Exclusive: ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Creator, Ira Parker Discusses His New Series
HBO is set to release their latest Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in the next few days. Based off the novella, The Hedge Knight, BeautifulBallad had the opportunity to catch up with creator of the series, Ira Parker.
On whether there is any intention to continue the series beyond the amount of books released: “We take nothing for granted here. This is just Game of Thrones without all the stuff. And who knows if we’re going to connect with a wider audience that allows us to keep doing these things. I love this show so much. I would make as many of these as they would let me make. George [Martin] is writing a fourth one, at least, that he has some good ideas for it. I’ve seen the outline, which is seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve of these, something that takes them all the way through their life. I really hope that we get to do it because it’s such an interesting journey to complete, and to take these characters from beginning to end. I really think would have a lot of longevity just in the world as stories that need to be told. If we end up doing two or three of these, it’ll be nice, but it won’t have that resolution that we would have seeing where they go and how they change. George and I have talked about very loosely that if it ever came to that, that we would just go through and sort of break seasons together. That he has a lot of ideas and we could bounce ideas off of each other. Obviously, I don’t want to take him away too long from his day job, but it’s amazing how much can be accomplished in a quick amount of time with him and a couple of his favorite authors in the room. We were pretty good for season one, and so I think we could continue that and come up with some good stuff.”
On whether there was any consideration to changing the week-to-week release model for this series: “I would say it was probably George’s preference to do a two-hour movie. When HBO came to me with this, they were very amenable to any length or format that we wanted to use. The 30 to 60 minutes gave us a pretty wide berth that we could lay down the type of story that was necessary based on the underlying material. Six episodes was talked about right from the beginning because everybody’s read the novella. We know how much there is to mine and here and we didn’t want to send Dunk off on any weird side quests. In terms of the release, I think it was probably all on the table. Releasing the BO two episodes at a time or releasing them all at once, I actually never had any real conversations about that. I always assumed it was going to be once a week. There’s just something fun about waiting for a new Game of Thrones show that is always nice when there’s a new series around that you can do that. At least that’s how I came up watching it, but these days, who knows? I think there would be a lot of benefit to putting a couple episodes together. But the truth is every episode has its own unique feel to it. That was very important that it didn’t just feel like one big long movie divvied up into six parts, that we were telling a story each individual episode, that each individual episode had its own feel and reason for existing. So hopefully we’ve executed that well, but I guess we’ll find out in a week.”
On potentially pushing the comedy too far in this type of fantasy: “No, I think nothing’s too far. Westeros is just a representation of our world in a medieval fantasy setting and so if it’s possible here on earth, it should be possible there, plus because they once had dragons. There was one that was joke though. I only used like three poop jokes this entire series that everybody keeps asking questions about these. And I promise they’re all character-based. There was going to be another one. I probably shouldn’t bring this up because it’s just, ‘What am I doing? That’s all people are going to be quoting me for.’ But it came very early on in the writer’s room, we were talking about where people have to go to the bathroom during a tournament, because you’re all out camping in the middle of nowhere. And so back in the day, trenches were dug and just a big long line. And there were also these things that were set up, like if you did it in the woods, sort of ropes attached to trees so that you could lean back in sort of a crouch squatting-ish position over top of this trench that was taking all this out of the way, hopefully going downhill and just Dunk and Egg having a conversation while people are doing that next to them and somebody’s rope snaps and they fall into the thing and that was too far for us. So there is a limit as to how much poop and fart jokes that we will allow in this show. But what’s funnier than a fart? We don’t have to be so highbrow about everything all the time. We have plenty of that in this show. We are a show, we are an earthy show, we are a gritty show, we’re an unpolished show, we’re showing it as it is, and this is a part of life.”
On how they prepared for many of the action sequences: “First of all, the through-the-helmet shot was very important for us because we wanted as much as possible to stay as we always have been in Dunk’s POV. And things change for you very drastically when you put on a helmet, when you put on 60 pounds of metal armor, when you have to do this on a horse, when you have to do it with your peripheral vision, knocked down to nothing, when all of a sudden your breathing is close to you inside of this thing when your heart is racing because you’re so nervous, so you can’t catch your breath. Dunk is our single POV character. We wanted the audience to be in that fight with him. We wanted the audience to be fighting. And so that’s showing how restricted that is, showing everything that is against Dunk was very important for us. Canonically, a fog rolls into Ashford on the morning of that journey was very important for us to represent, and it descends on these lists. Does it make for the most badass looking fucking fight ever? You bet. But we took it from the novella. We were using things that were appropriate and George spoke of, function over form, but we also have the two best stud coordinator and second unit director in the game who also did a really lovely job in Fassbender’s Macbeth. And a lot of the fog was honestly, we embellished it. We don’t have a lot of money on this show. We have about a quarter for every dollar for a Westeros minute of previous shows. We had to be careful how we hid things and how we made it feel like we weren’t hiding things and how it puts you in Dunk’s POV and we let you focus on what we want you to be focusing on rather than not having 10,000 crowd like you probably would have at a Coachella/Glastonbury type tournament situation here. It’s funny how not having any money just forces you to find really cool, creative ways that maybe you wouldn’t have come to completely if you had just had the ability to spend, spend, spend.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres on HBO on January 18.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo Credit: Steffan Hill/HBO