![]() Noting the lack of epic scope, "I remember the quote was, 'We could have shot this in Burbank.'" "There were concerns about whether we were getting enough wide shots," Lombardo told Hibberd. Which, ironically, felt a little too contained. Game of Thrones' premiere episode on April 17, 2011, was visually stunning and wildly intriguing-and it wasn't the original $10 million pilot that was shot to suck you into the world of Westeros.Īctor-filmmaker Tom McCarthy, who had previously directed Dinklage in The Station Agent and went on to make the 2016 Best Picture Oscar winner Spotlight, was instrumental in the GOT casting process and helmed that first first episode. The pilot got the greenlight in November 2008. "I'm not sure I ever really believed that," Lombardo told Hibberd of Benioff and Weiss describing the plot as "contained." "We knew it was a gamble." The pair admittedly fudged the truth when they reiterated that the show, while expensive, would be more about the characters than anything else, knowing full well how grand the action got down the road. Still, it was a yes-albeit a yes that was only the beginning of the first leg of GOT's journey to the small screen. It took months to secure the rights to the books, and then Strauss left HBO in 2008, meaning Benioff and Weiss had to re-convince the new programming president, Michael Lombardo. "There are many ways a fantasy series can go south." "There were a fair number of reasons not to do it," GOT executive producer Carolyn Strauss, who was president of programming at HBO when she heard the pitch, remembered to Hibberd. Or, at least, ready to start trying to do business with a network.īenioff and Weiss felt early on that HBO, with its penchant for big spending, would be the best place for what they envisioned. "We were weirdly prepared for that question," Benioff recalled. Their meeting with Martin was a success, but as all three remembered for James Hibberd's 2020 oral history Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, the author wanted to make sure Benioff and Weiss were really invested-so he asked, based on the clues woven throughout the books so far, whom they though Jon Snow's mother was. The pals decided quickly that only a TV series could do A Song of Ice and Fire justice. But as fate would have it, in the mid-'00s his agent sent the books to writer David Benioff-and as soon as Ned Stark lost his head, he had writing partner Dan Weiss start reading as well, to make sure he wasn't geeking out over nothing. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire novel series kicked off in 1996 with the publication of Game of Thrones, has credited the popularity of the 2001-2003 Lord of the Rings films with growing viewers' appetite for-and critical appreciation of-well-made onscreen fantasy.Īt the same time, he didn't like any of the pitches he was hearing about condensing his five epic tales- GOT alone clocked in at 694 pages-into a watchable movie.
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