Recently, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin interviewed fellow fantasy author Joe Abercrombie at the Kimo Theater in Martin's hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Abercrombie is the author of The First Law books; he has a new book, The Devils, that just hit store shelves.
Becca Monet posted a recording of the interview on YouTube, for which she has our thanks! The pair talk about a wide range of topics, but I want to zero in on what Martin has to say about collaboration and adaptation, because it's something he's been talking about for a while, at least ever since he publicly criticized the HBO show House of the Dragon, which is adapted from his book Fire & Blood, for straying from the source material.
"Television and film are ultimately collaborative," Martin said. "You always have you director and the actors and of course the studio will have executives and they will give notes and all that. And you have to deal with all this, which some people do better than others. The hard part about collaborating is not so much them, but [rather] — and I'm speaking only for myself here — dealing with the other writers."
"You're adapting your book or your story and they hire someone to do it and...they empower this writer: 'Okay, take The Great Gatsby but make it your own.' And I don't want anyone to make The Great Gatsby their own...But I think I may be a minority on this case here. Other people don't mind that. But I don't think in most of the cases where a Hollywood screenwriter makes something their own they improve it. I think [in] the majority of cases it's the opposite."
Martin has been making variations on this point for a while now. It really started to become a running theme, at least to me, about a month before the premiere of House of the Dragon season 2, when Martin wrote a blog post entitled 'The Adaptation Tango.' "Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and 'make them their own,'" he wrote. "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. '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."
That built up to a since-deleted blog post called 'Beware the Butterflies' where Martin openly criticized House of the Dragon for cutting elements from Fire & Blood in such a way that he thought amounted to "a considerable loss" for the story. And he was just focused on the first episode of season 2; there were much bigger changes to the source material to come.
Martin's criticism of the show was so direct and unexpected — remember that he's got a producer credit on the series — that HBO issued a statement in response. Ryan Condal eventually gave his take, opining that he and Martin had at first worked together on the show, but that eventually, Martin became "unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way." Martin hasn't responded directly to that. He's mostly stayed quiet on the matter since, expect when he talks about his issues with Hollywood screenwriters changing things in a general, like he does in this new interview. He's also praised HBO's upcoming Game of Thrones prequel show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is also based on his books, as especially "faithful."
Fans can debate whether Martin's criticisms of House of the Dragon are reasonable; personally, I think they are. I expect changes to be made made whenever a story gets adapted from the page to the screen, but I think the changes in House of the Dragon go well beyond what's necessary to make the story work in a new medium; it's more like they're crafting an entirely new story.
So that's why I look at what Martin said during his interview with Joe Abercrombie and think it might be connected to this recent history. Martin's a guy who appreciates narrative fidelity, although he thinks "collaboration can be fun and can be useful," particularly early in a writer's career. "When you're starting your career, you can learn a lot from other people," Martin said in the Abercrombie interview. "However, there also comes a point where you don't want to learn from other people. Fuck those other people. You find your own voice and you're gonna do it your own way."
As funny as it would be to end this on "fuck those other people," I should point that I think Martin is just being funny and flippant here; I don't think he's targeting anyone. The whole interview is fun and loose, with both Martin and Abercrombie having a lot of interesting things to say. Feel free to watch it here!
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.