For over a decade, David Benioff and Dan Weiss have labored to bring Game of Thrones to the small screen. The show has succeeded beyond what anyone could have predicted, and now, it’s almost at an end. The pair sat down with Entertainment Weekly to talk about what that means for them, what kind of reaction they want from the ending, and more.
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Let’s start with that ending. According to Weiss, the two of them have been planning it “for at least five years” — they were talking about it during season 3. “On the one hand, when you’ve been working on something for 10 years, knowing you’re writing the last episodes is harder because there’s a lot more weight and pressure on those scenes,” Weiss explained. “’Is a line right?’ seems more important than in seasons past. On the other hand, the motivations behind each scene are something you’ve been thinking about for five years, so the foundations in your mind are stronger for what you’re putting on paper. But you still find yourself spending a lot more time to get it right.”
That’s part of the reason Benioff and Weiss decided to direct the series finale themselves. They’ve been sitting with these ideas for so long that it didn’t seem right to hand it off to someone else to realize. “When something has been sitting with you for so long, you have such a specific sense of the way each moment should play and feel,” Weiss said. “So it’s not really fair to ask somebody else to get that right. We’d be lurking over their shoulder every take driving them crazy, making it hard for them to do their job. If we’re going to drive anybody crazy, it might as well be ourselves.”
As for the audience reaction, they’re hoping for the best. “I’m hoping we get the Breaking Bad argument where it’s like, “Is that an A or an A+?” said Weiss. “I want that to be the argument.”
"We want people to love it. It matters a lot to us. We’ve spent 11 years doing this. We also know no matter what we do, even if it’s the optimal version, that a certain number of people will hate the best of all possible versions. There is no version where everybody says, “I have to admit, I agree with every other person on the planet that this is the perfect way to do this” — that’s an impossible reality that doesn’t exist. You hope you’re doing the best job you can, the version that works better than any other version, but you know somebody is not going to like it. I’ve been that person with other things, where people are loving something and I’m going, “Yeah, that’s okay. I was hoping for more."
Benioff agrees that while they want the ending to rock people’s worlds, but isn’t expecting everyone to agree. And that’s part of the point. “From the beginning, we’ve talked about how the show would end,” he said. “A good story isn’t a good story if you have a bad ending. Of course we worry. It’s also part of the fun of any show that people love arguing about it.”
"I loved the way David Chase ended The Sopranos [with its surprising cut to black]. I was one of those people who thought my TV had gone out. I got up and was checking the wires, unable to believe my cable had gone out in the most important moment of my favorite TV series. I think that was the best of all possible endings for that show. But a lot of people hated it. I’ve gotten into a lot of arguments with people about why that was a great ending, but people felt legitimately cheated and that’s their right to feel that way, just as it’s my right to feel like they’re idiots."
I think it’s safe to assume there will be spirited debate after the series ends, and I’m here for it.
Now, obviously Benioff and Weiss aren’t going to spoil season 8. They worked overtime to make sure leaks would be kept to a minimum and still worry that something could get out. (“here have been issues that have happened in postproduction, or a week before an episode airs,” Benioff said. “So we’re entering the most dangerous time.”) Still, EW did get them to discuss what they’re excited about for the final season, from the performances of the actors to to new relationships between characters. “Jon and Dany are obviously together-together now,” said Weiss. “We didn’t have much time, or any time, to explore that relationship as a real relationship in the seventh season. It came to fruition at the end. It was a lot of fun to write them meeting each other, and now there’s a new kind of relationship between them. And here they’re together from the beginning.”
Below: Jon and Dany, together-together:
Will that last once they find out they’re related and have competing claims for the Iron Throne? Hard to say.
Beyond that, season 8 is — obviously — the climax of the show, and Weiss is excited for long simmering conflicts to finally come into the foreground:
"The show began with the threat in the North. From the beginning, there were all of these squabbles that were going on between people that seemed important happening against the backdrop of much larger and more momentous events that only a few people who lived on the fringes of the political world knew about. This always was the overarching structure of the series: The very slow burn of the rise of the [Army of the Dead in the] Far North and the [rise of Daenerys and her dragons in the] Far East. If you live in the capital, everything that matters to you is happening right in front of you while the things happening in the flyover parts of the world don’t really matter. So the things driving the story are from the edges of the earth, and it seems fitting that these things from the east and the north should come together to decide the fate of everybody in the middle, who didn’t even know about them until recently."
And then there’s the barn-burning Battle of Winterfell, a spectacular clash between the living and the dead that promises to be the longest and most impressive action set piece in the show’s history — it may even be the longest sustained battle sequence in film history. “Having the largest battle doesn’t sound very exciting — it actually sounds pretty boring,” said Benioff. “Part of our challenge, and really challenge, is how to keep that compelling. If it’s just humans hacking and slashing at wights for 55 minutes, it’s going to quickly become dull. We’ve had big battles since season 2. But just because we have the budget to do bigger battles doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be more exciting or have more to do with the story. It always comes back to what’s best for the story. We’ve been building toward this since the very beginning and it’s the living against the dead, and you can’t do that in a 12-minute sequence.”
Weiss agrees, underlining the importance of characters driving the action rather than the other way around:
"We’ve been lucky enough to have 70-plus hours to tell you who everybody is. There are so many individual stories you bring to that situation. The best action is driven by character, not by how many swords and spears you can swing around. It’s driven by who is Arya Stark — she made it to this stage of her development, so how does that come to bear in the events she’s thrust into? Then add 20 to that, because there are 20 people you care about in this situation. That’s a huge challenge, but it’s also a lot of fun. Usually things of this scope tend to be in movies because they take a lot of time and resources. We’ve been lucky enough to mount something of this level with characters that have a television level of investment poured into them."
I like hearing how they think about battle scenes. It makes me optimistic that we’ll see something truly special when the Battle of Winterfell rolls round on April 28. Also, pray for Arya:
Benioff and Weiss also talked a little about the show’s ever-evolving relationship to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. “ used to be that the books would spoil the show for people — and luckily it did not, for the most part,” said Benioff. “Now that the show is ahead of the books, it seems the show could ruin the books for people. So one thing we’ve talked to George about is that we’re not going to tell people what the differences are, so when those books come out people can experience them fresh.”
It’s no secret that the show has become pretty different from the books lately, and even though Martin told them the ending he had in mind years ago, there’s no guarantee he won’t change his mind. “George discovers a lot of stuff while he’s writing,” Benioff continued. “I don’t think that final book is not written in stone yet — it’s not written on paper yet. As George says, he’s a gardener and he’s waiting to see how those seeds blossom.”
You can read more with Benioff and Weiss here — it’s a long interview — but here are a few other quick points:
- According to Benioff, Sophie Turner was the first cast member to get back to them after they sent out the scripts, “so she gets credit for racing through all six scripts in like an hour or something.” Others, like Kit Harington, didn’t read them at all and showed up to the first table read fresh.
- Did anyone in the cast read the scripts and say, ‘This isn’t what I wanted for my character?’ Benioff: “I don’t think anyone said anything like that.” Weiss: “They seemed to get the dramatic necessity behind it.”
- As writing partners, Benioff and Weiss are usually in sync when it comes to the big stuff, but they’ll argue for a long time about little things, like “how many frames to leave at the end of a shot,” or “whether the take where an actor is smiling or just sort-of smiling is better.”
- The Game of Thrones team went to extreme lengths to prevent leaks from the set, but sometimes it was for naught, like the time they set giant shipping containers in front of Titanic Studios in Belfast to block the set from view, and then a giant Ferris wheel went up right across the street for a concert series. Doh.
Game of Thrones season 8 starts April 14. Here we go.
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