George R.R. Martin Second Life Reading

Here's an excerpt of the Q&A:

George RR Martin: Since January, when I announced the deal with Home Box Office for the television series of A Song of Ice and Fire—A Game of Thrones--I've been getting a lot of questions about it. And I knew I'd get a lot of questions tonight, so I've asked David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who will be the executive producers of the show and the scriptwriters, who will be doing it, to join us here tonight. And you can ask them some of your questions about what will happen with the Home Box Office project. Of course, keep in mind that we're just getting started here, so there's a lot of stuff that we don't know yet. But, David and Dan, can you guys come forward here?

Moderator: Obviously you've been standing in the room and you've been seeing the questions from fans going on all evening. I guess the biggest question and the one that everybody's kind of wanted to know about the series is, how faithful is it going to be to the books and how is it going to cue off what George has already written?

David Benioff: Well, when the books were first sent to me by George's agent, they were sent for me to look at in terms of making as a feature. And I started reading and about, I probably read about 150 pages, and I realized three things I guess. One was that I hadn't been this transported into a fantasy world since I also was in junior high school reading Lord of the Rings. The second thing was that this was, this would not work as a feature because the idea of trying to compress an 800 page book with incredibly detailed subplots into 120 page script, I mean we would have lost so much of what was so wonderful about this book. The third thing was that this was something I wanted to do and I couldn't do it by myself, which was why I sent the book to my friend and colleague, D.B. Weiss.

And you know I got phone calls from people at the studio afterwards saying, "There is a way to make this as a feature. There's a way to do it as a movie. You could just take Jon Snow and Daenerys and just concentrate on them and get rid of some of the minor characters." And it just, it was kind of appalling because, much as I love Jon Snow and Daenerys, I didn't want to lose the other characters. I mean this is an epic and the only way we could conceive of doing it properly was to tell it as a series. And you can't do it as a series where's it interrupted every twenty minutes by a commercial for toothpaste. And you can't do it where I'd have Tyrion saying the things he says and doing the things he says, all of which network TV would have had a huge problem with.

So we really felt from the beginning that the best way to do this was on HBO or possibly Showtime. And then I went online and I saw that all the fans had had this idea years before I had and realized that I was quite late to the game. But luckily George felt the same as we did and the whole reason we're doing this with HBO was because we felt it was really the only way to be faithful to the books and to put the entire series on air, not just highlighting, not just in the Reader's Digest condensed version of it, I should say.

D.B. Weiss: Yeah, it's really our goal just to make it as faithful as possible within the confines of the medium, which are much less on HBO than they are anywhere else.

Moderator: That's allowing you guys a certain amount of freedom in terms of the script and the casting and everything else.

David Benioff: Yeah, absolutely it is. As opposed to having to do 120 page script for A Game of Thrones, for instance, we're going to have now twelve 60 page scripts, so that’s 720 pages to tell the full story and it really allows us to be true to George's world in a way that we never could have otherwise. It's incredibly exciting and, as George said, it's a long process. We're still at the very, very beginning of it, but we can't wait to see the "Winter is Coming" promos on HBO at the end of a, well, I guess there won't be any more Sopranos episodes, but the end of whatever is coming on in a year.

I'm still hunting for a link to the full text.

EDIT: Full transcript at the ASOIAF forums.