Isegoria

Star Wars creator George Lucas, actor Mark Hamill, and sound designer Ben Burtt discuss the concept and creation of the lightsaber:

George Lucas recalls that Star Wars was influenced by pirate and swashbuckling films of the ’40s, which showcased the romantic side of fighting, illustrated in characters like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. With Jedi, who were heroes in this tradition, the director needed a weapon that would match their ideals. In a clip from Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, the lightsaber is introduced by Obi-Wan Kenobi, who says it’s “not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” Thus, the lightsaber also became a symbol for more peaceful, honorable times, representing what the galaxy was like before the Empire. Originally, Lucas says, Jedi were meant to fight with just swords. But to give the weapon a technological edge, they became “laser swords,” able to deflect incoming fire — which made sense, character-wise, as Jedi were not meant to be warlike, aggressive fighters.

The choreography and duels started simple, but became more emotional and complex as the series went on. Mark Hamill states that Lucas originally envisioned lightsaber hilts as being very, very heavy, always requiring two hands. But with a desire to make the sword fighting faster and more intense, they slowly moved away from the two-handed form. The technology used to create the glowing blade of lightsabers also changed as the series progressed.

In rare behind-the-scenes footage from Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker battles Darth Vader, and Hamill explains that metal poles were required so that the actors could have a realistic battle. Otherwise, one wouldn’t know where to stop their hands and finish a strike.

Ben Burtt says that the lightsaber was the first sound he created for the film. Upon hearing the hum of an old film projector idling, he felt it was the perfect, saying it was “musical, in a way. ‘That’s probably what a lightsaber would sound like.’” Burtt wanted another element — the iconic whooshing sound — which he accidentally created through electronic feedback.

In discussing the intensity of the lightsaber duels, Lucas says it changed with each film, often times reflecting the emotions of Luke and the ongoing story. Still Luke was not trained as a Jedi in the classic sense. It wasn’t until Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace that audiences would see Jedi battling in their prime; the duels were more aggressive and acrobatic than anything seen in the original trilogy, and only grew in scale and intensity as the series continued.

The sound effects really are almost as important as the visual effects.

Adrien Noterdaem has Simpsonized the cast Of Twin Peaks:

Community brings us a very special Public Service Announcement:

George R.R. Martin has a plan for keeping the Game of Thrones TV show from catching up to the books:

They know certain things. I’ve told them certain things. So they have some knowledge, but the devil is in the details. I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write, but the details aren’t there yet. I’m hopeful that I can not let them catch up with me. The season that’s about to debut covers the second half of the third book. The third book [A Storm of Swords] was so long that it had to be split into two. But there are two more books beyond that, A Feast for Crowsand A Dance With Dragons. A Dance With Dragons is itself a book that’s as big as A Storm of Swords. So there’s potentially three more seasons there, between Feast and Dance, if they split into two the way they did [with Storms]. Now, Feast and Dance take place simultaneously. So you can’t do Feast and then Dance the way I did. You can combine them and do it chronologically. And it’s my hope that they’ll do it that way and then, long before they catch up with me, I’ll have published The Winds of Winter, which’ll give me another couple years. It might be tight on the last book, A Dream of Spring, as they juggernaut forward.

George R.R. Martin started writing A Game of Thrones after moving to Santa Fe:

I was living in Dubuque, Iowa, in the seventies. I was teaching college. And I’d been writing since I was a kid but I started selling in ’71 and had pretty immediate success in a limited way. I was selling everything I wrote. I did short stories for six years and sold my first novel and got a nice payment for my first novel. In 1977 a friend of mine, a brilliant writer, he was like ten years older than me, his name was Tom Reamy, he had won a John Campbell Award for best new writer in his field. He was a little older, he was in his forties, so he’d started writing older than other people, but he’d been a science fiction fan for a long time. Lived in Kansas City. Tom died of a heart attack just a few months after winning the award for best new writer in his field. He was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. Instant. Boom. Killed him. We weren’t super close. I knew him from conventions and I’d admired his writing. But Tom’s death had a profound effect on me, because I was in my early thirties then. I’d been thinking, as I taught, well, I have all these stories that I want to write, all these novels I want to write, and I have all the time in the world to write them, ‘cause I’m a young guy, and then Tom’s death happened, and I said, Boy. Maybe I don’t have all the time in the world. Maybe I’ll die tomorrow. Maybe I’ll die ten years from now. Am I still teaching? I really liked teaching, actually. I was pretty good at it. I was teaching journalism and English and occasionally they would let me teach a science fiction course at this little college in Iowa, Clark College, a Catholic girls’ college. But teaching used up a lot of emotional energy. I would write a few short stories over Christmas break and more stuff over summer break. But I didn’t have time.

I had finished one novel before I took the teaching job and I didn’t know when I would write a second novel. After Tom’s death, I said, “You know, I gotta try this. I don’t know if I can make a living as a full-time writer or not, but who knows how much time I have left? I don’t want to die ten years from now or twenty years from now and say I never told the stories I wanted to tell because I always thought I could do it next week or next year. Maybe I’ll starve to death but then I’ll go back and get another job, if it doesn’t work out.”

