In an interview with The Indian Express, award-winning writer and director Brian Helgeland shared some thoughts on his work on one of five (or perhaps four) possible successors to Game of Thrones following its final season. This makes the second screenwriter attached to the successors to talk publicly about their work, following Jane Goldman‘s comments in an IGN interview last year.
The first take away: fan speculation that Helgeland had moved on, due to his being attached to write and direct a new film, seems to have been mistaken.
Helgeland’s key remarks are quoted below:
“I can only speak for my own. But I think the intention is to stay geographically in that world but to tell a completely different story from a different point of view. So it is still Westeros.”
Prodded further, he teased, “It might be a story which happened hundreds of years before the story that people are watching now, or could even be a story that happened 100 years after the story that they are watching now.
“It is a different time period. It is still the same geography, but it is a different set of people,” added Helgeland, famous for creating some the most defining crime fiction in the US.
Given that it’s clear that in fact all the pitches are for shows set before the present TV series, one can take his remark about “100 years after” as simply being cagey. But what does seem clear is that his pitched show is set primarily in the Seven Kingdoms. Not a lot of new information, to be sure, but that’s something.