Darren Aronofsky Adapting Margaret Atwood ‘MaddAddam’ Trilogy for HBO

By Jason Diamond

Darren Aronofsky will reportedly adapt Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Year Of The Flood, and MaddAddam for the small screen. The series is supposedly in development, but since HBO has inked deals with writers from Karen Russell to Sam Lipsyte in the past, with little to show for many of those signings, I won’t get my hopes up too much. Still, this deal features a big-name director, a well-known author, and a science-fiction storyline, so it sounds like it has a much better chance of seeing the light of day than the others. [via HBO Watch]

A New Kind of Woman on “Game of Thrones”?

Posted by Rachel Syme

This post contains spoilers.

“Game of Thrones” is the plottiest show on television—how else can the writers compress the thousands of pages of thickly wooded story by George R. R. Martin into hour-long feasts of carnality and bloodshed? The season openers are the most dense, burdened with reintroducing us to the entire cast of characters and setting the table for the battles to come. These packed curtain-raisers, like last night’s “Two Swords,” are rewarding for those who have read the books (bringing the thrill of seeing long-awaited characters, such as Styr and Oberyn Martell, finally cast and onscreen) and somewhat maddening for those who have not, requiring multiple viewings and an open Wikipedia page.

Yet there have always been competing ways to watch “Game of Thrones”: either as someone who’s fully immersed in the Martin canon or as a Westeros rookie who knows the world only through television (that’s me). The episodes that jump rapidly between lands and perspectives seem designed to validate one type of viewer and to pleasantly scramble the other. Episodes that crescendo into a dramatic event, like Blackwater or the Red Wedding, are the uniting force between the two viewer tribes, climaxes that both can experience. But those stories only hit the heart like one of Ygritte’s arrows if they are the result of careful, elegant world-building—which is exactly what we got in the première.

Even within the more reserved “Game of Thrones” episodes—if you can call an episode that includes a gory wrist-stabbing, the disowning of a son, hundreds of crucified slave girls, and a bisexual orgy “reserved”—the showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (who directed the episode) infuse an overarching theme into the proceedings. I have often heard that it is best to experience “Game of Thrones” like a tone poem or a medieval tapestry, especially if you don’t know what’s coming—to bathe in the dark, gloaming atmosphere of the show without worrying too much about each new face or the small bits of dialogue that go by too fast. And yet it might be more accurate to think of each installment as a fugue, with an opening motif that recurs throughout, imitated and reworked along the way.

The first shot of last night’s episode, of Tywin Lannister callously melting down Ned Stark’s Valyrian blade and splitting it into two new weapons for his own house, is echoed in the episode’s final scene, when Arya Stark, one of the last members of her family left alive to fight for its name, reclaims her own sword, Needle. At the start of Season 4, the Lannisters are the triumphant lords of Westeros, and they are in solid possession of the Iron Throne. Believing that the Lannisters have won the war against upstarts like Stannis Baratheon and Robb Stark, Tywin watches the instruments of his former antagonist turn to liquid with the look of a man who has comfortably vanquished his enemies.

The Lannisters now have all they need to rule: a king in the family who is about to wed a Tyrell to form a superpower, Ned Stark’s daughter married into the clan and diffused as a threat, and, now, two solid rods of ancient metal that can cut through bone. But, as soon as new swords are forged, they start to rust. The foundation underneath the Lannister dynasty is crumbling; Tywin cannot see it through the haze of burning dire-wolf fur, but his demise is written into the very hubris of trying to mold something as hard as steel into his family’s future. The first sword goes to a man without a hand to use it properly (and who doesn’t want to use it to defend the family legacy back at Casterly Rock), a sign of the precarious position of the ruling class.

While Tywin basks in his false sense of security, the rest of the episode offers up all of the nefarious chess pieces that will shortly march on the king: Oberyn Martell, with his hot temper and deep hatred of Lannister dominance; Daenerys, with her calf-slaying dragons and unsullied thousands; Sansa’s unpredictable and self-abnegating despair; Jaime and Cersei’s sexual rift and loss of faith in family ties; Margaery’s sneering ambition and distaste for her future husband (who would have her wear a string of dead sparrows around her neck at her nuptials); the Wildings’ impending Wall attack, fuelled by the fury of a woman scorned; and, most important, little Arya with her little sword, whose determination for vengeance may be stronger than any steel that her father wielded.

The poster for Season 4 proclaims that “all men must die,” and I couldn’t help thinking of that phrase as Arya skewered Polliver through the jaw, a delighted smirk on her face as she avenged Lommy with the exact words that were used during her friend’s killing. While she is currently under the protection of a man—and as much as I enjoy the bantering road-trip energy between Arya and the Hound—her reunion with Needle seems to mark a turning point in the series, one in which a female character is reclaiming a specific kind of power that may prove to be more dangerous than any other force in Westeros.

The world of “Game of Thrones” is now populated by two kinds of women: those who are actualized to make their own destinies, like Ygritte, Daenerys, Melisandre, Arya, and those who still rely on their male counterparts to dictate their happiness (with characters like Brienne caught somewhere in the middle). While the women deprived of power choose to self-medicate—Cersei drinks herself into a stupor in the castle, Sansa starves, Shae seduces, and Margaery touches diamonds—Arya’s drug of choice is grisly revenge. As she rides off into the sunset on a white horse, she looks less like a princess on a pony and more like a knight coming to her own rescue.

