Game of Thrones showrunners discuss the tricky adaptation process

About a month back, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss popped up unexpectedly in Japan, talking about the final season of the show on Star Channel:

This was the first we’d heard from the showrunners since Game of Thrones wrapped up in May, and it seemed a little random. Why a Japanese outlet?

We learn why in a new interview, this time published on the website for Japanese internet radio station block.fm. Apparently, Benioff has had a yen to visit Japan on behalf of HBO since the early days of Game of Thrones, but there was never much reason to send them there. The opportunity to do some post-season 8 press finally made it happen.

And Benioff and Weiss talk about quite a lot in this interview, including their writing process. They actually hadn’t written much together before they were working on the show, and while they tried to write the script for the pilot together, they quickly realized that would be an unacceptably slow way to go about things. “So we just decided one of us would take the first half of the script, one of us would take the second half of the script and we would work separately on our own, then we would trade halves and he would rewrite my work and I would rewrite his work, and we would pass them back and forth until we got to a place where we forgot who wrote what, and it seemed like it was ready,” Weiss said.

“Which is why one half of every episode is amazing, and one half is terrible,” Benioff quipped. “Because Dan wrote the good parts.”

"Do we ever disagree about the writing? Yeah sometimes, but fewer than you might think, considering how many episodes we’ve written together. And we do a pretty detailed outline beforehand, so by the time we get to the actual script part, any of the big issues have generally been decided. We’ve definitely had some arguments about shots and editing things, and some score stuff, but few writing fights."

I’m not surprised that these two don’t fight much about writing; if there was a lot of tension, I don’t think they would have lasted eight seasons. “I think it’s that we have to write so much so quickly, every season we were writing 7-8 scripts, whatever it was,” Weiss remembered. “It was kind of hard to be too precious about what we were writing because there was just a lot of work to be done.”

Keep in mind that they’re mostly talking about the actual script-writing part of the process here; the plot of an episode would have already been thoroughly outlined before a single word was written.

Sticking with the writing process, Weiss mused on the difficulties of adapting a book series as sprawling as A Song of Ice and Fire for TV. “I mean movies are not television series, and series are not books,” he said. “They are different media, and there are different … I will not say different rules, but different requirements that each one offers and different things that a novel can achieve compared to what a television series can achieve. For example one is that you can have many more characters in a novel and find ways to keep track of all of them. I think our series was the absolute limit of how many characters you can have in a series and that it still makes sense.”

Benioff jumped right on to that train of thought: “That said, there are fewer characters in the series than there are in the books, so the series represents a kind of understanding, a condensation, of the number of characters in the book. So when you take characters out, the story must change accordingly because that person who was important to this plot is no longer there, so you must figure a different way to tell that story that is true to the spirit of the story, without some characters from the books.”

"So I would say that just making it viable and working on television required a lot of those changes. But we knew them, we had read the first four books by the time we started and we knew that by the time we reached the fourth book there was more history than we could do justice in even 10-hour seasons."

Maybe someday someone will tackle the titanic task of adapting A Song of Ice and Fire unabridged, and to that person, I saw good luck. Maybe invest in some reading glasses.

And do these two have a favorite character to write for, or a favorite character arc? “I mean the first person we ever approached about the show was Peter Dinklage because we knew him a little bit before we made the show and reading the books I was just picturing Peter from the beginning,” Benioff said. “And Peter is as funny in real life as he is on the show and writing for him, especially once we got to know him really well, was always fun because you just knew whatever you wrote he was gonna make it even better.”

"And in terms of character progression, the Stark sisters. We were talking about this before, but they were just kids when we first cast them, Sophie was 12 and Maisie was 11 and we have pictures of them before the original pilot which was shot a year before season 1 was shot and they’re just like these little kids, and now they’re both grown ups and have become these incredible actors. They both went on these very dark journeys as characters, both Sansa Stark and Arya. I just love those characters and love those two women, so for me I’d probably choose them."

Weiss agreed that it was hard to pick a favorite, and naturally both showrunners were thrilled that so many of the actors received Emmy nominations for their work in the final season (this interview was given before the actual Emmy ceremony).

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 22: D. B. Weiss (C, speaking), David Benioff (3rd L) and cast and crew of ‘Game of Thrones’ accept the Outstanding Drama Series award onstage during the 71st Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 22, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

I can’t argue with Benioff when he talks about loving the arcs the Stark sisters went on over the course of the series, but of course, fans know there was plenty of heated online discourse over the direction of those stories, and about the show in general, particularly in the later seasons. It ends up that the pair of them decided to stop looking at Google and Reddit and YouTube chatter back around season 2, back when the fan base was starting to build.

Of course, some stuff still slips through, as Benioff details:

"Sometimes it’s hard to avoid because you might have a friend that sends you things and says, ‘Hey did you guys know that you did something terrible?’ and be like, ‘Oh no, I didn’t know that til just now.’ But normally I try to avoid it, because you just go crazy and you start to have arguments in your head with people on the internet which is not a good way for mental peace."

Amen to that. Weiss had thoughts on this topic as well:

"There’s so much work to be done for us and for everyone involved in making this show, or any large show for that matter, and to add on to it that constant interaction…whether it’s social media or YouTube, we decided early on that wasn’t really in our best interest. And it really wasn’t in the best interests of the show either, it would have made it worse."

I can’t be the only fan to wonder if people involved in the show look at what’s being said about them online, and so far as the people at the top are concerned, it sounds like they don’t. Which is a good idea, obviously. There’s no way to do anything useful with the multiplicity of often contrasting voices out there, fun as it is to be a part of.

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The pair touch on a bunch more! Feel free to check out the full interview here.

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