Yesterday Indiewire published some highlights from a discussion between George R.R. Martin and writer Kirk Ellis as a part of the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival. A few interesting tidbits emerged, one that caught my attention was the fact that Martin has apparently watched Game of Bones and thought it was really tame.
“There is an incestuous relationship at the heart of ‘Game of Thrones’ and you find out about it pretty early in the first book. But in the porn version that they’re doing they’ve omitted the incest because that would just be too shocking. So my books are actually dirtier than the porn version!”
Good luck getting the image of George R.R. Martin watching porn out of your heads, kids. Good luck.
Also interesting: the idea for Game of Thrones came from Martin having pet turtles as a kid.
“In the projects you’re not allowed to have dogs or cats. So the only pets I was allowed were the smaller pets. We could have parakeets or canaries. We could have fish of course, which were interesting for about the first day after you got them and then they became very boring pets. And you could have turtles. So we had these dime store turtles, and you got them at Woolworth’s and they come in a little plastic bowl that was half water and half gravel and a little fake plastic palm tree. As it happened I had a toy castle, and two of those bowls fit perfectly inside the courtyard of the toy castle. So that’s where I kept my turtles and I decided that they were kings and knights and I gave them suitable names. But the other thing about these turtles is that they died very easily and very quickly. You would never have them as pets for very long. And you would find it in its little bowl and its eyes would be all sunken in and it would be dead. Or it would escape. It would escape the little plastic thing or it would escape the castle and you would find it under the refrigerator. For some reason they liked to go under the refrigerator. I never figured that out. It was like Mordor for turtles. And so my imagination was overheated by that. Why did all my turtles die? Well they were competing for the throne of the turtle kingdom! And they’re killing and murdering each other poisoning each other and stabbing each other in the heart. So ‘Game of Thrones’ began as Game of Shells.”