Once I handed in my notice, then I said, “Well, I don’t have to stay in Dubuque, Iowa anymore. I can live any place I want.” And in that particular time Dubuque had just had some very, very harsh winters, and I was tired of shoveling out my car out from being buried in snow. I think a lot of the stuff in A Game of Thrones, the snow and ice and freezing, comes from my memories of Dubuque. And I’d seen Santa Fe the previous year while going to a convention in Phoenix, and I loved New Mexico. It was so beautiful. So I decided I would sell my house in Iowa and move to New Mexico. And I’ve never looked back.

George R.R. Martin is not a young man, and A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t done yet.

Almost 90 years after he translated the 11th-century poem, JRR Tolkien’s version of Beowulf will see print:

The book, edited by Christopher Tolkien, will also include the series of lectures Tolkien gave at Oxford about the poem in the 1930s, as well as the author’s “marvellous tale”, Sellic Spell.

It seems odd that it took so long.

Twist endings are hard to do, George R.R. Martin finds:

I worked on the revived Twilight Zone in the mid-eighties, and the network was constantly on us, saying, “You have to have more twist endings!” And what we discovered is, it’s a lot harder to do a twist ending in 1987 than it is to do a twist ending in 1959. The audience has seen tens of thousands of more shows, and they’ve gotten far more sophisticated. We tried to remake some of the classic Twilight Zones, like Anne Francis is a mannequin coming into a store in the original, and we tried to remake that. Three minutes into it, they say, “She’s a mannequin.” Ha ha ha ha! Or the one where the woman has an operation. She’s supposedly hideously ugly and she’s having an operation to make her beautiful. But if you notice how they film that, you never see anyone’s face. You just see her with her bandages. And, of course, they take it off, and she’s incredibly beautiful, and everybody reacts with horror — and you see that they’re all idiot pig people! Well, the minute you remake that, the modern audience says, “They’re not showing us anyone’s faces.” So, trick endings are harder to do. The audience is increasingly sophisticated and wary of such things.

George R.R. Martin discusses something he borrowed from Tolkien in writing A Game of Thrones, in terms of the initial structure of the book:

If you look at Lord of the Rings, everything begins in the Shire with Bilbo’s birthday party. You have a very small focus. You have a map of the Shire right in the beginning of the book – you think it’s the entire world. And then they get outside it. They cross the Shire, which seems epic in itself. And then the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then they add more and more characters, and then those characters split up. I essentially looked at the master there and adopted the same structure. Everything in A Game of Thrones begins in Winterfell. Everybody is together there and then you meet more people and, ultimately, they’re split apart and they go in different directions. But the one departure from that, right from the first, was Daenerys, who was always separate. It’s almost as if Tolkien, in addition to having Bilbo, had thrown in an occasional Faramir chapter, right from the beginning of the book.

There is no real Iron Throne, George R.R. Martin admits — but there is a depiction of the fictional throne that is more true to his imagination than the HBO show’s prop:

The HBO throne has become iconic. And well it might. It’s a terrific design, and it has served the show very well. There are replicas and paperweights of it in three different sizes. Everyone knows it. I love it. I have all those replicas right here, sitting on my shelves.

And yet, and yet… it’s still not right. It’s not the Iron Throne I see when I’m working on THE WINDS OF WINTER. It’s not the Iron Throne I want my readers to see. The way the throne is described in the books… HUGE, hulking, black and twisted, with the steep iron stairs in front, the high seat from which the king looks DOWN on everyone in the court… my throne is a hunched beast looming over the throne room, ugly and asymmetric…

The HBO throne is none of those things. It’s big, yes, but not nearly as big as the one described in the novels. And for good reason. We have a huge throne room set in Belfast, but not nearly huge enough to hold the Iron Throne as I painted it. For that we’d need something much bigger, more like the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, and no set has that much room. The Book Version of the Iron Throne would not even fit through the doors of the Paint Hall.

So what does the Real Iron Throne look like, you ask? Glad you asked. It looks kind of like this:

That’s the Iron Throne as painted by the amazing Marc Simonetti (and if you haven’t gotten his 2013 Ice & Fire calendar, better hurry, the year’s half over) for the upcoming concordance, THE WORLD OF ICE & FIRE. It’s a rough, not a final version, so what you see in the book will be more polished. But Marc has come closer here to capturing the Iron Throne as I picture it than any other artist to tackle it. From now on, THIS will be the reference I give to every other artist tackling a throne room scene. This Iron Throne is massive. Ugly. Assymetric. It’s a throne made by blacksmiths hammering together half-melted, broken, twisted swords, wrenched from the hands of dead men or yielded up by defeated foes… a symbol of conquest… it has the steps I describe, and the height. From on top, the king dominates the throne room. And there are thousands of swords in it, not just a few.

This Iron Throne is scary. And not at all a comfortable seat, just as Aegon intended.