David Benioff talks about changing A Song of Ice and Fire for TV

Along with George R.R. Martin and Dan Weiss, David Benioff is one of the three people primarily responsible for bringing Game of Thrones to your TV screen. Before season 7 aired, he gave an interview to Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, talking about the perils of adapting Martin’s mammoth books to screen, the show’s most controversial scenes, and more.

It’s well-known that Benioff and Weiss have changed much of Martin’s work when adapting the Song of Ice and Fire novels to TV, and that they’ve received criticism over some of their choices. It’s less well-known that before he got into screenwriting, Benioff was a novelist himself, and adapted his own book, 25th Hour, into a well-regarded movie directed by Spike Lee. According to an interview with The Guardian in 2003, when writing the script for that movie, “If the choice ever boiled down to keeping faith with the novel or doing what was best for the script, I chose the latter.”

Obviously, that has some bearing on the choices he would have to make when it came time to make Game of Thrones years later. “[O]nce you make the decision to sell your novel and have it adapted, I think you understand that there are going to be compromises and there are going to be changes made,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of adaptations that run into trouble by being too faithful to the book and they get kind of hamstrung by that.”

"It’s something that we told George a long time ago: For this to work, we have to make choices that are sometimes going to deviate from your intentions. Then there are a lot of things that work in prose that just wouldn’t work on screen, and part of that is just the nature of the beast. In George’s books so much of the story takes place in the characters’ minds. That’s one of the weaknesses of television compared to fiction—what people are thinking cannot be conveyed as easily, other by than having long voiceover monologues, which are boring.There are certain scenes that work so wonderfully in the novels that just wouldn’t on the show and other scenes that are pretty much as they are on page. The Red Wedding was very faithful to what happens in the book."

As the show went on, questions of adaptation gave way to questions of where to take the story next, since the plot of Game of Thrones outpaced that of the novels right around the time the Night’s Watchmen murdered Jon Snow. As George R.R. Martin has stated before, he’s more of a “gardener” when it comes to writing; that is, while he may know some basic story beats, he prefers to figure out certain plot elements as he goes.

Benioff, on the other hand, is forced to be more of an “architect,” a storyteller who plans things out ahead of time. According to him, the realities of running a TV show make this unavoidable. “We have to have the entire season written before we start shooting, because we don’t shoot in order,” he said. “We shoot it like a movie. We might shoot a scene from the last episode on the first day, and it takes so much preparation for every scene.”

"So right now we’re outlining the final season. I’d say 90 percent of it was stuff that we knew was going to happen. It’s just necessary for us to make the series work. Otherwise, there are just too many plot threads, and the idea of trying to bring it all together at the very end would make me go crazy because if you try to figure out how to end this story at the end, it would never work."

So working in TV restricts how you can tell a story. But it has advantages, too, like getting to know and becoming inspired by the actors who read your lines. “There’s a real, just wonderful symbiotic relationship,” Benioff said.

The acting on Game of Thrones is often praised, and Benioff’s willingness to really work with the cast members may be part of the reason why. It helps that he’s married to an actress, Amanda Peet, who can give him the inside scoop on the filmmaking process from the other end of the camera. “With Amanda a lot of it is just why a line won’t play or why a line is really hard to deliver, which sometimes is confusing for a writer because the line might look great on paper and then it’s really useful to have an actor say it’s a really tough line because X, Y or Z…[B]eing in a house where you kind of get a sense of all different sides, it’s encouraging.”

LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 30: Actress Amanda Peet (L) and David Benioff attend The 22nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at The Shrine Auditorium on January 30, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. 25650_018 (Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Turner)

Benioff also addressed some of the show’s most controversial moments, headlined by the scene in season 5’s “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” where Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa on their wedding night. Did he expect there to be a backlash?

"For sure, because there had been a scene in the previous season with Jaime and Cersei, where it was not quite as violent but was very much a non-consensual sex scene, and there was a massive uproar about that. And this was darker."

The Jaime-Cersei sex scene was another of the show’s most controversial moments, and it’s worth noting that several key people involved in that scene — from Lena Headey to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to director Alex Graves — went on record as saying that the scene did not depict a rape. Now, years later, David Benioff comes out and calls it a “non-consensual sex scene,” so to this day nobody can seem to get their story straight on this one.

Back to Sansa and Ramsay, the intent with the wedding night scene, at least, was more clear. “[Game of Thrones is] supposed to be a dark mirror to our world and a dark mirror to our medieval world, which was a horrific place for women,” Benioff said. “So I believe that this is what would have happened to Sansa on her wedding night, and all the writers did. So it was a brutal scene to watch for us and a brutal scene to shoot on the day, but I felt it was right for the story.”

We can debate whether Benioff has the right idea here, but let’s also note that, while all the writers felt this was the right way to portray the scene, all of the writers on season 5 were men.

Finally, Benioff reflected on the show coming to an end. “I think it’s time,” he said. “We’re ready to end it.”

"When we first pitched this to HBO, part of what we were excited about was the notion of telling a really grand story from beginning to middle to end. We got very lucky in the sense that people watched it and we were working at a certain time in television where cable had these big budgets and enabled us to do this incredibly expensive, very visual effects-heavy show, which I don’t think at any other time in history could have been done, just technologically.So it’s exciting to me that we’re at the end of the story. There’s no desire on our part to add on a year because the show’s going well, and we love our jobs. When we shoot that final day and we know we’re saying goodbye to the actors—not the last time because I hope we’ll see them again, but we’re not going to have them all together the same way—it will definitely be emotional."

The interview is fantastic. If you want to read more, including Benioff’s thoughts on seeing  select Thrones moments make their way into the wider culture, click here. Benioff’s recollections of getting mountains of rejection letters when he was first trying to write novels is particularly interesting, and good food for thought for anybody trying to make it in that business.

Next: Video: The Game of Thrones crew tests a trebuchet on the set of season 8

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