Kingdoms come
A song of ice and fire and gore and growth charts.
INSIDE HBO’S GAME OF THRONES: SEASONS 3 & 4
Having worked 10 years under the budget constraints of Hollywood TV productions such as The Twilight Zone and Beauty And The Beast, George R.R. Martin wrote his A Song Of Ice And Fire fantasy series with the aim of it being unfilmable. He wanted a cast of characters that stretched into thousands, a world of complex history and various lands, huge battle sequences and, of course, dragons. In short: a narrative too dense for film, visuals too ambitious for TV.
And so it comes as no surprise that, four seasons in, HBO’s adaptation of Game Of Thrones is one of the biggest television productions ever – one that not only embodies TV’s new cinematic age, but is an epic story all in itself. Enter Inside HBO’s Game Of Thrones Season 3 & 4, an official update to 2012’s Season 1 & 2 edition that tackles how the cast and crew brought Westeros to screen.
Following on from the format of co-producer Bryan Cogman’s Season 1&2 tome, C.A. Taylor, who has “worked behind the scenes in the television industry for over a decade,” explores various elements of the show – title sequence, costume design, set design, major scenes – through quotes from those involved, concept art and lots of big, glossy photos.
This quote-led approach, of course, makes Inside Game Of Thrones an easy read, although does mean that the book varies in insight and depth. Indeed, beyond all the ‘it was so great to work with so-and-so’ speak, an early example is the opening Q&A with showrunners David Benioff and D.B Weiss, which abruptly stops around two-thirds into its second page, leaving an ugly void of white space. Did Taylor simply not get enough material from them?
So yes, if you’re after a focused, in-depth beginning-to-end story of Game Of Thrones’ production, this may not satisfy. As an overview, however, it offers an impressive range of voices – including main cast stars like Peter Dinklage – covering an impressive range of topics.
The big events are given the most coverage, naturally. The five-page section devoted to Season 3’s notorious Red Wedding, for example, touches upon director David Nutter’s intense fear of doing it justice, Richard Madden’s interesting theory that Robb Stark was relieved to die and a nifty revelation from George R.R. Martin that he had planned to make a cameo as a murdered Stark but work got in the way.
Yet it’s the finer detail of the production that serves up the real geeky stuff. The exterior wall of Astapor, where Daenerys Targaryen frees the army of Unsullied in Season 3, was actually a surviving set from Ridley Scott’s 2005 film Kingdom Of Heaven; the interior design of the Iron Bank of Braavos was heavily based on Nazi architecture; and the dragons follow a very specific growth chart, with Drogon, the lion of the pack, always pictured 15 per cent larger than his scaly siblings.
Even if this book doesn’t dig as deep as you’d hope, and it suffers for that, its revelation of the amount of thought – and sheer hard work– that goes into making Game Of Thrones is truly staggering.