Game of Thrones showrunners would “definitely” do some things differently

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss look back at the end of the show, the messy reaction to its finale, and that damn coffee cup.

We’re over a year out from the series finale of Game of Thrones, and generally speaking, the furor that followed it has died down, although it definitely lives on in the memory of fans. Remember the million-plus people who signed a petition to remake the eighth and final season of the show with “competent writers”? Things got ugly.

Since then, fans have continued to debate the merits and demerits of that final season, but we’ve gotten precious little input from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss about what they were thinking when they put that final season together. Now, thanks to James Hibberd’s oral history of the show, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, that’s changing.

“There definitely are things [over the course of the show] we would do differently,” Benioff said. “I don’t know if there’s anything I would want to discuss publicly.”

Now, this quote specifies that Benioff is talking about things he would change “over the course of the show,” but I’m guessing he’s mostly talking about the final couple of seasons, given the backlash. And I get why he wouldn’t be willing to share the specifics right now — these guys poured years of their lives into this show, so they probably still don’t have a ton of distance — but I hope he will someday, because frankly, I’m very curious.

Weiss also gave his take, talking about the backlash specifically. “Prince once said something about how any record you listen to that you think is terrible, somebody worked themselves to the bone to make it. So many people work so hard on any aspect of a thing. So when you say something critical it can sound like you’re blaming somebody else. And really the only people who are to blame are us – and I sure as hell don’t want to blame us.”

Reading this, it kind of sounds like the showrunners have come around to the idea that not everything about the show — and the final season in particular — worked. Not all of the producers are on board with that, though. “I thought [season 8] was the best work we had ever done,” said producer Christopher Newman. “Once everybody gets over the anger of the internet, they will see they wrote some fantastic stuff.”

"The criticism doesn’t seem to fairly consider what an extraordinary achievement the whole thing was. When people say ‘I wasn’t happy with the ending,’ I think ‘If you wrote the ending you wanted, I bet nobody would have been happy with your ending either!’"

Executive producer Carolyn Strauss thought along similar lines, saying that “there’s always going to be somebody in their comfy chair who has the better ending.”

"There were a lot of practical and storytelling factors that were never considered by someone doing a theoretical finale. If other people have a better idea, well, they can go do it themselves."

Benioff and Weiss may not want to share details of what they would change, but elsewhere in the book, they do talk about probably the show’s most famous snafu: the coffee cup visible during the after-battle celebration in “The Last of the Starks.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Benioff said. “When we got the email about it the next day, I honestly thought someone was pranking us, because there had been things before where people were like, ‘Oh, look at that plane in the background!’ and somebody had Photoshopped it in. I thought, ‘There’s no way there’s a coffee cup in there.’ Then when I saw it on the TV I was like, ‘How did I not see that?’”

Weiss was similarly flabbergasted. “I’d seen that shot one thousand times, and we’re always looking at their faces or how the shot sat with the shots on either side of it,” he said. “I felt like we were the participants in a psychology experiment, like where you don’t see the gorillas running around in the background because you’re counting the basketballs.”

That gorilla-basketball thing is real, by the way:

“Every production that’s ever existed had things like this,” Weiss continued. “You can see a crew member in Braveheart; there’s an actor wearing a wristwatch in Spartacus. But now people can rewind things and everybody is talking to each other in real time. So one person saw the coffee cup, rewound it, and then everybody did.”

And then they immediately edited it out.

I agree with Weiss here. I had issues with the final season of Game of Thrones, but little production mistakes like that just happen. In the cast of season 8, the coffee cup kind of became symbolic of people’s problems with the show, but by itself it wasn’t any better or worse than snafus that always have (and always will) happen on busy, complicated sets.

You can read more stories like this Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, available now.

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h/t NME, The Hollywood Reporter