“I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time,” Condal told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. “But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.”
Fire And Blood, the book on which House Of The Dragon is based, is “this incomplete history (of the Targaryen dynasty) and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,” Condal explained. One of those decisions was to write out Aegon and Helaena Targaryen’s youngest son, Prince Maelor, from the brutal “Blood & Cheese” sequence in season two, the main tweak Martin took issue with in his post. Unfortunately, Condal can’t adapt all 736 pages of the Martin book in their entirety. “At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that’s my job,” he said.
Despite the rather on-the-nose nature of Condal and Martin’s conflict seemingly coming down to issues of both brevity and production speed, the showrunner did have a lot of nice things to say about the author. “I will simply say I’ve been a fan of A Song Of Ice And Fire for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy. George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer,” Condal shared. “I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.”
