George R.R. Martin's least-favorite Game of Thrones scene is from Season 1 when the show had a smaller budget

Entertainment Weekly

In James Hibberd's new book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, Martin notes that the HBO drama had a large budget for 2011 at $6 million episode. But the budget was not enough to capture the grand scale of some scenes. "Where we really fell down in terms of budget was my least favorite scene in the entire show, in all eight seasons: King Robert goes hunting," says Martin. "Four guys walking on foot through the woods carrying spears and Robert is giving Renly sh*t. In the books, Robert goes off hunting, we get word he was gored by a boar, and they bring him back and he dies. So I never did (a hunting scene). But I knew what a royal hunting party was like. There would have been a hundred guys. There would have been pavilions. There would have been huntsmen. There would have been dogs. There would have been horns blowing — that's how a king goes hunting! He wouldn't have just been walking through the woods with three of his friends holding spears hoping to meet a boar. But at that point, we couldn't afford horses or dogs or pavilions."