An Interview with George R.R. Martin
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Do you think the realm will ever accept me as their queen? The lords of the realm bend the knee. A woman would not inherit the Iron Throne. Because that is the order of things. When I'm queen, I will create a new order. Ah, I just, you know, I just love this so much. How are we going to create a new order, Jason? What do we do? Well, I will often do that. If my fries are cold, I'll just send it back. Be like, can you apply...

some fire to these fries or whatever, however that works, put it under the heat lamp or something or get some new ones from the basket. And then you're going to send fries back though. I do it in a nice way. I'm not being a jerk about it. You're not being a jerk about it. No, because I just be like, Hey, these are a little cold. Okay. Tips going to be there no matter what. Don't worry about it.

Welcome to the official Game of Thrones podcast, House of the Dragon. I'm Jason Concepcion, host of the podcast X-Ray Vision from Crooked Media, formerly of Binge Mode from The Ringer. And I am Greta Johnson, host of WBEZ's Nerd Out podcast. And this is a Game of Thrones podcast for everyone, whether you are an OG Thrones watcher or if you're curious to dabble in this new HBO original series, House of the Dragon.

And this is our last episode before the show premieres Sunday. This Sunday, this is it, folks. Yes. This Sunday. House of the Dragon episode one. Oh my gosh. We are so excited to watch this show along with you. And we want to make sure you know we are actually going to start releasing this podcast right after the show comes out on Sunday night. So we're doing Wednesdays now, but...

You can watch the premiere of the show and then like tune in right after that and hear our thoughts and all of the things. We're going to be recapping and analyzing episodes. We're going to be talking to cast and crew about the making of the series. So be sure to check out that next episode coming up this Sunday, right after the premiere of House of the Dragons.

And you know how I feel about that? Good. Because I want to watch these episodes. I can't wait to watch them. I know, right? I'm ready. I want to watch the episodes. It's time. Yeah. And in this episode, get ready, folks. You're going to hear an interview with the person who is responsible for all of this, George R.R. Martin. He's here. You will hear his voice in this episode. Of course, this episode is also going to include a bunch of news and updates. So let's get to it.

If you're just tuning into this podcast, last week, Gret and I introduced Dracarys, an app that allows you to secure your own baby dragon egg from old Valeria. Bring that dragon egg home and watch your little baby dragon grow up via augmented reality. You can download this app in the Apple Store or Google Play Store, and you can raise your dragon right along with us. And before we get into the news and updates this week, let's check in on our little bubblers. How are those dragons? How are our dragons?

How is your dragon Greta? Guess who's flying? Okay, well, that's great. Listen, no, go ahead. Go ahead. Don't, you know. You know, I had this great moment earlier where I loaded it and the little app was like, girl, you don't have enough space for your dragon to show up in your apartment. And here in Chicago, it's a small place, but yeah, he's really thriving. I got to say.

Yeah. My dragon also had to go outside. The app told me that the dragon needed to go outside. Oh, yeah. So it was tough because I was traveling a little bit. And I'll just say, listen, I'll just put it this way. Dragons, like any life form, thinking, feeling, being, they grow up at different rates. And that's fine. Okay. That's all. I believe you. And that's okay. Some dragons are flying. Some dragons are flying already.

Some dragons are cooking their food with fire and still doing that and maybe not taking wing yet. And that's okay. That's all right. And whatever rate my dragon, Canaris, develops at is fine with me because I love them. Not quite flying yet, but that's okay. It's okay. Oh, they can't all be flyers, Jason. Yeah.

And Will, I look forward to commemorating the milestone when you get there. Thank you so much. That is so generous. So the thing I wanted to talk to you about also is the fact that we are celebrating the release of Game of Thrones episodes that have been remastered. So this is like an Ultra HD situation, I guess, which I just realized there's an acronym that's UHD. And I was like, oh, so...

What's your take on this situation, Jason? My take on this is I'm glad that we got this news release because I was on my rewatch last night and I'm on season two. And I was like, why does this look so great? I just got new glasses. And I was like, man, I guess...

