You won’t believe what we learned about HBO’s transportation budget…
HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones has been the subject of numerous controversies over the course of its run, now in the middle of its seventh season. The most recent one, like the previous few, had been attributed to the kind of nuance compression that inevitably takes place in adapting a massive, sprawling text like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series to a medium with the strictures of modern day Prestige TV. But, Film School Rejects has learned, in an exclusive interview, that this is not the case, and that the truth is something that will likely change our entire perception of this world and beyond.
We recently spoke to an ageless, genderless being whose existence partially overlaps with our plane of consciousness, who works in the motion picture industry as a technical consultant, and for simplicity’s sake answers to the name Bob. Read on, if you dare:
FSR: So you’ve been working on Game of Thrones since, what, the start?
BOB: Yeah, not exactly day one, but pretty close. There was initially a bit of back and forth with HBO about whether they wanted to render the magical elements of the show as CGI, but Benioff and Weiss were adamant: we want to shoot on location in Westeros, with all practical effects, to be as true to the books as possible.
Wait but don’t they shoot in like Belfast and Dubrovnik and Spain and shit?
I mean, they shoot some pickups there, but the boys got their way, the rest of it is all at the real places from the books.
Wow, you learn something new every day.
Yeah, so they brought me on at first to handle transportation because it’s hard schlepping huge film crews, not to mention actors, back and forth between differing planes of existence. It’s completely beyond the capabilities of most mortal beings, which is why they pay me the big bucks. So, yeah, first I did transpo but then they were like, shit, we need direwolves and white walkers and dragons and all that kinda mess so I was like, cross my palm with some more coin of the realm because you should never work for free. And, voila, you got Game of Thrones. You’re welcome.
amn, show business is a trip. So, there’s something kinda big I need to bring up, I don’t want this to be a “gotcha” interview or anything—
Please, it’s fine. Ask away.
So, like, this season. Keep in mind I still like the show, but this season it’s been kinda, well, increasingly noticeable that people are zipping around Westeros like really fast. This past episode alone, Davos traversed the entirety of Westeros like four times. In one episode. It took the Stark family like four episodes to get from Winterfell to King’s Landing in the first season. I guess my question is, what the fuck?
Well, that’s a fair question, and a good question. Because most civilians are like, well, it takes place in a realm where summer and winter last for years and there’s no spring or fall, and there’s dragons and shit, so who cares, it’s just magic. And that’s just not true. I worked hard, through many quantum iterations of universes where film industries exist and the human mind still perceives time in a linear fashion, which is a huge cluster of possible realities, to get good at what I do. It’s not “just magic.” Okay? Let’s be totally clear about that. Goddammit. Anyway, I was saying. So yeah, I’m not saying you can’t circumvent linear time just because it’s expedient, I’m just saying it’s cheating. And this was a big point of conflict I had with the suits. Either Benioff or Weiss, I forget which one, was like “well, make a magic thingie so that time moves faster when we need it to.” And I was like “fuck you” and we had a big fight and I think I turned him into a warthog but then everyone intervened and the lawyers came in and they were like, Bob, it’s in your contract, you have to do a magic thingie. Which sucks, because look at it from my perspective: you have powers the likes of which these mortals can only dream, but because the government busted up your union and you lost a lot of your collective bargaining leverage, these jerkoffs get to order you around and call your immense supernatural abilities “a magic thingie?”
Yeah, that does suck.
Right? So I did “a magic thingie”—Jesus Christ, I still, ugh, that pisses me off so much—and I fucked with the fabric of Westerosi space-time so now people can get wherever they need to immediately because there are only eight episodes left. They should have done two whole seasons if they needed to burn through this much plot, but nooo, writers never listen to people in logistics. They may not even bring me back for the last shooting schedule, but at this point, I don’t give a fuck.
Have you ever had a beef like this working with other creatives?
Well, Warners wouldn’t hire me for the Harry Potter movies because of Practical Magic, which was kind of a passion project for me, underperformed. Total bullshit, and then the magic in those movies looked like ass because it had no verisimilitude. Peter Jackson does all of his himself, but he’s the only one who can. I mean, yeah, being a bit outspoken lands me in some hot water from time to time, but that’s the thing about existing largely outside of space and time, dry spells never last too long. Get it? Spells? Because, I’m, yeah.
Oh, yeah. That was good.
Related Topics: Game of Thrones, Satire
