Swords And Saucery

In interviews, actors nearly always say something vaguely whiny to the effect that their job really isn’t as glamorous as you’d think, especially shooting on location. You’d reckon that jetting off to some foreign clime would be really glitzy but it’s actually such hard work, and so physically demanding, etc, etc. And the rest of us mere mortals with jobs in the real world think, “Yeah, right.”

In fairness to the actors on Game Of Thrones, the disused quarry on the Antrim coast where they’ve pitched up, in winter, is a bleak place to do a day’s work. Crew and cast – the latter weighed down by half a stone or so of faux-Medieval leather, armour and furs – stand ankle deep in mud between takes, drinking filthy-tasting coffee out of Styrofoam cups and getting rained on. The multicoloured umbrellas the make-up girls keep exhorting them to use to protect their face-paint aren’t much of a match for the gusts of freezing, drizzly wind. Maybe shooting on location isn’t all that.
Against the quarry’s steep cliff face, an army of set builders have erected an enormous and pretty convincing – if you squint a bit –‘stone’ fortress (product may not contain actual stones). This is Castle Black, an isolated outpost on the 700-foot high wall that marks the grim, northernmost boundary of the kingdom of Westeros.
A bit of back story for non-geeks: Westeros is the fictional world where A Game Of Thrones is set, A Game Of Thrones being the first volume of George RR Martin’s massively popular epic fantasy series, A Song Of Ice And Fire. The series is, as yet, incomplete, much to the chagrin of geeks across the globe. We met some that night in the basement of a Belfast pub, dressed in faux-Medieval attire – apparently de rigueur where fantasy is concerned – and singing apocryphal songs of Westeros inspired by Martin’s text. It was a bit scary.
Over 12 million books in the series have been sold worldwide and they’re actually a pretty good read.

High fantasy
All of which bodes well for the big budget TV adaptation by co-producers and directors David Benioff and Dan Weiss. It’s an HBO production and reinvigorating tired genres is what HBO has, to date, done best. The cops and crims formula was as tired a set-up as Winning Streak before David Simon wrote season one of The Wire. A few years earlier, no-one thought the Italian gangster could be reanimated from moribund stock character to believable human being – until The Sopranos came along.
Indeed, “The Sopranos set in Middle Earth” is the tagline that network execs have been using to sum up HBO’s new series for promotional purposes. Benioff has no objection to that précis. Having read and loved Martin’s books, Benioff – who wrote the screenplays for The Kite Runner, Troy and X Men Origins: Wolverine – knew he wanted to adapt them for screen. But a feature film wouldn’t be long enough to do the complex plot justice, so he had to go knocking on TV executives’ doors.
“It was a tricky pitch,” the affable Benioff admits. “HBO hadn’t done fantasy before. They’d done stuff with a supernatural angle like True Blood or Carnivàle but really no-one has done high fantasy the way that we’re trying to do. I think at first they weren’t quite sure but then once they read the book they realised it really is their kind of story, it’s about the characters and intrigue and a lot of Machiavellian scheming, and that’s something they do better than anyone.”
The many characters and plots of A Game Of Thrones are complex, intermeshed and frequently disturbing. The setting might be reminiscent of Middle Earth but there are no cosy, Tolkein-esque guarantees that (spoiler alert) the goodies will ultimately defeat the forces of evil and then everyone can go back to Frodo’s place for a nice cup of tea.
There are a few genuine good guys in Game Of Thrones, but they are rarely rewarded with happy endings. Martin has an unnerving predilection for killing off his characters, which is another major similarity between the new series and HBO’s back catalogue.
“George is notorious for killing off some of people’s favourite characters and it’s one of the things that really keeps you on edge,” Benioff resumes. “We all grew up on stories where the good guys generally triumph and a couple of the good guys might die along the way, but you sort of know which ones they are because they’re the eccentric ones or the ones who are a bit off-centre. In this story you never know. I feel a lot of the great series on HBO were the same. Certainly on The Sopranos, nobody was ever safe. And speaking to people who worked on that show, they were always very nervous reading their scripts because they never knew if they were going to get whacked or not.”

Northern Ireland
The world of Westeros is divided in two: the King’s court and major trading cities lie in the warm, exotic South, shot in Malta. But it’s in the gloomy, freezing North – shot in Northern Ireland – that the real action takes place. (There are discontented mutterings on this point from the half-dozen shivering journalists HBO has invited to Antrim from overseas; the drawing of short straws is alluded to).
In Westeros, we learn, Winter and Summer don’t follow any regular pattern but rather can last months or years. When the story opens, a new Winter is coming and, with the creeping cold and dark are arriving signs of a malevolent force gathering beyond the massive wall that marks the northernmost boundary of Westeros and the edge of the known world.
Society’s outcasts – criminals, degenerates, and the illegitimate sons of noblemen – are sent to man the crumbling battlements of Castle Black. Visiting the set on a grey, bitterly cold day, it’s not difficult to see why HBO’s location scouts chose this place: the bleak, eerily remote Antrim coast seems the perfect setting for Martin’s ultima thule, beyond which lie the sinister forces of the unknown.
The first episodes of A Game Of Thrones will follow the fortunes of Jon Snow, played by 23-year-old newcomer Kit Harington. Snow, arguably the hero of the piece, has been sent to Castle Black because he is a bastard son. His nobleman dad, Sean Bean, is in Malta, lucky sod.
“Jon’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He comes up North because he wants to prove himself somewhere. He’s got huge ambition. What I think is interesting is that he has this unknown quantity, because we don’t know who his mother is,” says Harrington.
It’s likely to be a breakout role for the baby-faced star: leading the stellar cast of a multimillion dollar series is no joke for a young actor. Wrapped in his convincingly rugged costume of mangey furs and shabby leathers, he is unashamedly enthusiastic about the part.
“I’ve no idea what may happen. If I’m honest, I’m terrified about it. I’ve only ever done theatre, I came out of drama school two years ago and did two plays. But as far as being a breakthrough role, I think it’s a fantastic part to play.”

