CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Forks in the Road
George R. R. Martin sat at a tucked-away table at his favorite restaurant in Santa Fe, a modest family-owned spot where green chili enchiladas and taco plates are ordered by their number. Even though he was out of sight from the main dining room, Thrones fans still managed to find him and ask for a photo. With his fluffy snow-white beard, suspenders, and ever-present fisherman’s cap, Martin looks a bit like a literary character himself, as the author admits.

“When we did the first season, Sean Bean was the only well-known actor in the cast, but I was a bestselling author,” Martin said. “So HBO used me in a lot of their early publicity, and my picture got out there and I became well-known. I guess my appearance is rather distinctive. Then I discovered you can’t turn that off. Like, I can’t go into a bookstore anymore, which is one of my favorite pleasures in life. I used to spend a whole day browsing around and leave with many books under my arm. Now I’m there five minutes and somebody asks for an autograph or a photo and pretty soon I have a circle of people around me. You gain a lot and lose things too.”

Martin pointed across the dining room to an even more secluded nook. Right over there, he said, was where he’d sat with David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bryan Cogman back in 2013 and revealed his long-held secret ending for A Song of Ice and Fire. By that time it was clear to Martin that the show would have major divergences from his novels.

“During the pilot reshoot, I visited the set on the isle of Malta and met some of the new actors,” Martin recalled. “There was some crisis that occurred. The director called David and Dan over, and they were having some discussion about ten feet away about how to handle it. And that was when I realized my baby wasn’t entirely my baby anymore, because I wasn’t part of that discussion. The director was talking to Dan and Dave. Nobody was saying, ‘George, come over and tell us your opinion.’

“I didn’t throw a tantrum or anything,” Martin added calmly. “I just came to the realization: I gave my baby up for adoption and now there is a parent-teacher conference and I’m not invited.”

Another early sign of the show’s autonomy was when the producers decided to have King Joffrey order Ser Ilyn Payne to cut out the singer Marillion’s tongue in season one (in the books, the victim is a different minstrel). “George was none too pleased because in the books Marillion ends up being the patsy for Lysa Arryn’s murder, which happened in season four,” Bryan Cogman said. “David and Dan’s reasoning was it’s better television to have this minstrel whose tongue is ripped out be the minstrel that we’d spend the season with and that we’d figure out Lysa’s murder when we got to it, and we did.”

Martin’s fifth A Song of Ice and Fire novel, the 1,040-page A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011, the same year Thrones debuted. Martin still had two more books planned, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Given that Dragons took six years to write, fans worried from the start that the HBO series was going to outpace the books. “Finish the book, George!” became an Internet rallying cry. A few years into the series, executives at the network grew nervous as well. “I finally understood fans’ fear, which I didn’t a couple of years before,” Michael Lombardo said during production of season three. “What if the storytelling catches up to the books? Let’s all hope and pray that’s not going to be a problem.”

Fandom and network angst paled in comparison to Martin’s own concern. The author posted dismayed updates on his blog detailing his struggle to complete Winds. He attributed the setbacks to a mix of factors—the complexity of the story, his perfectionism, and the distractions and opportunities that came along with being part of the HBO series. “On Tuesday, I think it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done,” Martin said. “On Wednesday, I think it’s all garbage and I should throw it all in the fire and start again.”

DAN WEISS (showrunner): We just did the math on how many seasons we got, how many the story could shoulder and service, and we realized we were going to outstrip the books. So we sat down with him in Santa Fe for three days and dug as deep as we could into what he had in mind for the future of the series through the end.

BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): I can’t even describe that meeting. It was like learning the meaning of life. Like God was coming down and telling you the future. We knew at that point that we were going to catch up. So it was learning a lot of these secrets and then in your mind figuring out, “What of that will work in the context of our show?”

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): It wasn’t easy for me. I didn’t want to give away my books. It’s not easy to talk about the end of my books. Every character has a different end. I told them who would be on the Iron Throne, and I told them some big twists like Hodor and “hold the door,” and Stannis’s decision to burn his daughter. We didn’t get to everybody by any means. Especially the minor characters, who may have very different endings.

DAN WEISS: What makes the books so great is that George doesn’t make meticulous blueprints for every beat of this story, then fill in the blanks by dutifully going from A to B to C, fleshing out an outline. George didn’t have ultra-detailed versions of the last hundred pages of his story figured out.

DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): George often used the metaphor of being a gardener instead of an architect. He plants the seeds and watches them grow. Even if we wanted to be gardeners, we couldn’t. We had to plan out entire seasons. We had to write a detailed outline and provide that to production. Writing a novel is a solo endeavor, and television is a team sport. I’m horribly mixing my metaphors, but the basic point is George was a gardener, and we had to be architects to plan out the seasons meticulously so they get shot and were ready in time. It’s just a fundamental difference between writing novels and TV series.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: David warned me: “We’re catching up.” I said: “I know you are.” But at that time I still thought they wouldn’t catch up. I thought I’d stay ahead.

Martin was confident he could finish his saga before the end of Thrones because he’d made an assumption about how the showrunners would use his already published fourth and fifth A Song of Ice and Fire books. The show’s first two seasons were based on the author’s first two novels, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. Seasons three and four were based on the fan-favorite 992-page A Storm of Swords.

Martin’s next two titles, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, were a combined 1,824 pages. So the author believed that was more than enough to keep the show occupied for several more years. But the new books also added many new characters and storylines, particularly set in Dorne and the Iron Islands. There were so many added threads that the books had an unusual format—covering the same chronological period while focusing on different characters.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: In The Lord of the Rings, everything begins in the Shire with Bilbo’s birthday party, and then the four hobbits set off and they pick up Strider and Gimli and Legolas, and then they start to split up and go their separate ways. That was the same structure I used. It all begins in Winterfell with everybody except Dany. They split up and split further and further. Everything is getting wider, and it’s always been my intent to curve back at the end. It’s the same structure as the show, but David and Dan made the turn much sooner and didn’t introduce some of my new characters, like Arianne Martell and Quentyn Martell.

Martin considered his new characters essential. The showrunners felt their show had to stay focused on its existing cast and maintain the momentum of its established storylines. By season five, Thrones was bursting at the seams with up to thirty series regulars and darting between eight stories set in different locations—Daenerys fighting an uprising in Meereen, Cersei struggling with the Faith Militant in King’s Landing, Sansa dealing with Ramsay at Winterfell, Brienne traveling in the North, Arya training at the House of Black and White, Jon navigating his newfound leadership duties at Castle Black, Stannis and Ser Davos marching their army south, and Jaime trying to rescue Myrcella in Dorne.

That’s a lot of story. So much, in fact, that Thrones was occasionally leaving major characters out of certain episodes, or gave them just a few minutes of screen time, even though series regulars are paid for every episode produced whether they’re used or not. One major arc—Bran’s journey to becoming the Three-Eyed Raven—was sidelined for the entire fifth season. The Hound was likewise benched that year. Asking an actor to take a year off is always risky or expensive, as they need to be kept under contract lest they get snatched up by other projects. Plus, all those storylines meant that Thrones had grown from filming with two units to occasionally using four (dubbed Wolf, Dragon, Raven, and White Walker). Having four units shooting an ambitious fantasy television series at the same time in different locations was a madcap juggling act that was very tough on the crew and made it more difficult for the producers to maintain quality.

In other words, adding even more characters and locations to Thrones, from a practical storytelling and production standpoint, seemed totally impossible . . . though, to be fair, making a “totally impossible” adaptation was always part of the deal. Martin made it clear from the outset that he was was writing a story that was shattering storytelling conventions, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the author would continue to find new ways of doing so.

DAVID BENIOFF: We didn’t want to do a ten-year adaptation of the books. We didn’t want to spend four years with Dany in Meereen. If we were to remain entirely faithful to A Feast for Crows, half the characters—the most popular characters—would be absent from the screen. There would be no Tyrion, no Dany, no Arya, no Jon Snow. It’s always been about adapting the series as a whole and following the map George laid out for us and the major milestones but not necessarily each of the stops along the way. It’s an adaptation. It had to adapt in order to survive.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I thought Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons would be recombined, because you can’t separate them the way I did in the books, and I thought there were three seasons there. At the very least, two seasons. But they got through it all in one season because they eliminated so much. They really started taking shortcuts and cutting things. They eliminated Lady Stoneheart and Quentyn Martell and his voyage across the world and Tyrion’s journey where he goes to Pentos and hooks up with Magister Illyrio, and then he crosses the hills and meets up with Jon Connington and Aegon on the river and they make the long journey down the river to Volantis and they encounter Jorah Mormont, who takes him prisoner—they skipped over that.

