keeping him in the loop. “For me it was all about trust,” Condal said. “It was a unique writing relationship because George was the author of the source material. And I promised him from the outset that I am going to render as faithful an adaptation of the material as I can, understanding that certain things have to shift, and change, and be invented because we’re putting this into a visual medium. It’s no longer a history book.

"So for me it was a trust building exercise. And the way Miguel and I approached the show was as fans of the original show. So what we’re all trying to do is create the thing that we as fans would want to see. For me as a fan that meant a very faithful adaptation. So I was very lucky in this case, I had George’s ear. I shared every outline that I wrote with him for the pilot, and every draft of the pilot I wrote. And then once that started getting going and HBO was happy, I think George was happy and knew where the story was going and what the plan was.So that’s what I really try to do. Keep him as abreast to the information as I could. Then at some point we wrote a series bible, and he came to Los Angeles to join us and heard how all of that was going. So I think at every step of the way, he always knew where the story was going. So with me it was always keeping him involved and keeping his eyes on it as much as I could because I felt like if George blessed this and said this is good, or we debated something and it’s not the thing he wanted and kind of compromised on kind of a mutual solution, then I felt like I had done my job as the author of the adaptation."

And indeed, based on what we can tell, it does look like the show is doing a good job of adapting Fire & Blood pretty closely. For instance, there’s a huge cast of characters, and I was prepared for some characters to be cut or combined, but so far it looks like they’re including pretty much everybody, although of course we won’t know for sure until we see the finished episodes.

George R.R. Martin, House of the Dragon producers argued over where to start the story

All that said, there will have to be some changes made, if for no other reason than because Fire & Blood is a quirky book. It’s not a straight novel, but rather a fake history book where one historian draws from multiple accounts of what happened during this war. There’s not much dialogue, so the writers will have to come up with that. And as far as the multiple points of view go, they’ll have to pick one where the book gave you multiple options.

“[W]e’ve had a couple of healthy debates more in the early going, in the kind of formation of how the show was going to be structured, and how this particular story was going to be told,” Condal said. “And it involved a deep and introspective look into the material that you wouldn’t necessarily have to do if you were just reading or discussing it as a history book.”

"Because it’s one guy (archmaester Glydan) trying to sift through three other guys who all have an incomplete account of the history that happened, trying to figure out what actually happened. Because we’re telling the objective version of this story, we had to make decisions about this was going to happen, and how that was going to happen…[T]here was debate, and there was ‘well what if we did this’ and some things weren’t exactly what George intended, but he came around to and liked."

Another issue is where to kick off the story. Again, Fire & Blood is a history book. It contains an account of the Dance of the Dragons, but it also covers much of what came before and after. How much of that backstory do you include, and how do you include it?

“So that’s like the history of the United States, or the history of England,” Martin said. “Where do you start. If you’re writing the history of England, do you start with the Picts, the Celts, the Romans invading? No I’ll skip them and start with the Saxons invading. Or no I’ll skip them, I’ll start with William the Conqueror. We faced the same issues here. And indeed that’s a major issue with me and some of the other writers who had preceded Ryan on this project. We could not agree on exactly where to begin the story. I usually wanted to begin earlier and other people wanted to begin later. But I think we found a great place to begin the story.”

The way Condal talks about it, the team has found a place where they’re serving two masters: staying faithful to the book while adapting it for TV. “It’s really interesting because you can really serve the adaptation, be extremely faithful to it, but still bring a lot of invention to it, just because of the way the story is told,” he said.

We’ll see how all this came together when House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21.

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h/t Los Siete Reinos