Morning Star
How old were you when you decided to be an author; around 18; 02:00
Can you hint at your next project?; No; 03:44
How did writing the Red Rising Screenplay change writing Morning Star; it changed the tactics but not the concept; 04:02
Where does your poetic writing come from?; Plays he read as a child; 07:27
Which character would you be most scared to meet; The Jackal; 09:17
Which character would you never want to be; Sevro would be very tough to live as; 10:18
Who would be your ideal cast?; Gary Oldman as mickey the carver, Eddie Redmayne as jackal; 11:27
What was the process of book to movie like?; very strange; 13:40
Where did you draw inspiration for Darrow?; from Antigone and the song Hurt; 16:20
Did your work on the political campaign influence your writing?; a lot of the political machinations in MS did; 17:53
How much of what you planned for the characters went through to MS?; everything; 19:36
What inspired Sevro; by a kid he grew up with in Iowa; 21:04
For the carving scene on screen, how were you thinking of visualizing it?; weird photoshoppy stuff; 22:27
Do you see Golds as looking like normal people?; If they were in real life everyone would be flabbergasted; 23:29
Favorite quote from the books?; Ares sends his regards, motherfucker; 15:17
How far did you take the characters’ developments in your head?; He mostly thinks about the story/inspiration in the moment; 26:20
What’s the backstory of the story; the story of a young man raging war for love; 02:22
Which book was the most difficult to write; Morning Star; 03:15
Was writing morning star ‘for the fans’ hard; that’s what slowed down the writing process; 03:52
If he wasn’t a writer what would you be; same as before, campaign driver on a political campaign; 04:28
How did you get to live in LA; he felt restless in Seattle; 05:17
What are your childhood inspirations; Star Wars, Game of Thrones; 07:59
What’s your favorite thing about being an author; being home all day; 09:04
What’s behind the tattoo on your arm; to remind himself of his mortality; 10:08
A day in the life of Pierce Brown; ; 12:21
Any projects planned for the future; fantasy series after red rising; 15:07
If red rising characters had social media which one would they use; Eo as a youtuber, Darrow wouldn’t use it, Sevro on vine, Cassius on Snapchat; 15:59
What would the characters dress up as Halloween; Darrow and Sevro as tiger and Winnie the pooh; 16:52
What gifts would he give to his characters for Christmas; peace; 17:47
Who would he ship Darrow with in Harry Potter; Hermione; 17:53
Why and who the books are dedicated to; dad taught to walk, mom taught to speak, sister taught to listen; 2:48
How writing Morning Star was a struggle; Due to the expectations of the fans; 4:24
How does the readership encourage your writing; the fact that people like his writing; 6:09
Sort the characters into hogwarts houses; Darrow is slytherin-gryffindor, mustang is ravenclaw, Pax is hufflepuff, Jackal and Sevro didn’t get in, Victra is slytherin; 7:29
How much of yourself have you put into the books; each character takes a fragment of his personality; 9:08
Are you planning on writing another series; A trilogy; 11:13
News on the movie; it’s in development; 11:32
What song inspired Darrow; your bones by Of Monsters And Men; 12:35
How were you able to build on the characters across the series; He creates chaos; 13:14
Are there side plots that didn’t make the books; There is a fun escapade with Sevro in Pluto; 15:15
Are there any novellas planned; they’re ‘piecing everything together’; 17:06
Did you get to choose the audio book narrator; yes; 17:27
How did you come up with the Reaper’s song performance in the audio book; It was performed by his friends and constructed like an Irish ballad; 19:26
How do you ease in to writing; He doesn’t ease in; 20:47
If you could choose the actor to play Darrow who would it be; There is no one in his head, Mustang would be Teresa Palmer; 22:07
Pierce Brown reading the beginning of Morning Star; 02:57
Did you draw any inspiration from anime; Only to a certain degree with character arcs and themes; 05:28
What are the colors’ physical identifiers; The eyes and sigils are the one trait is constant; 06:46
What happened to the film adaptation; The rights were sold to Universal; 08:39
What is next on the horizon; A new trilogy; 09:28
What is your favorite color in the series; Gold; 10:46
Are there any specific actors in your head for Darrow before and after carving; No, the shift in Darrow’s looks can be done through practical effects; 11:42
How can you fit Red Rising into a 2 hour movie without cutting things out; That is why the script took so long to write; 14:06
Why did you make it a trilogy and not a series; Darrow’s story arc was a trilogy from the beginning; 16:12
What did you know about the end of the series from the beginning; One thing he did not know was going to happen was Pax’s death; 17:33
