Swords And Saucery
“The Sopranos in Middle Earth” is how they’re plugging Game Of Thrones, the next massive series coming to the small screen. But will HBO’s multimillion-dollar gamble on an epic fantasy drama – stuffed with a synapse-fryingly high number of sex scenes – be fantastically successful or just epically geeky?
Valerie Flynn, 27 Apr 2011
In interviews, actors nearly always say something vaguely whiny to the effect that their job really isn’t as glamorous as you’d think, especially shooting on location. You’d reckon that jetting off to some foreign clime would be really glitzy but it’s actually such hard work, and so physically demanding, etc, etc. And the rest of us mere mortals with jobs in the real world think, “Yeah, right.”
In fairness to the actors on Game Of Thrones, the disused quarry on the Antrim coast where they’ve pitched up, in winter, is a bleak place to do a day’s work. Crew and cast – the latter weighed down by half a stone or so of faux-Medieval leather, armour and furs – stand ankle deep in mud between takes, drinking filthy-tasting coffee out of Styrofoam cups and getting rained on. The multicoloured umbrellas the make-up girls keep exhorting them to use to protect their face-paint aren’t much of a match for the gusts of freezing, drizzly wind. Maybe shooting on location isn’t all that.
Against the quarry’s steep cliff face, an army of set builders have erected an enormous and pretty convincing – if you squint a bit –‘stone’ fortress (product may not contain actual stones). This is Castle Black, an isolated outpost on the 700-foot high wall that marks the grim, northernmost boundary of the kingdom of Westeros.
A bit of back story for non-geeks: Westeros is the fictional world where A Game Of Thrones is set, A Game Of Thrones being the first volume of George RR Martin’s massively popular epic fantasy series, A Song Of Ice And Fire. The series is, as yet, incomplete, much to the chagrin of geeks across the globe. We met some that night in the basement of a Belfast pub, dressed in faux-Medieval attire – apparently de rigueur where fantasy is concerned – and singing apocryphal songs of Westeros inspired by Martin’s text. It was a bit scary.
Over 12 million books in the series have been sold worldwide and they’re actually a pretty good read.
High fantasy
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