Wheel of Time for me feels like an example of something that absolutely shouldn’t be made into a film, it’s so sprawling.
I think it’s do-able, but boy it’s going to be tough! I do envy George RR Martin with HBO. I think that’s a perfect medium for the story that he told.
The response to that has been fantastic; do you see that helping to make fantasy a bit more mainstream? In the same way that the Lord of the Rings films or even Harry Potter books were a sort of gateway drug to the genre, do you think A Game Of Thrones will have the same effect?
As an outsider to the film industry, I find it very interesting that they seem to focus on what’s hot right now rather than what’s well done. The thing about A Game Of Thrones is that it’s an exceptional story, done really well, which is what happened with the Lord Of The Rings films as well. Those came out, and everyone said, “Oh, fantasy is hot”. And fantasy, well, it’s been opened up, but it’s more that really great stories told really well are hot and always will be. It was really disappointing to me to see them snatch up a bunch of fantasy rights and make films out of them that didn’t really work, because fantasy was hot.
The Golden Compass film was heartbreaking, because my perspective on that is that they actually got fantastic casting, the visuals were beautiful and they tried really hard to stay close to the story. I think what happened there was that they didn’t adapt it enough, they were too faithful and filmed it almost scene-by-scene. They were too attached to the source material. I talked to the Mistborn producers and we all agree that it needs to be more heavily adapted. It’s a different medium. If you can keep the soul of the story but change the story that’s what you want to do. If I can armchair it, the Harry Potter films where they were forced to adapt more strongly are the best. The third one is beautiful.
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