Game of Thrones is one of the biggest fantasy franchises on the planet, and just like any other big project, its production wasn’t smooth sailing. It had its fair share of bumps, especially early on during the pilot, something that the upcoming prequel House of The Dragon also experienced, but to a lesser extent.
House of The Dragon’s producers weren’t sure about how to begin the story, and the team also included showrunner Ryan Condal and author George R. R. Martin. In a recent interview on the Coupledom podcast, Condal revealed, “[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. 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.”
Martin added, “So that’s like the history of the United States or the history of England. Where do you start? If you’re writing the history of England, do you start with the Picts, the Celts, and 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.”
Condal concluded, “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.”
Which of the events from Fire & Blood will be covered in House of The Dragon? Tell us in the comments below!