Those bifocals are really helping you out. I was absolutely legally blind, I guess, before this. Legitimately, it was like, wow, man, this looks like really, really good. And now I know the reason why. So, folks.

those Game of Thrones episodes, you're going to be wowed. Is there anything in particular that you're looking forward to seeing with fresh eyes, fresh bifocal eyes? I mean, you know, I have not done a rewatch. I probably should. You know, the one that comes to mind, a scene that I think would be really cool to see and, you know, fancy extra bonus high def would be the Battle of the Bastards. And like when it comes to battle scenes, I have a really weird metaphor, but if you just stick with me, I promise it's going to work.

I once did an interview with someone and we were talking about a romance novel. And she talked about how the difference between a romance novel and just like straight up erotica is whether you can delete the sex scenes and the storyline still makes sense. And that's kind of how I feel about fight scenes, actually, is like, are they necessary to the plot? But the Battle of the Bastards was such a well thought

And like to get the sense of the claustrophobia of all of those people packed into that space and like all those aerial shots, I just think that would be super cool to see. It's absolutely in terms of story, all the battle scenes and that one in particular, it's load bearing. And I'm sorry to say that in reference to your previous metaphor. Oh.

But it is. It carries the weight of the story, which is really cool. I'm excited to just watch everything. Like, I'm deep into my rewatch right now. And listen, put a new gloss of paint on everything. And that makes it even more fun to watch. Yeah, right. It's funny. I mean, you know, during watching Game of Thrones as a person who's from Alaska, as you know, I was always, you know, when anyone was north of the wall, I'd always be like, why aren't they wearing hats? And

And now I guess we'll just be able to see like the frost formations on their eyebrows even that much more clearly because those poor humans aren't covering the tops of their heads. They just, you know, they didn't realize, they didn't understand just how much heat they lose to the top of the head. Yeah. Those heating glands in your head. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's it for news and updates. Of course, we're going to be unpacking every episode as it comes out. But for today, Jason, I think we should go back to your time at Comic-Con because you got to interview the one and only George R.R. Martin. How thrilling was that for you? It was truly a core memory moment. Like, it was amazing. He's a person I've admired for a long time, obviously. I've spent a lot of times exploring his worlds, and I just couldn't wait to talk to the man himself.

Let's hear from George. George R.R. Martin, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, my pleasure. Glad to be here. George's fans gear up to experience House of the Dragon. We're seeing lots of people dive into the lore of the Song of Ice and Fire, which is wonderful. Tell us a little about what's happening in Westeros at this time in the second century of Targaryen rule on the continent.

Well, of course, a lot of things are happening. Westeros is a continent and there's stuff going on all over. But what House of the Dragon mostly concerns us with is the issue of succession to the Iron Throne. Of course, the show starts in 101 AC at the Great Council, which the old King Jarrus is called.

to let the lords of the realm advise him on who should succeed to the Iron Throne after he dies. Then the war itself breaks out in 129 AC, so we have basically a 28-year run just in the first season here. And you see the various characters introduced and the conflict begin to grow, the seeds of what will eventually be a war, but not right away. The seeds grow and

feelings intensify and grievances are collected and all of that stuff. So yeah, there's a lot going on there. You've talked a lot about the War of the Roses in particular being an inspiration for Game of Thrones and some of House of the Dragon. What is it about that period of time that you find so interesting?

I actually like a lot of history. I read a lot of history, popular history of all sorts. I'm not a professional historian, so I don't read the academic treatises and theses, but I like reading books of popular history, which they contain the stories, the stories of our civilization, the stories of countries of old Europe and the Far East and various other places. And I don't know, there's just always been something about me that I liked, knights and...

sword play and all of that stuff, maybe more than any other period of history. And of course, it's a part of fantasy too. I mean, I read at a very early age, comparatively, I became addicted to Tolkien and before him, there were other fantasies like Robert E. Howard with Conan the Barbarian, like Fritz Leiber with Fofford and Grey Mouser, all variants on a medieval or quasi-medieval time. So that got its hooks into me at some point.

Being interested in, broadly speaking, nerd stuff now is widely accepted. But what was it like as a young person delving into these fictions and these histories?

