Dominaz: переводы

→Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school and they had a profound affect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien. And I, indeed, was not alone in that. The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.

→When I think of HBO dramas, I think of them taking a genre that's been done a lot, maybe romanticized, like Deadwood or Rome, and sort of dirtying it up. Were there specific things in the history of the fantasy genre that you were responding to, or trying to avoid certain clichés?

→I mean, in my 10 years that I spent out in TV and film I had my shares of frustrations and annoyances and disappointments, but also I think it was, in the long run, it was very good for me in a whole bunch of ways.

→A cliff hanger is a good act break certainly, but it's not the only kind of act break. It can just be a moment… a character moment, a moment of revelation, it has to end with something that makes you want to read more about this character.

→I think so. I think it did. You know, one of the things you learn when you are working for network television, the importance of the act to break because unlike HBO, network TV requires people to come back after the commercial. So you know, you always want to have an act break that it's a moment of revelation, a twist, a moment of tension, a cliff hanger what it is, but each act has to go out on something, you know. The da, da, da, da moment as my wife, Parris, calls them when we watch “Law and Order,” you know. ... I want to keep I want to keep people turning the pages here, keep them engrossed. And so I tried to end every chapter with an act break.

→One thing I was struck by when I started reading the books was how the chapters would break the way that an HBO drama might. Would you say that having written for series television influenced at all the way you develop and structure the story?

→And then the huge factor was when David and Dan came onboard. So my agents got the books for them and we got a meeting and we hit it off right away and you know, they wanted to do the same thing I wanted to do, so… the rest is history or infamy or something like that.

→Well, there was [by the time the second book made the bestseller lists]. That was my final conclusion where I said if we're gonna do this, it has to be done as like either a giant epic miniseries, like “Shogun” or “Roots,” you know, one of those 27-part miniseries, which they don't make anymore, or it has to be done as a series.

→There was no such thing as an HBO drama when you first started writing them.

→I thought, well, it might work better as a TV series, but we'd run up to huge problems with the network censors with all the sex and the violence and that is much more graphic than anything is on television.

→And I said, well, the entire book, Lord of the Rings--which Tolkien actually wrote as one novel, of course, not as a trilogy--is about the same size as A Storm of Swords. So, just with the three books I had out at that time, it would take like nine movies and I thought what studio is going to guarantee nine movies. Well, they're not. They're going to do one movie and we'll see how it goes. And in the one movie you're going to lose 90% of the characters and subplots. I mean, I've been a screenwriter myself. You have to go into a big book like this and you have to say, well, what's the arc? Who's the major character? Well focus on him and/or her and we'll follow that major character through and we'll pare away all these secondary characters and secondary stories and then we'll get a movie out of it. Not only didn't I want that done, but I didn't think it could be done because in the early books, I'm deliberately disguising who the major characters are.

→That was the first thing that came up. But I knew the minute my agent started giving me those inquiries and I started getting inquiries from studios and producers and screenwriters, that it couldn't be done as a movie. It was simply too big. I mean, Lord of the Rings was done as three movies and it took them you know, 40 years or so to find a studio that was willing to do three movies. I mean, most of them wanted to do, ‘Well, we'll do one and we'll see how it does.' Which is a chancy proposition at best. And then you wind up with a story that's not finished.

→What it was that persuaded you that these books would work well as a serial TV drama as opposed to being adapted for movies, which I understand was also considered in the past, right?

→So you watch all this stuff and you reach a point where you're just ready to despair and say, this can't be done here because most child actors—a lot of child actors out there are in sitcoms. And their role in sitcoms is to mug and look cute, you know. Our kids have actual dramatic roles where they have to deal with grief and loneliness and anger and a lot of very adult stuff. [I thought] my God, how the hell, are we going to do this, you know? But then you find that one in a hundred, or one in a thousand that suddenly… oh my God, thank God, this is great. And Maisie Williams, who plays Arya, was one of those. I mean, just from the moment we saw her audition, I knew she was, she was our Arya and you know, the same was true for Sansa and Bran; two good actors who played those roles too. They were extraordinary.

→And then you've got the other extreme. You've got some kid whose obviously been told by mommy and daddy or by their school drama coach that part of acting is you have to emote. So those kids go to the other extreme and they emote all over the place, they're rolling their eyes and they're grimacing and they're really going way over the top for everything and it's completely unnatural.

→Martin: The child actors were the hardest to fill because we looked at literally hundreds for the three major children's roles. I mean, most child actors. Well you know, you see these kids and they're kids, they're not actors. Their triumph is that they've memorized the lines. And mommy and daddy are very proud that they've memorized the lines, but that's all.

→[I began by mentioning that I'd seen two episodes of the show at this point—at the time, he hadn't seen any—and I mentioned particularly liking the casting of the difficult children's roles. He started from there.]

→MARTIN: There’s no denying that it’s taken me a real long time to write this last book, and the one before it, which actually began life as part of the same book. But, I haven’t always taken that long. The first three books in the series came out much more quickly, and I’m hoping that the troubles and difficulties that I’ve been going through are just difficulties affecting this particular volume and, once I’ve delivered it, I will pick up speed again. Hopefully, The Winds of Winter and The Dream of Spring – the last two books in the series – will go much more quickly. Although nothing has been decided, I think we will have a number of seasons to go. We’ve done Game of Thrones as 10 episodes, for this first season. With Clash of Kings for the second season, that’s a slightly longer book. I would love it, if we got 12 hours for that one, instead of 10, but we could probably do it in 10. Once you hit the third book, A Storm of Swords, it’s too big. It’s 500 manuscript pages bigger than the second book, which itself is 100 manuscript pages longer than the first book. There’s no way that they can do that in one season, so I think you would have to divide that one into two seasons. And then, when you hit the fourth and fifth books, which would have to be recombined, the fifth book is even longer than Storm of Swords, so that’s another two seasons, for three seasons total to cover those two books. So, I have a considerable head start. If I could just finish these next two books more quickly than I did the last two, I think I’ll be fine.

→It’s been rumored that you like to take forever to write your books because you put a lot of time into them. So, if you do get five seasons, will you have enough time to write your sixth and seventh books, in order to finish the story?

→MARTIN: Yeah, the children were always at the heart of this. The Stark children, in particular, were always very central. Bran is the first viewpoint character that we meet, and then we meet Jon and Sansa and Arya and the rest of them. It was always my intention to do that. As for the harshness, the whole series is harsh. My inspiration have grown, not only from Tolkien, but also from history and historical fiction. I tried to blend some of the tropes and traditions of fantasy with those of historical fiction, while doing this. If you read about the real Middle Ages, as I do all the time, it was a brutal time for everybody – for men, women and children. Children weren’t sentimentalized, the way they are today. They were frequently made to work, from a very early age. They were taken into battle. Boys become pages and then squires. You’re riding into battle with your knight, as a 12-year-old squire, but you’re there, and people are hacking at you with swords and shooting at you with arrows. You’re not at home, being protected. It was a different age with a different mind-set. I did want to reflect that.