Benioff to TMZ on Theon’s gruesome scene last week.
David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, Game of Thrones writers and executive producers, appeared on KCRW’s UpClose a couple weeks ago. David & Dan talk about their background, the genesis of the show, the adaptation process and more in an entertaining and enlightening hour. This conversation was recorded live as part of KCRW’s UpClose series
One bit of news to come out of this interview: Season 4 is set to begin filming on July 8th.
‘Game of Thrones’ producers Q&A: Why season 3 is the most epic yet
David Benioff: We always talked about doing the third book in two seasons, but it’s not quite that neat. There’s not a halfway point in the book where all the story lines break. We’re drawing things in from other books and [adding] other plot lines that were implied by the books but not shown. It’s trickier in that sense. We could easily write a show about just, say, Bronn [Jerome Flynn]. The Bronn Show.
EW: Sellsword.
Benioff: Good title. We could do a great half-hour comedy with Sam [John Bradley] and Gilly [Hannah Murray]. It’s an embarrassment of riches. There’s so many great characters and you want to spend more time with them. George always wanted more hours per season. And it would be great, but we just can’t. It was getting to the point where we were turning in VFX shots on “Blackwater” [last season] a week before airing. It was getting to the point where Quality Control in New York for HBO had to get the tapes couriered with 20 minutes to spare. There’s no possible way for us to do an extra hour.
D.B. Weiss: The episodes will be longer though, slightly. We’re getting a few more minutes into each episode.
HBO has confirmed to us the full roster of directors and writers for season three. Here is the list:
Ep. 21
Writers: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Director: Dan Minahan
Ep. 22
Writer: Vanessa Taylor
Director: Dan Minahan
Ep. 23
Writers: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Directors: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Ep. 24
Writers: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Director: Alex Graves
“There’s almost another full episode’s worth of extra minutes spread across the season,” Weiss says. “One of the great liberties with HBO is we’re not forced to come in at a specific time. We can’t be under 50 minutes or over 60, but that gives us a lot of flexibility.”
“A super-sized season, as befitting Storm of Swords,” Benioff adds. “Last year we had a lot of 52-minute episodes. This year is a lot of 56, 57.”
David Benioff on The Late Late Show. Benioff comes on at the 27:15 mark.
*POTENTIAL SPOILERS*
“Elements of this kind of battle have been done before, particularly Helm’s Deep sequence in LOTR. Can you talk about how you went about dramatizing Blackwater in a fresh way?
Weiss: On the resources we have, you’re never gonna be able to compete with that level of spectacle. It really has to become more about pulling into the characters and making it more about their personal experience of this event rather than giving us the giant bird’s eye view.
Benioff: One great advantage we have over the movies is that when one of our characters wades into battle, we’ve spent almost 19 hours with these characters. You know them so well and hopefully you’re worried for them. And some of them are gonna die. There is a way of shooting a battle where you see an army of a hundred thousand attacking an army of two hundred thousand. There’s also the ground’s eye view where you’re an infantryman and you’re running out there with an axe or a sword or something, you’re not seeing the grand scale of it. You’re just kind of seeing what’s directly in front of you. And that can be a really visceral way of shooting a battle.”
A clip from a 30-min CNN special that will air on Sunday about the creation of the Dothraki language featuring new interviews with David J. Peterson, Emilia Clarke, Amrita Acharia, and David Benioff & D.B. Weiss. Looks interesting!
D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, writers and executive producers of Game of Thrones (Credit: HBO/Helen Sloan)
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss discussing Game of Thrones in the teaser for the You Win or You Die preview.
“It was crucial that people understood that this was a rite of passage for her, but we didn’t want to load down Viserys (Harry Lloyd) and Jorah (Iain Glen) with a lot of clunky exposition,” Benioff told The Hollywood Reporter. “The biggest challenge was finding the right balance of dialogue and context to make the meaning of the scene clear without spoon-feeding people.”
For the scene, in which Clarke wound up eating several pounds of a horse heart made of gummy bears that the actress notes in DVD commentary tasted of bleach, director Dan Minahan told the actress that it was a “make or break moment” for Daenerys, where she’d either be accepted or not by the Dothraki.
“There was no need to tell Emilia anything about how gruesome a task it was to choke down a horse heart,” Weiss notes. “Apparently, eating several pounds of gummy bear heart is almost as gruesome as the real thing.”