DAVID BENIOFF: We don’t get bonus points for being strictly faithful to the books. It doesn’t give us anything extra. For every decision, if there’s a fork in the road and the fork to the left is strictly adhering to the books and to the right is what’s better for the series, we’re always going to take that path to the right.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: So I thought I had three years to get out the next book, and suddenly I was racing to get it out before season five. I realized season five was supposed to come out in April [of 2015], and my publisher said, “If we get it in by the end of the year, we can rush it out in March.” I said, “Okay, I can still get this one book out before the next season.” When it became clear I wasn’t going to have it done by the end of the year, it really took a lot of wind out of my sails. Suddenly, they were ahead of me. I should have gotten the last two books out sooner.

The producers attempted to represent some of Martin’s new characters. The show introduced the Sand Snakes in Dorne and added Euron Greyjoy in the Iron Islands. But the jettisoned character fans clamored to see the most was one who had only a couple of cryptic appearances in the books—Lady Stoneheart. At the end of A Storm of Swords, Catelyn Stark was resurrected from her Red Wedding fate as a silent undead specter of vengeance. The reveal is one of the most shocking moments in the books. The character also appears in one more subsequent chapter, but her purpose to readers is not yet clear.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Lady Stoneheart has a role in the books. Whether it’s sufficient or interesting enough . . . I think it is or I wouldn’t have put her in. One of the things I wanted to show with her is that the death she suffered changes you.

DAVID BENIOFF: There was never really much debate about [including Lady Stoneheart]. There is that one great scene.

DAN WEISS: That was the only debate. The scene where she first shows up is one of the best “holy shit” moments in the books. I think that scene is where the public response came from. But then . . .

DAVID BENIOFF: We can’t go into detail. Part of the reason we didn’t want to put it in had to do with things coming up in George’s books that we don’t want to spoil [by discussing them]. Part of it too was we knew we had Jon Snow’s resurrection coming up. Too many resurrections start to diminish the impact of characters’ dying. We wanted to keep our powder dry for that. And Catelyn’s last moment was so fantastic, and Michelle is such a great actress, to bring her back as a zombie who doesn’t speak felt like diminishing returns.

Another popular mythological aspect of the books that was pared back was the direwolves, which play a larger role in Martin’s novels. The issue with the direwolves wasn’t a storytelling problem, or a lack of interest by the writers, but purely a technical challenge. Once the wolves became larger than ordinary wolves, the show struggled to find ways to portray them in a convincing manner. After using dogs in the first season, the production subsequently filmed real wolves and used CG to make them larger. Even so, there was a degree of uncanniness to their shots that became difficult to disguise.

DAN WEISS: We did some testing, and at a certain point they look unreal. We reached a nice balance with them.

DAVID BENIOFF: With dragons you get some leeway. You don’t say, “Well, that doesn’t look like a real dragon.” And dragons are easier to animate since they don’t have fur.

DAN WEISS: With a wolf you have a million years of evolution telling you what they’re supposed to act like.

BRYAN COGMAN: The show had constraints and the wolves were very challenging to pull off in a way that looked good.

So what, then, did the direwolves mean? Their fates seemed loosely connected to that of each Stark. Jon Snow’s direwolf was Ghost, which was appropriate for a man who rose from the dead. Bran’s direwolf was Summer, the opposite of the supernatural winter force that Bran was destined to confront. Sansa’s direwolf, Lady, was killed by the Lannisters and then she was ensnared by them as well. Robb Stark’s Grey Wind was trapped and shot with crossbows just like his master. Rickon Stark’s Shaggydog was slain by men loyal to Ramsay Bolton, then the boy died by Ramsay’s arrow shortly thereafter. And Arya’s Nymeria was chased into the wild, where she found her strength and independence. (“That’s not you,” Arya told Nymeria when she was reunited with her wolf in season seven, echoing her own line—“That’s not me”—to her father in season one.)

BRYAN COGMAN: [Arya and Nymeria are] lone wolves. They can’t go back to the way things were. It was also a foreshadow for what Arya was going to encounter when she reunited with her family.

MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): Nymeria has created her own world and created her own pack and wasn’t ready to be Arya’s pet. To be someone’s pet would reverse everything she’s learned. So they just regard each other and go their separate ways.

BRYAN COGMAN: The direwolves were supposed to mean more than they ended up meaning. A lot of plans for the direwolves ended up not coming to fruition. Even in the first season, there were a lot of direwolf scenes we had to cut even though we were just using dogs because the dogs couldn’t execute the scenes; it would just take too long.

That aside, I think the direwolves represent the spirit of the North and the soul of House Stark and the soul of those characters. It’s no accident Lady was killed and Sansa was left on her own, and it was no accident that Grey Wind was put in a cage, and it was no accident Nymeria found her independence and went her own way. But we never really wanted to lean too heavily into the spirit-animal trope of it all. And certainly in the books, the direwolves function in a different way. Arya and Jon are wargs in the books, and Sansa and Robb would have been except their wolves died—I don’t know that for a fact, but I assume so.

After season four, Martin decided to stop writing scripts for Thrones. He told the producers he needed to focus on finishing his novels.

DAVID BENIOFF: It wasn’t a contentious thing, it wasn’t a screaming match. He just felt like he needed to prioritize the book, and that made sense to us.

The showrunners had to figure out how best to use what they knew of Martin’s master plan to plot their remaining hours, and they emphasized the silver lining of their show surpassing the books.

DAN WEISS: We chose to see it as a great thing on both sides. There’s this amazing world George has created, and now there are two different versions out there. There’s no reason we can see why you can’t be thrilled and surprised and dismayed by both of these two different versions of this world.

Ultimately, Martin and the showrunners are passionate creatives grappling with a staggeringly complex tale in two very different mediums. Despite their occasional disagreements, each side is respectful of the other, even in private. Benioff and Weiss never fail to express the magnitude of their respect for Martin’s writing, while Martin is grateful for the show and says the showrunners did a great job overall despite aspects that he wishes were different.

DAVID BENIOFF: We don’t always agree on everything in the series, but we have a great relationship with him.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: One thing David and Dan did really right, that I couldn’t have done if I was the showrunner, is the vast majority of our Emmys are for below the line—costuming, set decoration, stunt work, and so on. They put together an incredible team of craftsmen, and some of them were new to the industry or without a lot of credits. If it were me, I would have done what most people would have done and picked people I’ve worked with before who are competent. But would they have been the extraordinary people David and Dan found?

Martin’s comment brings up a frequent point made by those interviewed for this book. Several cast and crew members emphasized that Benioff and Weiss never received enough public credit for their hands-on involvement with the nonwriting aspects of the production, from supervising filming to overseeing decisions made by a variety of departments. The showrunners received praise (and criticism) for story elements, but few outsiders realize how many other facets of the Thrones production likewise bore their fingerprints.

DEBORAH RILEY (production designer): David and Dan don’t get the credit they deserve for being the leaders that they are. They gathered a team of workaholic perfectionists who they trusted with their work. We all were allowed to get on with our jobs, but it was always their vision that we were trying to fulfill. They would have to approve everything; we wouldn’t put anything on set they had not seen. So the sheer volume of work they were presented with that they would have to comment on and provide advice about was phenomenal. I cannot bear to have them criticized.

SIBEL KEKILLI (Shae): Dan and David took really good care of us. They’d invited us to their house in Belfast to have Thanksgiving dinner with their families. They’d take two actors to dinner one night, then another two actors to dinner the next night. They really tried to make sure we had a good time when we had days off.

LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): David and Dan were always there. They were there 24/7. They didn’t just leave and sit in an office. They were there.

But for Martin, being creatively involved with Game of Thrones—and commenting on it publicly—became increasingly difficult after season five. How can an author talk about, for instance, the Battle of the Bastards when he likely has his own very different, yet still unpublished, version of the same battle in his mind?

DAN WEISS: The differences between the show and the books became difficult to track in parallel. It’s almost like George was in a weird science fiction movie trying to keep two similar-but-different universes in his mind at the same time.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: It’s been an incredible ride, and almost all of it has been great. The show is the end for a lot of people. It’s not the end for me. I’m still deeply in it. I better live a long time, because I have a lot of work left to do.