As Game of Thrones gets bolder and bloodier, big things are coming for Kit Harington’s Jon Snow

Jon Dekel |
More from Jon Dekel | @jondekel

HBOKit Harington as Jon Snow in HBO's Game of Thrones.

MAGHERAMORNE, IRELAND – Kit Harington is anxious. Oddly, considering the show’s penchant for relieving central characters of their heads, the 27-year-old British actor’s concern is not for the safety of his Game of Thrones character, the kind-hearted bastard Jon Snow, nor for his brothers in the order of The Night’s Watch — the Seven Kingdom’s miscreant defense against wildling humans and supernatural ice zombies. Rather, Harington’s unease stems from a worrisome mental lapse that has put both his safety and the day’s tight production schedule in grave jeopardy: He’s left his glasses in his hotel room. “I’m doing a sword fight,” Harington explains between worried cigarette puffs (an act jarring enough to break any Game of Thrones fan’s suspended disbelief), “and I’m completely blind.”

It’s an unseasonably sunny mid-October day in Northern Ireland, and Harington, in full Night’s Watch regalia, is in the middle of shooting the fourth of 10 episodes that comprise Game of Thrones’ fourth season. In the show, as in A Song of Ice and Fire, the George R.R. Martin book series it’s based on, the military outpost of Castle Black lies along The Wall — a gargantuan ice barrier built at the northern peak of civilized society. On Earth, however, The Watch’s HQ is situated in a disused quarry about an hour outside of Belfast — where the majority of the Game of Thrones is filmed and where, presently, Harington’s corrective lenses are situated.

HBOEmilia Clarke in Game of Thrones.

Harington spent little time on the Castle Black set over the past year as his character perused his own Bond-like covert mission beyond The Wall — losing his virginity, his heart and ultimately nearly his life to a fiery wildling named Ygritte. Between seasons, the budding star spent his off time in Toronto shooting Pompeii, his first leading film role. The stay coincided with Game of Thrones‘ most disturbing, blood-churning and infamous moment to date: The Red Wedding.

“I was alone in Toronto, on my own,” he recalls of taking in the butchering of his television brother and step-mother. “It was a weird feeling. I was upset because [actors] Michelle [Fairley] and Richard [Madden] were going, but at the end I literally jumped up and wept for joy because I personally thought they nailed it.”

“It was a mixed bag.”

With Snow’s fourth-season return to Castle Black, Harington admits to feeling what he refers to as “a weird sort of déjà vu.”

“I’m wearing the training gear and it’s very similar to doing the training yard fight we did in Season 1,” he says.

Similar, but not the same. “I hated the wigs. Now it’s pure Harington hair — I never knew it would be curly,” he smiles. “And this is my first beard, too. I didn’t know I could grow one.” This isn’t the first time Harrington and the rest of his castmates have felt déjà vu. After a disastrous initial run, HBO asked showrunners David Benioff and D.B Weiss to reshoot the show’s pilot, demanding a “dirtier” aesthetic.

By the start of the fourth season, Game of Thrones’ mammoth production stretches across the world, filming in Croatia, Iceland, Morocco and multiple Northern Ireland locations, and is HBO’s most successful (and costly) series, with 5.4 million viewers watching the season three finale on the paid U.S. cable network and a record 5.9 million illegally downloading the episode, according to digital piracy news site TorrentFreak.

During a break from filming, Game of Thrones’ executive story editor, co-producer and writer Bryan Cogman considers the show’s success: “I didn’t personally know if a show that was this complicated, strange and genre-bending would find a huge audience. It’s been very gratifying.” Cogman, like the rest of the cast, credits much of Game of Thrones’ accomplishments to Martin, who not only serves as a producer but also writes one episode per season. Though much has been made of the ample nudity and gory violence, it’s the hirsute author’s ability to subtly paint in shades of moral greys, Cogman argues, that elevates the show.

HBONikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lena Headey in Game of Thrones.

“The genius of George is that he makes you empathize with a man who in the first 80 pages of the book pushes a child out the window,” he says, citing the improbably sympathetic story arc of hobbled “Kingslayer” Jaime Lannister. Cogman’s job, then, is to take Martin’s rapidly escalating vision and reshape it as palatable television (a format which the author rejected as being too small for his pre-Thrones scripts).

“We’re always trying to top ourselves in every way,” Cogman explains. “We really want this to be the greatest show ever seen.” Logically, then, Cogman claims Season 4 is “without question our biggest in terms of spectacle. We’re not cutting back on anything: sex, violence or profanity.” He then adds, carefully, “This is a big season for Jon Snow.”

Moments later, Snow himself returns, glasses in hand thanks to a hustled production assistant, and Cogman ceeds the focus to the “handsome star of television and movies.” “I always knew he was a lead in the show,” Harington says when informed of Cogman’s comments. But, as the oft-cited quote goes, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” and Martin — who is currently penning the sixth of the seven planned Song novels — has yet to seal Snow’s fate.

“I don’t want to know if Jon lives or dies. I want it to be a surprise,” Harington claims. If he were to perish, though, the actor wishes Snow “a good death. Something epic. Taking out a dragon maybe.” And what would Harington do in such a scenario? “I’d go somewhere warm with less beards.”