Before the Show

New York Times – " His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: George R. R. Martin Talks ‘Game of Thrones’"
Interview with Dave Itzkoff (April 2011)

(Photo from early 1990's according to Reddit)


....

"I didn’t do anything, ultimately, except lick my wounds. I did do other pilots after that, a pilot called “Starport,” a pilot called “The Survivors” – all shows that to this day, I think, ah, that would have been a great show. It would have been fun to work on that. So in some alternate world, maybe I became Joss Whedon or J. J. Abrams."

...


"So then I would go in and I would start cutting. I would combine characters and trim out giant battle scenes, make it produceable. Although the later drafts of those scripts were always more polished, because I’d revised them several times, my favorites were always the first drafts, which had all the good stuff in it which I had to take out because it was too expensive and too big. When I returned to prose, which had been my first love, in the 90s, I said I’m going to do something that is just as big as I want to do. I can have all the special effects I want. I can have a cast of characters that numbers in the hundreds. I can have giant battle scenes. Everything you can’t do in television and film, of course you can do in prose because you’re everything there. You’re the director, you’re the special effects coordinator, you’re the costume department, and you don’t have to worry about a budget.

Of course the irony of all this is the project that I thought most unlikely to ever be filmed – the project that was actually unfilmable – is now going to be this big show on HBO."


Previously,
George R.R. Martin's Original October 1993 Pitch Letter