How much planning and foreshadowing was written beforehand; He has every character’s arc written on a single sticky note; 18:34
What was the inspiration for the Jackal; He was created off of the main character; 21:22
Are the accents in the audio book going to carry over to the film adaptation; Yes they will, the accents are canonical; 23:01
How do you think we as a society should address technological progress; We probably can’t address it at all; 24:48
Who do you visualize as an actor for Victra; Probably Charlize Theron; 26:48
How much were you involved in the voice changes in the audio book; The performance was all done by Tim Gerard Reynolds; 27:24
What kind of mood do you need to write Sevro; Whenever Sevro is in a scene he is bloating 90s rap; 29:53
What invention from the series would you want; GravBoots; 30:24
Are you ever planning on writing a prequel; He is inherently against the idea of writing prequels, but maybe; 30:50
How do you come up with names and who do you align the most with; Torn between the Jackal and Darrow, and the names just pop into his head; 31:22
How much thought went into the science; He likes the change in strategy that staying true to the science brings; 33:36
How does it feel to have a finished trilogy; Having closure feels fulfilling, though the potential new stories in the future are also exciting; 00:08
What is Iron Gold; It is an expansion of the world by getting into the minds of other characters; 01:35
What makes good Sci-Fi Fantasy; Not getting lost in the science, where technology is no longer distinguishable from magic; 02:12
How do you approach your world-building; There was no prior planning, it was all built through Darrow’s eyes in the moment; 03:46
Can a character be completely good or evil; They can not in the grand scheme of a character’s arc, but they can from a certain perspective; 05:32
Did your mother and sister influence how your write women; Completely, His mother taught him how to use power precisely and was the inspiration for Mustang; 06:58
Was Aja being the best fighter always the case; He wanted to show a society with fluid gender roles, and comment on those themes through the color system instead of traditional examples; 08:20
Which author dead or alive would you have dinner with; JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien; 09:49
Paperbacks or hardbacks; Paperbacks; 10:25
Do you bend book spines; Always; 10:31
Cats or dogs; Dogs; 10:51
TV obsession; Game Of Thrones or Battlestar Galactica or Buffy; 10:56
Do you judge a book by its cover; Yes; 11:06
What fictional universe would you like to join; Star Wars; 11:09
Would you want to be a jedi, hobbit or wizard; jedi/wizard; 11:16
Where do your ideas come from; takes it from personal experience; 05:28
How do you expand that idea into an expansive universe; to really focus and ‘get into the zone’; 14:05
What being a writer feels like; crippling guilt, anytime he does something he feels like he has to be writing; 22:54
How does being edited as a writer feels like; it can be very cathartic; 38:18
How much of yourself do you put in Darrow; it’s surprising how much he sees himself in Darrow; 51:40
How much time is based on world-building rather than the plot; He gets the world-building from the characters and plot; 59:54
Is ‘write what you know important’; well, he knows sci-fi; 1:02:03
On writers putting themselves as the main character; Pierce’s characters are slivers of his personality expanded into a real character; 00:53
On the setting of the books taking place in mars; 02:44
On trying to sell the movie adaptation to Hollywood; 04:10
How challenging was it to write a screenplay after writing a novel; The difficulty of adapting a novel into a screenplay is in truncating the story; 05:50
How did your experience with politics impact the books; The intricate game of politics that he had experience with fed into Darrow’s experiences; 09:10
How did you stop the socio-political context from interfering with the narrative; His editor especially, assisted him in choosing what to keep on the page; 11:12
Where did the curse words come from; He used to make compound curse words as a child; 13:18
How long was the process of pitching the book to publishers; It took 6 books and 130 rejections until red rising got published; 15:00
Is red rising the right book to get published; Yes, because he wrote Red Rising for himself and not others; 19:03
What was the role of obsidians before they rose up; The obsidians were first made as a weapon of war; 20:05
On the ‘adult rating’ of the violence in the books; The tone is more important than the gore on screen; 21:18
Who is mustang’s character based off of; She is based off of Pierce’s mother; 22:54
Why not go to HBO for the adaptation; because they have no room in their budget after Game of Thrones; 23:23
Are there upcoming books you are working on; Yes, Iron Gold takes place after the trilogy, dealing with what happens after breaking an empire; 25:15