原文來自天涯小築： http://donatino.skygate.cn/post/21/5102 Ryan: Has the interest in a show that won't even be on the air for another year surprised you? （此君為訪問的記者） Martin: You know, I come from the science-fiction/fantasy subculture and this sort of fan phenomenon is pretty common now. The intensity, sometimes the size of the group varies, but "Beauty and the Beast," where I was a writer and a producer for three years, had an incredibly intense fan base. They had their own conventions, they had fanzines, they would go through our dumpster occasionally. When Linda Hamilton left the show and we had to recast, half of them turned against us viciously. You know, love can quickly turn to hate, so that can make you nervous. Ryan: That's so true. But in my years of doing this, the intensity of interest even before a show is made -- interest that I fully admit to having fanned myself -- is pretty unusual. Does that make you look at the show any differently, or is that just how it is? Martin: Well, I don't think that we appreciate it any differently. You know, I've been in the middle of it for a long time, so it's a little different for the people coming to the show for the first time. In the initial state, is I just tried to take it for what it was and not get too excited, because I did work out there in Hollywood for 10 years in a couple of shows, I had worked in development for a while, I wrote some pilots, I wrote some feature films, none of which were ever made. And I very quickly learned that Hollywood would break your heart and you can't get too excited until it's definite. And even then you better not get too excited because there are so many things that can go wrong. I sort of failed in that effort [to not get excited] because toward the end, when we were filming the ["Game of Thrones'] pilot, I got very excited, despite my best efforts. And I'm very jazzed now about the whole experience. Ryan: Did you resist the idea of going back to television, having moved away from that and having had more control over your story in books? Martin: Well, yes. I was in Hollywood for 10 years. I worked on "Twilight Zone" in the mid-'80's and then I worked for three years on "Beauty and the Beast." And there were things about it I loved and there were things about it I hated. But what was very good about those five years was that I was part of [a writing] staff, the writing and producing staff on shows that were actually on the air. I would write a script and we would rewrite it and sometimes there would be fights with the network or the studio or the censors. But in the end the fight would be resolved and then the show would go before the camera and then a couple of weeks later, it would be on the air and millions of people would see it. And that was the process that I sort of got used to. But the second five years that I was out there, I had reached the point where I was doing pilots. I was doing feature films. I was doing development. I had an overall deal at Columbia, and you know, they call it development hell for a reason. I found myself writing scripts and sometimes working on something for a year or maybe two years and pouring my heart and soul into it, creating good things and then, "No, we're not going to do that one. No, the other network is doing something similar. Oh, we have another show we like better." So you're paid a great deal of money, but four guys in the room are the only people who ever saw it. At the end of the time [in Hollywood], I decided I just couldn't do that anymore. It was just too psychologically frustrating. It's like, if you wrote these newspaper stories and they paid you for them, but they never printed them, it would drive your crazy. It certainly drove me crazy. And probably the most frustrating was the pilot that got the closest to being done. I did a show called "Doorways" that was the only one of my pilots that was actually filmed, and everybody loved it. It was for ABC, and it was going to go on the air, they ordered six backup scripts, which was a huge order for backup scripts then. Then there were personnel changes and some executives left and other executives were promoted, and suddenly we weren't on the air. Suddenly a year and a half dissolved and I had really gotten excited about the idea of having my own show -- after [on other shows] being the lieutenant and the colonel, I was finally going to be the general and command the troops and I wanted to do a great show. And suddenly I was back to square one. And I did a few more pilots and all that, but the failure of "Doorways" to get on the air kind of took the heart out of me. Books had always been my first love anyway. So at that point I started writing what would eventually be "A Game of Thrones." The irony of "A Game of Thrones" and where we are now is, I wrote the books almost in reaction to my years in television. My scripts were always too long, they were always too expensive. I was always having to cut them. There were too many characters, too many matte paintings. "We can't have all these matte paintings, we can't have this giant battle scene that you've written because we can only afford 12 extras." So when I went back to books, I said, "I don't care about any of that any more. I'm going to write a story that's going to be as gigantic a story as I want. I'm going to have hundreds of characters, gigantic battles, magnificent castles and vistas -- all the things I couldn't do in television, I'm going to do in these books and I hope people like it." So now here we are doing it for television. But fortunately it's David and Dan [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the executive producers of the series] who have to figure out all the problems, not me. Ryan: How closely involved are you in the making of the show? I know you're writing the eighth