John Connolly

It's very nice to be here.

Thank you for having me.

Well, the thing is, firstly, let's just say that it's far cheaper and easier not to make something than to make something.

And we've been at various stages of things before.

But anyway, where we are is we're kind of in the middle of the process where Amazon and Blumhouse have signed on and we have a number of producers, including Colin Farrell and his sister and Brian Cranston.

And now what they have to do, and I had to ask about this because I was completely unfamiliar with it.

They now have to recruit a showrunner.

and the showrunner writes a pilot episode.

And if the pilot episode passes muster, and he also has to do an outline of an initial season and then, in theory, four seasons after that.

And if all of that passes muster, they might then put money on the table to make a pilot episode.

But Game of Thrones is a very salutary lesson for any writer who wants to get involved in television because two things happen.

Firstly, when they tried to make a sequel to Game of Thrones, they got to the pilot stage and they made a pilot and they put a lot of money into it and they cast it and they ditched it.

because they watched it and thought it didn't work.

So you can get to that stage.

Yeah, and it doesn't happen.

And the other thing is I had to tell the... They wanted to do something interesting, which is why it appealed to me, in that they wanted to reorganise all the material.

They didn't want something that was going to be like lost, that stretched on forever and disappointed people at the end.

So they wanted five seasons.

They were going to reorganise 20 books, pick and choose material, and they wanted the ending, which I hadn't told even my wife.

But you had an ending.