Power
Meanwhile, filming is also taking place a few miles away on the industrial outskirts of Belfast. Castle Black is impressive, but it can’t match the set built to house the Iron Throne alluded to in the series’ title. The opulent court of Westeros has been constructed in the old Harland and Wolff Paint Hall, the gargantuan warehouse where the Titanic was built. It’s a seriously impressive space, with ceilings nearly 100 foot high. Beat that, Malta.
While the format of A Game Of Thrones is standard for American cable – 10 hour-long episodes per series – the sets and special effects are on a distinctly blockbuster-like scale. HBO are keeping mum on the figures but the budget is rumoured to be on a similar scale to that of the network’s previous foray into epic territory with Rome. The agreed estimate sloshing around the internet is $100 million.
The scene being shot in the Paint Hall today is a bitter exchange between the Robert Baratheon, king of Westeros (Mark Addy) and his wife’s untrustworthy brother, Jamie Lannister (Danish actor/eye-candy Nikolaj Coster-Waldau).
“Robert has been king since he led a rebellion against the last king, who was a crazy tyrant,” explains Addy, who’ll be best-known to most of us as Dave from The Full Monty. “He was the leader of a rebellion but now he finds himself having to do a job that is not really his thing. He’s been an unopposed king for several years and because of that he’s allowed himself to grow fat and drunk and lazy, and he has married into a family that are hungry for his power. He’s surrounded by his enemies who are also his family.”
Watching over proceedings at the Paint Hall is George RR Martin himself, who has been heavily involved in the adaptation process from the start. The genial 62-year-old writer seems genuinely delighted at the way his creation has been reconstructed by the filmmakers.
“It’s pretty amazing. I’ve been writing these books since 1991 so I’ve been living in the world of Westeros for many years. There’s always a double reaction: ‘Well, that’s not quite what I pictured,’ but then that’s usually followed by, ‘Oh, but that’s really cool’,” Martin enthuses. “The set designers and the people involved in giving it a look, and the locations, have done an amazing job at bringing it to life.”

Violence
It’s nice that Martin is pleased, but will the general viewing public be as impressed by Benioff and Weiss’ work? It’s easy to see how HBO’s $100 million gamble could fail to attract the audience figures that would justify a multi-season run. That would be a major blow to the North’s film board, Northern Ireland Screen, for whom it has been an enormous coup to attract such a big-name, big-spending client.
Characters like the ambitious outsider Jon Snow and the disillusioned Robert Baratheon drew readers into the world of Martin’s books. But the danger is that television audiences could hear the word “fantasy”, picture Elijah Wood’s hairy hobbit feet, and think, “no thanks.”
However, HBO has another card up its sleeve apart from filthy lucre, although it certainly has plenty of that. The cable network is the foremost American outlet for onscreen sex and violence. It’s a bit tricky for us funny liberal Europeans to grasp, but in the wackily conservative America of the 21st century, onscreen smut is a pretty big deal. HBO’s track record in this area was one of Benioff and Weiss’ major considerations when they were looking for a suitable home for their series. In addition to your common or garden titillation (nudity, beheading and the like), Game Of Thrones will also have plenty of incest, a dash of statutory rape, and the crippling of a small child. If that can’t up the audience figures, what can?
“There were one or two other places but really it had to be HBO because it’s a very adult story. It’s sexy, it’s very violent. It’s not something you could put on network TV in America,” Benioff resumes.
“It’s about power, that’s what we keep coming back to. The Iron Throne is the central prop of the whole show, it’s the throne that’s been built with a thousand conquered enemies’ swords. Everyone is vying for power and the throne is the symbol of that.”
So basically, if power, sex and violence can trump unicorns and hobbits for the non-geeky man on the street, Benioff and his team are on to a winner.
“I mean, look, there are dragons, there are wolves, there are ‘Others’ – there are fantasy elements. We’re not afraid of being in the fantasy genre,” the producer says. “But if you look at the Harry Potter books, they’re fantasy and they seem to be pretty successful. Narnia is successful worldwide. If you look at the huge movies of the last 20 years, even Star Wars is really fantasy in outer space. So I think the world is ready for it and hopefully we can create a good enough series that will appeal to people.”
With the first episode airing Stateside this week, we should know pretty soon whether he’s right and the gamble has paid off.

Game Of Thrones airs on Mondays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic.