At HBO they may be interested in making the most of Game of Thrones with the production of the second season of The House of the Dragon or the already confirmed The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but there are always projects that fall by the wayside such as the spin-off of Jon Snow, who had to tell what happened to Kit Harington’s character after the outcome of the television phenomenon, or 10,000 ships, about which new details are now known when it has already been discarded by the channel.
Screenwriter Brian Helgeland, known for winning an Oscar for L.A. Confidential and having been nominated for the statuette for Mystic River, has revealed in an interview what the plot of the series he was creating with G.R.R. Martin, the architect of this fictional universe. It was going to focus on Queen Nymeria and the little information there was about her in the Westeros encyclopedia.
“Essentially it was the story of Moses but changing it to Nymeria,” he said. “His country is ruined and his people are forced to live on the water, which is why the series was titled 10,000 Ships.” In this context, “they have to leave their place and find a new home like the Israelis had to leave Egypt” with Nymeria lightening her people, keeping them united and with her population always facing new dangers.
In his opinion, the first script had “turned out wonderfully” but at HBO it did not convince because “the time” of the production was too far from “the pillars of the original.” To make it clear, this leader of the Rhoynar, one of the three main ethnic groups of Westeros, led this expedition a millennium before the events of Game of Thrones.
And, taking into account the fate of the prequel with Naomi Watts about the origins of the Continent that was going to be set some 8,000 years before, which was canceled after investing 30 million in the production of a pilot episode in the Canary Islands, there is something Of course: when it comes to telling stories derived from Game of Thrones, managers are afraid of going too far back in the chronology of Westeros.
We will therefore miss this series that Helgeland described as “a kind of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films mixed with The Odyssey.” He, for the record, is not giving up: he considers that HBO has the project in a drawer and, if one day they change their mind, they have it there to recover it.