script, is that correct? Martin: My deal calls for me to write one script this season. It's script eight this year and next year, I'll do another one if we get another season. I really can't do more than that because I still have the [next 'A Song of Ice and Fire'] books to write. The books take an enormous amount of time. There's a part of me that would love to be more involved than I am involved, attending the meetings and all that, but I can't. Even if they wanted me, which I'm not sure they would, but I can't. So my level of involvement is great. I have a great communication with David and Dan and with the people at HBO and I certainly feel like I'm part of the process, but they're the showrunners and the buck stops with them, not with me. Ryan: Is it hard not to not be the general in this campaign, if you will? Martin: It hasn't been hard so far, it's been great. I guess it potentially it might be, if they made some decision that I hated or something like that, but so far they haven't. I mean, everything they're deciding, I can understand the reason for [the decisions they make] and I think they're handling it well. And I think the fact that I was in television for 10 years helped me understand that. Some book authors when dealing with Hollywood, if they've never worked out there, they don't know what goes into these decisions. They don't know why [certain things happen] and it seems arbitrary to them, but I kind of understand things like budgets and shooting schedules and the stuff that I dealt with, so I think it gives me a more realistic appreciation of the process. Ryan: Is 10 episodes enough to tell that first book's story? Do things have to be cut, and are you OK with the direction they've taken it in? Martin: We haven't seen it yet, but I think 10 episodes should be enough to do it, yes. You know, at some point early on there was some talk of [possibly doing] 12 hours. But the 10 will go for a faster pace. More is not always better. Back in the early '90's, when we did "Doorways," ABC ordered it as a 90-minute pilot, so we shot a 90-minute pilot for them even though it would be an hourlong show [week to week]. But then we were told that the European markets didn't use the 90 minute slot. So we had to produce a two-hour version for the European markets. And the two-hour version is actually what got released on video around the world. They didn't give us any more money for the two-hour version, so what we had to do was take the 90-minute version, which was pretty tight and taut, and [to stretch it] we had to use every foot of film that we shot. So the version that was finally released around the world when they just tossed that out on video was a very flabby version, because it was longer but it wasn't longer in a good way. So I think 10 hours should be great. Ryan: In terms of making "The Game of Thrones," was your attitude kind of "HBO or bust"? Was it a situation where you would not have gone to a broadcast network, or you just trusted this particular team and this network? Martin: Well I certainly trusted the team when I met them. You know, years ago when the books started hitting the New York Times Best Seller List we started getting interest from Hollywood. Initially it was from feature people because Time had called me the American Tolkien and then Peter Jackson's ["Lord of the Rings"] movies had made so much money. So people came sniffing around my books to see whether they would work [as a film]. And we got a number of inquiries and basically, I told my agents, no. Because I didn't see how they could possibly be done as a feature film. I mean, I was talking seven gigantic books by that point -- "The Storm of Swords," which is the longest book in the series so far, is itself bigger than the entirety of Tolkien's ["Lord of the Rings"] trilogy. All three of his books combined are about the length of "The Storm of Swords." And it took three movies to for Peter Jackson to do [that trilogy of books]. Well, no one was going to commit to three movies for me [and] to do the whole series, they would have to commit to 27 movies. So I knew that they couldn't do it as a feature film. The only way would be is if some studio wanted to commit to nine feature films and that wasn't going to happen. So then the other option was television. Well, of course, I worked with television. I knew that the limitations of budgets and the censorship limitations. I know it's loosened up some since I was active in the '80's and '90's, but I can still remember the fights with Standards and Practices and censors about the sex and violence. And the books are full of sex and violence. I didn't want some watered-down, bowdlerized version of this. And also then, the networks with their attention to ratings, -- you go on the air, you get three episodes and the cancel with you if you don't break out of the gate strong. So it seemed to me, even years ago, that the only way to do this was HBO, or a similar network, but HBO was the Tiffany's, the Cadillac of the cable networks, as far as I'm concerned. And they had done shows like "Deadwood" and "Rome" and "The Sopranos" and that was the kind of thing I saw this as. Ryan: So could we talk a little bit about the book series and where that stands? I'm sorry to be the millionth person to ask you if you're getting close to finishing "A Dance With Dragons." I hate to do it because I know what it's like to be on a deadline and have someone ask you about when you're going to be done. Martin: You were at Medill [School of Journalism at Northwestern], right? Ryan: I was. Martin: I bring that up because even when I was a college student, I picked [the magazine course] because they didn't have deadlines every day. I love newspapers; I love the history of newspapers. But the idea of having a deadline every day at 5:00, -- [I thought] I'm going to have a heart attack at 42 if I go into that work. Magazines, you have a month to write your article. I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel, I didn't have a contract. Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, "Well, here's a novel, sell it if you can." And they would do that and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder. But obviously you can't do that with a series. And so I do have contracts and I do have a series and people are expecting it to come out. So, it has produced this pressure and with this book. It's obviously the worst I've ever blown a deadline, although I had blown deadlines before. And I am very aware of that. Some fans seem to think I'm not conscious of that, but I am aware of it every day. I think I am approaching the end of "Dance," knock wood. I had a very, very productive period in February and March and the early part of March, and I slowed down a little in the latter part of March, so I got to get back in the groove again. Ryan: And you will make the announcement of when it's done on your "Not a Blog," I assume. Martin: Yeah. The minute I do it. I told the fans that a million times. But there are still ones that don't believe me -- they read my posts like some kind of Delphic Oracle speaking. You know, "Is there a clue there that he's actually finished the book?" Ryan: It's funny because I loved that famous post that Neal Gaiman wrote [about deadlines and expectations for authors]? Martin: Oh yeah. [laughs] Ryan: It was a great statement about how sometimes creativity can't be rushed. But having said that ... I have to ask... You wrote on the blog about some problems you had to solve with this particular book. Do you think having solved those problems will make the next books come more quickly? Martin: I hope so. I hope that this is, you know, the middle book and it'll get easier after this, but I don't know. When we split "A Feast for Crows" [into two books], I thought the second half would go easier, and I made the mistake of actually saying in the back of "Feast for Crows," "Well the [next] book is half written, I should be able to finish it in a year." But obviously, I was off by four years. Ryan: It happens. It's funny, with the book series -- as the HBO adaptation has gotten more publicity, more and more people I know are reading the book series and they all, once they start, get totally into it. I'll get emails at 2 in the morning - "How could Martin DO that? I can't believe that happened." They understand the intensity of the fandom once they've dipped into the books. They get it, you know? And I have to give credit to my husband for recommending the books in the first place, he read them way before me. Martin: Is your husband a journalist as well? Ryan: Oh no. But we're both reading freaks. It's so funny, once in a while on my website someone will leave a comment saying, "Why don't you just read a book sometime?" Which I find hilarious, because I spend so much of my free time reading. Martin: I hate to say this because books are my first love. I've always loved books more than anything else, but television and film have become our - they're [a huge] part of our culture. Ryan: Yeah. Martin: I mean, I associate with a lot of other writers, I attend conventions and hang out with them. We have a writer's group in Albuquerque, we have lunch together all the time. And they're science-fiction/fantasy writers mostly. And even talking about science fiction, I'll say, "Well, what did you think of the new China Mieville book?" And no one will have read it. Someone else will say, "Well, I read this book by so-and-so, did you read that?" And no one would have read it. And then, "What did you think of 'Avatar?'" And everyone would have seen it. And there we are talking about "Avatar" for the next hour. [Then it's] what do you think is going to happen next on "Lost" or "House" and all that stuff. This stuff is becoming common culture even for people who make their living writing books, much more so than the books themselves. And that maybe an unfortunate thing, but I don't know. Maybe there's a circle out there where they're still talking about Proust rather than "House." But I'm not part of that circle. Ryan: No, I think you're right. And a lot of shows these days invite intense analysis, which is great for what I do. Martin: You know, I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement. With a standalone book, you get, "Hey, I liked your novel." When it's a series, it can be a much different discussion. Ryan: Does that ever change what you're doing? Do you read message boards and all that? Martin: I try not to let it influence me. Sometimes people will figure out a twist that you're contemplating, so the temptation is to change what would have been the twist. That way lies madness and disaster. So I read some [comment areas on GRRM-related sites] early on [but not now]. No matter what, it's exciting as an artist to have a response to your work. Sometimes you put so much work into a book and it's carefully crafted and it's got secondary meanings and subtext and a little foreshadowing and you have no idea when they go, "Oh, I like your book," that anybody is getting any of it. But when they're responding to that, you can see that they're getting [what you're trying to do]. You're trying to do something and it's not coming across. You invented this character and everybody hates it. Or everybody completely misunderstands the character, so you might not be doing it right, you know? Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I just want to briefly ask you about coming to conventions -- is that at the request of your publishers? Martin: Well, you know, I started out as a fan. I went to my first convention in 1971 when I had sold one story. But there are different types of conventions these days and they all came out of the science-fiction culture, which goes all the way back to the '30's. But comic book fandom has become much bigger than science fiction fandom, and [now there are] media conventions, which really mean television and film. I tend to go to three or four science-fiction conventions a year, just because that's where my roots are, I have a lot of friends there, etc. So I go to those just for myself, really. Ryan: Can you talk a bit about where "Fevre Dream" came from? Martin: "Fevre Dream" is an older book of mine, it predates "Ice and Fire." It was originally published in 1982, and it was probably my most successful book before "Ice and Fire." It's been optioned for movies a couple times, I even wrote a screenplay for a feature when I was at Disney. The head of Avatar Comics called me up and wanted to do some [comic books based on] my work. They wanted "Ice and Fire," but I haven't sold any comic rights to "Ice and Fire." People keep approaching me, I may do it some day, but it's such a big project, I don't know how they would do it. But we got to talking about other stuff, and I said, you know, "Fevre Dream" would probably make a good comic series. And I sent him a copy and he agreed and so we did it. The adaptation is done by Daniel Abraham, who's a friend of mine, an up-and-coming younger fantasy writer. And they got a Spanish artist named, Rafa Lopez to do the [art]. But Rafa was very, very slow. But it's finally all done, all ten issues. They'll do ten issues, I think monthly, or something like that, and then they'll collect them altogether and do a graphic novel for the bookstore trade. Ryan: Well, there goes my theory that this comic book adaptation was put into motion by the recent vampire craze that we've had with "Twilight" and "True Blood" and "The Vampire Diaries" and all these different properties. Martin: I predated all of those. Although I did follow, Anne Rice, who was first with Interview With A Vampire. Though actually Bram Stoker was first. Ryan: Yeah. Martin: My vampires are a lot meaner than the ones in "Twilight." Ryan: Definitely. What made you want to write about vampires in the first place? What piqued your interest? Was it just a fun arena to explore? Martin: Well, I don't remember why, I had always been attracted to writing about vampires, but I didn't have a vehicle for it. And then after my years in Chicago, in 1976, I moved to Dubuque, Iowa, where I got a job teaching journalism, college journalism, at a little Catholic girl's college called Clark College, in Dubuque. So I taught at Clark from 1976 through 1979. And Dubuque is an old river town, it's right on the Mississippi. I got interested in the history of the river there and the history of the Dubuque. They used to build steamboats there, and I started reading about steamboats on the upper Mississippi and I was just fascinated by that. So at some point, I said, "I want to write a period novel set in this period about the steamboats." But being a science-fiction/fantasy writer, I said, "Well, what's my fantasy angle?" Somehow vampires seemed to work with steamboats, kind of, it was sort of a dark romanticism for both of them, that seemed to go together. There were certain aspects that didn't go together, most notably that vampires can't cross running water, according to the tradition, which would blow the whole thing right out of the Mississippi. So I said, "Well, I can't go with that, I got to get rid of that aspect." And then once I got rid of that, I said, "Well, let me rethink the vampires and make them more rational vampires, more science-fiction vampires, not living corpses that are cursed because, you know, they have no souls or whatever their traditional supernatural thing is." A more science-fiction approach, a more realistic approach. And once I did that, they fit perfectly with the whole vampire riverboat thing. Ryan: I see. Last question -- do you get back to Chicago much? Martin: Every couple of years. I have a lot of fond memories of Chicago. The last time I was here, like, was, I don't know, a year and a half ago, I came in for about a week and I had a couple free days so I took one day and I took the El up and I just walked around my old neighborhood. The Uptown Theater broke my heart. I mean, it's one of the great theaters of the world and it's just sitting there, just decaying. I thought it was on the National Register of Historic Places or something, I mean, it should be, it's the second biggest theater in the United States. Only Radio City Music Hall is bigger than that. Ryan: It's a palace, or should be a palace again. Someone should restore it. Martin: Yeah. I have a novel that I want to write about a theater like that, [I would] fictionalize it. I wouldn't call it the Uptown, but I'd put it in some fictional city. I was certainly inspired by that, because when I lived in that neighborhood, the Uptown was still an operating movie theater. It was, I guess you'd call it a grindhouse. It was showing these, they weren't exactly porn films, it was like, women in cages. You know, Roger Corman kind of stuff. And you'd go into this theater and they had like 5,000 seats and there'd be like 12 people in there, you know? So I'd be sitting all alone here, you know, surrounded by acres of empty seats. But you could just look and see the magnificent balconies on balconies, and boxes along the side. I love that stuff. Ryan: I totally get that. I want you to write that novel but I feel like your fans would string you up from the lamppost, if you did take a break from "A Song of Ice and Fire." Martin: No, I have to finish "Ice and Fire" first. The fans get very hinky when I do do other things -- some of them don't like [that]. --

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