George R.R. Martin isn't happy with screenwriters who adapt books but "make them their own"

Earlier this year, A Song of Ice and Fire creator George R.R. Martin wrote a blog post where he discussed the difficult process of adapting a book for the screen. He did not mince words in complaining about how often the stories tend to degrade in the transition. "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."

Martin is no stranger to having his stories adapted for the screen; HBO turned A Song of Ice and Fire into Game of Thrones, and the network is currently adapting Martin's book Fire & Blood as House of the Dragon. That show in particular has made some seismic changes to the source material, and if you ask me, they've been for the worse. Martin does not confirm anything one way or the other, but I can't help but wonder if those changes weren't on his mind when he wrote this.

Martin returned to this topic during an extensive interview at the Oxford Writers House, where someone asked him about his thoughts on adaptations. "I do think...that there's not enough faithful adaptations," he said. "[Studios] don't buy the book that did terribly and no one liked, they buy classics, they buy books that are centuries old and that people loved or they buy the latest bestseller that has hundreds of fans. And then they turn it over to a screenwriter and director who often come in with their own ideas...And too many screenwriters do make it their own. Even if they're adapting Dickens or Tolkien or Shakespeare or whoever, they decide to make it their own, but they never make it better because usually the people who are making it their own are simply not as good as the people who wrote it in the first place."

"Legitimate" and "illegitimate" adaptation changes

That's pretty much what Martin wrote on his blog, but this time Martin digs a little more deeply into what he means. For instance, he opines that HBO's recent TV adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series "was much more successful" that the 2007 movie version. (Pullman was supposed to be a part of this interview but couldn't make it, hence why Martin brought up his series.) And he makes a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" changes to the source material, using an example from back when he was writing for the 1985 revival of The Twilight Zone, which aired on CBS.

For an episode of this sci-fi anthology series, Martin chose to adapt the short story "The Last Defender of Camelot" by his friend and fellow author Roger Zelazny, about what happens when Lancelot of King Arthur's roundtable is transported into the modern day. The climax of that story involves Lancelot fighting a villain called the Hollow Knight on horseback at Stonehenge. The network couldn't afford both horses or Stonehenge, so Martin had to choose one. He called up Zelazny, who told Martin to lose Stonehenge, and so it happened. Martin thinks this is a "legitimate" change.

On the other hand, Martin also remembers that CBS executives were freaking out that the Lancelot episode didn't conform to the high-concept pitch for The Twilight Zone, which was supposed to be about "an ordinary man [who] finds himself in extraordinary circumstances." Lancelot isn't an ordinary man; surely this will sink the show. So Martin had to change the script to expand the role of a tertiary character who didn't even have a name in the original draft to be a main part of the story. Martin thinks this is an "illegitimate change."

Martin also talked about the push to adapt stories in a way that accounts for "outdated attitudes" on the part of the original authors, so things are "less offensive" for modern audiences. I'm sure there are circumstances where these kinds of changes are made and no one's going to argue, but Martin clearly thinks it sometimes goes too far. He's particularly incensed by Puffin Books editing the works of Roald Dahl, the author of books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, removing words like "crazy" so as to make them more palatable. "[S]ome of the changes are just ridiculous," Martin opined. "They eliminated the word fat because it would be offensive to fat people. And I've struggled with my weight all my life here and believe me, they've substituted the word enormous, which I don't think was an improvement." Martin is particularly offended in this instance because, according to him, Dahl was specific before his death in 1990 that he didn't want his editors to ever change a word of his text. "[A]nd now he's dead so what he said doesn't matter."

If Martin had his way, works like Dahl's would be preserved even if they contain some potentially unsavory elements. "Leave it the way Dahl wrote it and just put, if you want to say this, this book was written in 1952 and reflects the attitudes that should do it." It kind of reminds me of the way the streaming service Max included an introduction from film scholar Jacqueline Stewart in front of Gone With The Wind, an influential movie released in 1939 that trades in harmful stereotypes about American slavery and the pre-Civil War south. This movie is not in line with modern sensibilities, but is the solution to change it or to help people understand the wider context in which it existed and exists? Roald Dahl's books aren't anywhere near as inflammatory as Gone With The Wind, but Puffin went a different route with them.

Should fantasy fiction comment on modern culture?

Kind of related to all of this, Martin was also asked whether he thinks fantasy fiction should comment on current social and political issues. "It all depends on the writer, but I don't necessarily think it should," the author said. "I mean, I know [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.] Tokien himself hated people who were trying to read Lord of the Rings as allegory. He hated allegories. 'I'm not writing about World War I, or World War II. Sauron is not Hitler, stop trying to read this stuff into it.' There are certainly other people who don't agree with Tolkien and who do things like that. Certainly you can, you can read Animal Farm [by George Orwell] and say, well, yeah, he's writing about the Soviet Union there and this pig is Stalin and this other pig is Trotsky and all of that."

"But I think fantasy is bigger than that. It doesn't have to comment on what's going on this week or this year or even this century. Fantasy is about universal human truth, is about love and life and faith or doubt or greed and lust, all of these basic human things that are different but still the same whether it's the middle ages or 2024 or ancient Rome or whatever. And those are the things that I like to talk about more."

Martin also briefly addressed his progress on The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series. You probably won't be surprised by where he landed on that:

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