Well, it definitely was a different time. You know, nerd was a bad thing to be. It was an insult. And if the other kids at school called you a nerd or called you a geek, that was not good. That was an epithet. That was, in some circles, that was fighting words. Now, a lot of people seem to have embraced those terms freely. And there are also some podcasts that nerd this, nerd that, you know, geeks, the same thing. But it was definitely different. And even...

Even teachers. I remember at one point, I guess I was in grade school, maybe junior. We didn't have junior high, but we had grade school and then high school. But it's around the age that I would have been junior high. And I was a good student. I read a lot and all that. But one of my teachers saw me reading a science fiction book and said, why are you, you're a really bright kid. Why are you reading that garbage? Why don't you read real, real books? Why are you reading this trash? I

But I like the trash. So I like the geek stuff, the nerd stuff, whatever you want to call it. Over the course of your career, you've been a constant presence at conventions, from the earliest days of conventions. What is it about these kind of gatherings that you love so much? There are many different types of conventions. I actually was the first person to register for the first comic book convention, which was 1964, New York City. It was one day. It was in Greenwich Village in a union hall of some sort.

It was all in one room. A room maybe smaller than the one we're in. There were a couple people in the corner selling old comic books out of cardboard boxes. And then there was a little podium where people talked and we had various artists and comic book professionals came by. Fabulous Flo Steinberg was one of the big guests. She was Stan Lee's secretary.

And Steve Ditko showed up, so that was amazing, because I don't think he ever showed up at another one, but he showed up at that first one. I got to talk to him. That was exciting. That was the first comic book convention, and I think it had like 30, 40 people, and now we're at San Diego, which has 150,000 people. When I think about your writing, I think one of the things for me that sets you apart from other fantasy writers, sci-fi writers, is...

Despite the fact that these characters are appearing in what is essentially a medieval context with magic and dragons, etc., they feel very modern because they're worried about things that I feel like I'm worried about. Where's the money coming from? Does my dad love me? Can you talk about your process in building these worlds and if you have a philosophy towards doing that, fleshing out these characters within this fantasy context? Well, many years ago, William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature

And he gave an acceptance speech at that in which he said a sentence that I've often quoted where he said, "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself." And those are words I've very much taken to heart.

sometimes in the context of science fiction and fantasy. I mean, there are science fiction writers who think those are opposites. Those are polar, you know, fantasy is the dreaming pole, as I think Ryan Aldiss called it. Science fiction is the thinking pole. And they're opposite ends of each other. Well, I don't think that's true. I think they're two flavors of the same thing. They're two flavors of a different part of romantic fiction. And the thing that's important about both of them is still the human heart in conflict with self. The rest is furniture. You

You know, science fiction story has spaceships and it has aliens and it has the Galactic Empire and all of the kinds of stuff you associate with science fiction. Fantasy has dragons and castles and knights and sword fights. But ultimately, it's the human heart in conflict with itself. In either story, your characters have to come alive. The reader has to get emotionally invested in them. They have to care about them. And I don't care if they're fighting with broadswords or lightsabers or ray guns or whatever. It's still...

Faulkner had to write of it. It's the human heart in conflict with itself. Thinking about that, what is it about the Dance of Dragons, this era, that made you want to tell this story? When I wrote Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, part of fantasy is the world building. So I'm telling a story about these characters, but as I got deeper into it, I'm creating more and more of a world. And the thing about world building, if you're successful at it after a period of time, you have

A world. And a world contains many stories, not just one. A Song of Ice and Fire is one story about a particular set of characters in a particular time set in the world. But the world is big, and there were people who lived before those people who also had stories. And there are people who lived before them, and people who live in other cities, on other continents. And all of them have stories, just like Inquisition.

in the real world. A real world has a huge amount of stories in it, and hopefully Westeros does too. When HBO wanted successor shows for Game of Thrones, this is one of the things that came to mind because the Dance of the Dragons is a

Huge canvas and it has lots of dragons and it has some fascinating characters and it has the same story about a contest for power. Characters who are driven by the same things that real people are driven by. They're driven by pride and ambition, rivalries, revenge for slights real or imagined that people have done in the past, fear for their future, you know, love, lust, all of the things that make us human. The Good Stories has all of those things.

