George R.R. Martin rails against Hollywood making “illegitimate changes” to books

Hollywood is adapting more and more books to TV nowadays, with varying levels of fidelity. There are shows like House of the Dragon and The Sandman, which stick pretty close to the source material. There’s The Witcher, which goes pretty far afield of the books by Andrzej Sapkowski even as it retains the basic outline. And there’s the recent Lord of the Rings show The Rings of Power, which takes a few cues from author J.R.R. Tolkien but is mostly doing its own thing.

Call me reductive, but after watching a lot of these sorts of shows over the past few years, it seems like they have been most successful when staying true to the source material and tend to struggle when they wander off on their own. But TV is a big complicated beast where a lot of people have input, so it’s not as easy as just saying, “We need to follow the book.” Other voices — powerful voices — have their say to, and they don’t always agree.

Authors George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman recently talked about some of these issues at a public event chronicled by Variety. “How faithful do you have to be?” Martin asked. “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…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.”

Martin gave an example: at one point in the ’80s he was adapting Roger Zelazny’s short story “The Last Defender of Camelot” as an episode of The Twilight Zone and was told that, due to budget constraints, the episode could have either horses or an elaborate Stonehenge-esque set for a battle scene, but not both. He called up Zelazny and asked him about it; Zelazny chose to lose the horses. “That, to my mind, is the kind of stuff you are called upon to do in Hollywood that is legitimate,” he said.

Another “legitimate” change: the fact that the Iron Throne on Game of Thrones is way smaller than how Martin envisioned it in his Song of Ice and Fire 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.”

As for an “illegitimate” change, Martin said, at one point CBS made him include an “ordinary person” who just “tags along” in an episode of The Twilight Zone in order to appeal to a “high concept…I was new to Hollywood,” Martin said. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re fucking morons.’”

George R.R. Martin on his interest in “grey” characters”

TV has changed a lot since those days. Budget concerns, while still there, aren’t as big of a problem on a show as grand as House of the Dragon, for instance. And networks seem more willing to dial into the moral ambiguity that Martin enjoys so much.

“A lot of people don’t want grey characters — they want heroes, they want villains,” Martin said. “And we see that in real history. Especially here in America, we grow up and we hear about the Founding Fathers and various people in the past, and they’re our heroes. They’re wonderful, they’re flawless. And then we find out later that maybe they weren’t flawless. Maybe they had a flaw here and there. Maybe they did some pretty bad things occasionally. But they also did good things.”

"There seems to be a lot of people who cannot accept that. If they find a flaw, they immediately move shining hero to absolute dirtbag, and now we have to despise this person. Really, most human beings are somewhere in the middle. And we should just accept that."

Characters like Daemon Targaryen and Alicent Hightower from House of the Dragon come to mind. In fact, pretty much the entire cast could fit that bill. “There were Targaryens who did something good on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday did something reprehensible. Also, of course, our standards of what constitutes ‘reprehensible’ change,” Martin said.

George R.R. Martin wants The Sandman season 2

Circling back to the talk about Hollywood changing source material for no good reason, Neil Gaiman isn’t a fan of it either. “I spent 30 years watching people make Sandman their own,” he said. “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.”

Netflix recently adapted Gaiman’s comic The Sandman as a terrific series that still hasn’t gotten renewed. Martin, like the rest of us, would like to see more. “We want Season 2!” he said, energizing the crowd.

Basically I just wanted to mention that before signing off. Give us season 2 of The Sandman, Netflix! George R.R. Martin demands it.

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