The premiere of Season 4 of Game of Thrones, scheduled for spring 2014, will be perhaps one of the most anticipated events for fantasy fans around the world.
Song of Ice and Fire
George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the world's most popular epic fantasy sagas. In total, the author has planned seven books. Five of them have been published to date.
The saga takes place in a fictional world corresponding to the earthly Middle Ages. In this case, the actual fantasy component plays a secondary role in the events. In the foreground are complex interweaving of intrigue, clashes of characters and human dramas.
Oddly enough, "A Song of Ice and Fire" can be called a very historical epic: it surprisingly accurately recreates many of the realities and the atmosphere of time, which corresponds to the action. At the same time, many characters have very real prototypes, and many situations are copied from historical events.
So, the prototype of one of the central and most complex characters of the cycle - the dwarf Tyrion Lannister - was the English king Richard III. And the "Battle of the Kings" largely reproduces the English "War of the Scarlet and White Roses".
Shooting a television series
Proposals for film adaptation began to come to George Martin almost immediately after the release of the first book of the series, which very quickly became a bestseller. However, the author was rather skeptical about the very idea of such a production, believing that the saga is too large for a full-length movie, and too expensive for a television series.
It wasn't until 2007 that the film rights were sold to HBO studios, so that Martin would be personally involved in creating the scripts for each season. Besides him, Robert Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss are working on the script.
The series has won numerous awards including Hugo, Emmy and Golden Globe awards.
By the way, in many ways, Martin was right about the cost of producing a quality film adaptation. The cost of filming each episode is an amount equivalent to the budget of many feature films (only about $ 60 million per season). But the special effects, and the costumes, and the scenery in the film are made at the highest level - not to mention the excellent acting, including such stars as Sean Bean (Eddard Stark) and Lena Hedy (Cersei Lannister).
Future plans
The world premiere date for the fourth season is set for April 6, 2014. At the same time, if the first two seasons in terms of timing of events corresponded to the first two books of the saga ("Game of Thrones" and "Battle of Kings"), and the third - to the events of the first half of the book "A Storm of Swords", then in the new season events from three books will be intertwined at once - A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons.
Martin has already informed the other writers about the planned plots of the remaining two books, as well as their ending. Including in the event that he himself dies before he has time to finish writing the saga.
This is due to the differences between cinematic artistic methods and literary ones. The fact is that in the fourth and fifth books of Martin, events are described that occur in parallel to each other. The series will restore the natural chronology of events.
Interestingly, the pace of filming the series is already significantly ahead of the pace with which Martin writes his books. So, "Dance with Dragons" was written for six years. So there is a high probability that soon the events of the series will outstrip the events of the literary source.