George, how much does the politics of the modern times influence your writing and your storytelling? Well, I live in these modern times, so it can't help but have some influence. But if it does, it's not on a conscious level. I mean, that's one thing that I agree completely with Tolkien on. He really resented and bristled that everybody thought Lord of the Rings was an allegory for World War II or something like that. I don't like allegory. I don't write allegory.

I follow politics. I'm involved with it to some extent, but I'm not writing about it in Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon. My characters are the characters, right? Rhaenyra is Rhaenyra. Tyrion is Tyrion. They may be inspired by something in history. Yes, Game of Thrones was inspired by the Wars of the Roses, and House of the Dragon is inspired by an earlier story

in England called the Anarchy. But it's not one for one. I didn't just take Empress Maud from the Anarchy and scrape off her name. I took certain things from her, changed the situation, tweaked it. Maybe one day I'll write about modern politics. I don't think so. I'm not playing an allegorical game here.

You've produced and written a lot of television over your career, whether it's Beauty and the Beast or the underrated Max Headroom, which I think is ahead of its time for people that remember it. How does that experience shape your relationship, your collaboration with Miguel and Ryan? Well, it certainly colored it. I mean, yes, I worked in television for about 10 years from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, first on a variety of shows where I was on the writing staff,

And then the last few years I was in development where I was making up my own shows and writing features, none of which ever got made, which was frustrating. I found through that that I'm the sort of writer who needs an audience. I want to put the story out there and have many, many people read it and like it, hopefully, or not like it, but it's like an actor. I mean...

Maybe I have that gene in me. When you're doing a live play on stage and the play is over, you want to come out for the curtain call if you're an actor. You don't want just everybody to get up and leave the way they do in a movie, right? The movie ends.

Everybody gets up and leaves. They don't applaud the movie. Well, occasionally, but very infrequently. But you wouldn't do that in a theater, and the actors in the theater want it. I found I was writing pilots for features that I'd work on for a year, and then for one reason or another, they decided not to make it. When you work on something for a long period of time, you fall in love, at least I do, with the world and the characters and the story, and you want to get it out there. It did give me an advantage, some understanding of the process

when I got involved in this, although, you know, I learned that mostly on Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. So by the time I met David Benioff and Dan Weiss and we did Game of Thrones, I was actually in the beginning of that far more experienced as a television writer than either of them. Not so much with Ryan and Miguel, though they've both done huge amounts of television, so...

but I think it has some understanding to the process. I know a lot of novelists who work on the prose side of the field, they sell their books and then they, well, some of them just...

They don't want to be involved. They just send me the check, do whatever you want. But there are others who have this idea that they're going to see their work translated faithfully to the screen. And then when it's changed, they don't understand why. They get upset and angry about it and all that. Not that I don't, but yes, obviously the way I write the story in the books is the way I want the story to be. But I also understand the practicalities of sometimes you don't have the budget to do that. Sometimes there's some other logistical problems. Sometimes you're

You're running behind and you have to cut scenes to, you know, make your day, make your month, etc. So I do understand some of that process, which gives me a little advantage, I suppose. When you fall in love with these characters that you've so lovingly built up, often spoken with yourself as a gardener style writer, what does it feel like when you have to sit at the word processor and you know, this is it, I'm going to kill him today? Yeah.

It can be hard. I've said in many other interviews that the Red Wedding was the hardest thing I ever wrote. I mean, I finished that whole book, I skipped that chapter, and then I came back and wrote it right at the end because I knew it would be hard to kill those characters. I'd been with them for so long.

As we enter this new story for many people, is there a particular character that you're excited for fans to meet for the first time? You know, I like all my kids. Yeah. Even the bad ones, the bad boys, the bad girls. Yeah, I get invested. The viewpoint characters, anyway. The secondary and tertiary characters who you're never inside your head. A little less for those. But when you're writing from someone's viewpoint, then you really have to crawl inside their head. You're not only...

recording what they see and what they say, but also what they think. That's one of the big differences between prose and television or film. I mean, television or film is strictly external, unless you want to use a clumsy device like a voiceover or something like that. But I can write a chapter of, you know, Cersei or someone smiling and saying sweet things and, oh, it's so good to see you, she said.

thinking, I can't wait to the day I can torture and kill you. But how do you do that in television without a voiceover? You have to do that with the actor has to convey things with their face and with their eyes. It's different, but each of these mediums has its own tools, its own strengths, its own weaknesses. And you have to really be familiar with both.

