The finale of Game of Thrones‘ first season is this Sunday – but the writers are already busy writing season 2, which will be based on the second book in the George R. R. Martin series, A Clash of Kings. The LA Times online has posted an interview with showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, where they discuss adapting the book.

Be aware of theme spoilers.

When asked about how true they are staying to the book and how many liberties they are taking, Weiss says:

The book is always going to be our template, our go-to bible. It’s mainly about the balancing act between keeping the characters the  viewers have spent so much time investing in front-and-center and introducing all these new characters George has come up with and giving them their fair share. That’s what we’re currently engaged in doing.

Speaking about casting the new characters that appear in the second book, he adds:

I’m sitting here looking at our casting grid, which is a grid of names and faces of all the characters. Last year I remember being so excited as I’d watch week after week — it gradually fills in and finally … you have this beautiful wall of faces that represents your cast. Now I’m looking at the grid again, and half the people are gone because they’ve been massacred wholesale. And now there’s a grid to be filled in again with a new group of people. […] It’s different people in the top row, but the whole top row is people we know, and almost the whole second row.

On whether author George R. R. Martin will be as involved with the second season as with season 1, Benioff can confirm that yes, he will be:

He’s writing an episode for the coming season, which is probably the heaviest, the Battle of Blackwater Bay. Now that we’re on the ground here in Belfast and working with the visual effects team and production team that’s going to create the sets, we have to talk to George about what that looks like. He’s just as involved as in Season 1. He’ll watch casting videos from afar, and meanwhile we get responses to the episodes.

Finally, the writers address the issue of some of the main characters in the show, whose roles are very reduced in the second novel – will they be cut from the series, too?

Weiss: In the book there are a couple of characters who have more of an offscreen role and come back in Book 3. But in the case of, say, Robb Stark — played by Richard Madden — he has more of an offscreen  presence in the book, but Richard did such a fabulous job once his character came to the fore, he so commanded the screen that we realized there’s no way to talk about this guy and not have him in the show. So there are people offscreen in the book who we are going to write onscreen in the show to make sure people who viewers have fallen in love with are still there in the second season.
Benioff: In the case of Jaime Lannister, he’s got one scene in the second book, but he’s such an important character we want to see more of him. There’s fluidity in that certain scenes from the third book find their way into the second season just as certain scenes from the second book find their way into the end of the first season. We wanted to make sure those characters stayed in the audience’s mind and didn’t disappear for a whole year.

I have not yet finished A Song of Ice and Fire, but I am relieved to see that the characters at the centre of the series’ story will stay more or less the same.

There’s much more, about dragons and special effects and the representation of gender, which you can read here at the LA Times!