Is it exciting in the television process when you see an actor start to grab a hold of one of your characters, maybe in a way you were expecting, in a way maybe you didn't expect?

It is exciting if it's being done right. There's always dangers. I mean, these are like I've made jokes here to my children, but in a sense they are. And when you have a child and you work with them for years and then you give it to somebody else for adoption or you send it away to boarding school or whatever, you hope they come out well, that they're not going to be changed or abused or...

something too much. I remember with Game of Thrones, when I visited, they were shooting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and I came to visit the set, and they were still working on the first episode, the pilot,

And David Benioff showed me a clip of the scene with Arya and her father Ned on the stairs where she was standing on one foot trying her balance. And it was great. I mean, I had seen rehearsals with these actors, but I hadn't seen them in character. I hadn't seen to do it. It was my scene, come alive. These were my characters. And nothing felt better than to see that happen. But, of course, there's always the flip side of that is where suddenly you're seeing a scene and

saying, what the hell have they done here? That's not how it's supposed to go. My character would never do that. My character would never say that. And that can be frustrating. So, you know, like anything else in life, it's complicated.

You spoke earlier about looking for that feedback from an audience, understanding how a certain point of a story hits them. Is there anything in particular, I know these are all your kids, but is there anything in particular with House of the Dragon that you're eager to see how the audience gets hit by it? I'm interested to see how the audience is hit by the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, House of the Dragon is different from...

Game of Thrones in some significant ways. Although, yes, both shows involve issues of power and who will have the Iron Throne. But House of the Dragon is much more like a Shakespearean tragedy. It's full of great characters who you can love or you can hate. And guys who seem to be really sons of bitches and bad guys will do heroic things.

characters who seem to be good will do awful things, kind of like human beings. A Song of Ice and Fire is in some ways that, but in other ways it's a more traditional fantasy. I mean, I brought in the white walkers there, the white shadows, perhaps a better term for them, and the others, which I actually call them in the book. And they are, I don't want to use the word evil because that's

But they're an inimical force that's going to end human life as we know it. But that's not the case with House of the Dragon. House of the Dragon is very human grounded. And it's people who were once friends coming to not be friends. It's lust and love and power and ambition. And, you know, you slight someone and you make an enemy and they get back to you later. All the kind of things that we really do.

in the real world. And one thing that sometimes vexes me as someone who reads a lot of history is I see people who also read history, or they know a little history, and they look back in the past, and they have the benefit of hindsight. So they know what was the right thing to do, and what was the wrong thing to do. And the people who do the wrong thing from the benefit of our time

mocked as idiots or losers or evil or something. But in many cases, that's not right. I mean, you have to really go back and put yourself in ahead of the people making that decision. They did not have the benefit of hindsight. They did not know what was going to happen, you know? So I'm presenting issues here in House of the Dragon and some of the other things where...

I'm trying to engage the readers and get them to think about these things and what would they do. It'll be fascinating to see which characters the viewers at home, the readers, like. House of the Dragon is a story about a succession crisis.

And we get, you know, a taste of old King Jaehaerys, who I think by many measures was probably the most successful king of Westeros. Viserys and his potential Airedaemon have very different managing styles. I wonder, in your mind, is there an ideal ruler of Westeros or of anywhere?

Like the vast majority of people in the world, I suspect the ideal ruler would be me. If you would like to make me president of the world and give me absolute power... You heard it here first. ...then it would be a wonderful place. I would make all the right decisions and everything would be great. He's running, folks. Most people feel that way. I think they get frustrated because you have to, you know, you have to politic, you have to convince other people. It's complicated. That's one thing I really wanted to convey in these books.

right from the beginning. Tolkien, who, you know, I pretty much worship, he was one of the writers who had the most profound effects on my own work, along with, like, Shakespeare and Stanley.

That's my holy trio. But he echoes at the end of Lord of the Rings what was a widespread belief in medieval times and before, that if you were a good man, you would be a good king. There was this mystical link between the land and the king. The king was the land. The land was the king. And if you had a good king, the land would blossom and be fertile and there would be peace and plenty. And if you had a bad king...

The land would wither and there would be droughts and rainstorms. So the king's got a lot of, you know, oh my God, we had a horrible storm. It destroyed all the crops. Now we're starving. It must be the king's fault. Let's go kill him. So...

But you look at real history and you find out that, no, there have been plenty of good men who were not good kings. And there have been some bad men, some absolute sons of bitches who were good kings. And, you know, the realm under them was at peace. It was at plenty. But meanwhile, they were doing horrible things in their personal life.

So it's complicated. I think that's, I'm going to put that on my tombstone. It's complicated. And I wanted to reflect some of that complication. My characters, not only do they become king and they have to defeat that, but how do you guarantee peace? How do you guarantee prosperity? At what point should you go to war? Should you ever go to war? What is it worth going to war for? You know, what about the system of laws, you know?

All of these are tough questions. I'm not sitting here having the answer. And you see someone like Viserys or Jaehaerys before him who are basically good men trying to grapple with these issues and succeeding on some and failing on others. And I'm fascinated by that stuff. George, thank you so much for joining us. No, my pleasure. Thank you.

Isn't George wonderful? What a wonderful and brilliant guy. Like, truly, I really loved how he takes his love of history as an amateur historian and uses that as a basis for him to kind of build his stories on top of, which is a reason I think why, you know, despite the fact that this is a story set in a medieval fantasy world, that

that the characters feel so modern in a way. Yeah, yeah, totally. I had the pleasure of interviewing George on Nerdette back in October of 2019, which feels like approximately 10 million years ago. But what really stood out to me is just how gracious he was and how he seemed...

Like, you know, I feel like a lot of people who create something that becomes as successful get kind of sick of talking about it, you know? And like you hear one interview, you kind of heard them all because they just say the same thing over and over again. But the sense I got from George was that he's like genuinely delighted to talk about this stuff with people. You know what I mean? You definitely get that feeling. And he's a person who's

You know, before A Song of Ice and Fire, before House of the Dragon has had a really extensive writing career. And so for people to be so engaged and interested in what he's doing, you can tell he just really wants to reward that, which is wonderful. Yeah, it's super sweet. Did he give you a release date on that book, perchance? No.

We breaking any publication news today? So I did not ask him during our podcast interview, but I will say this. During the San Diego Comic-Con panel, he voluntarily brought it up. May not know, but there's this book that I'm writing. It's a little late.

Listen, I don't know anything. The energy I got from him and the way he brought it up in this kind of with this twinkle in his eye. Oh, the twinkle. I feel like he's close. I don't know. That's just me. That's my own read on it. But my feeling was interesting. Maybe he's close. Maybe he's close. Maybe. I guess we'll see.

That's it for us today. Thank you so much for joining. And do not forget, we're coming to you this Sunday. Moving forward, we're going to be dropping Sundays after the episodes premiere on HBO Max. You can find us on your podcast player of choice or in the HBO Max app. Yes, just look for episode extras there. We are very excited about our premiere episode. We're going to be talking with co-showrunner and EP of the series, writer Ryan Condal.

A lot of great nuggets from him. And that is a human being that is just living the dream. You'll see what I mean when you listen to the interview. Love nuggets. So thanks for that, Jason. Sounds great. We want to hear from you too. Don't forget to leave a rating and review on your podcast player of choice. And you can find us on the Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon social media handles. You can find me on Twitter at NETW3RK.

And you can find me at Greta M. Johnson on Twitter and Instagram. The official Game of Thrones podcast, House of the Dragon, is produced by HBO Max in collaboration with iHeartRadio. This podcast is hosted by Jason Concepcion. And Greta Johnson. Our executive producer is Molly Socha. Our supervising producer is Nakia Swinton. Our lead sound engineer is Matt Stillo. This episode was edited by Sierra Spreen. Our producer is Jason Concepcion in association with Crooked Media. Special thanks to our sponsors,

Special thanks to Michael Gluckstadt, Alison Cohen, Kenya Reyes, and Becky Rowe at HBO.