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6 Filmmaking Tips From the Creators of Game of Thrones

As the sixth season of Game of Thrones is about to begin, we look at the careers of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and share six bits of advice they’ve imparted over the years.
By  · Published on April 20th, 2016

Writing for TV Will Set You Free

Benioff and Weiss have written novels, feature films, and now television. The last of the three appears to be their preference due to the freedom it gives them in a multitude of ways. In a lengthy interview with Vanity Fair in 2014, while discussing the reason Game of Thrones had to be a series and whether or not they know its end point, they argued for the benefits of writing for the small screen. First, Benioff:

one of the things that’s always kind of frustrating, writing feature scripts, is there’s always so much time pressure on it. You’re trying to tell a story in roughly a hundred script pages, and that doesn’t allow for a huge amount of character development. It means that it’s almost like a short story. Everything’s got to be so concise. You’re constantly cutting, cutting, cutting. And so the idea, the attraction, of having this massive canvas, where you can take these characters, characters that we loved from the books, and have years to spend on them and to get to know them and to tell their stories with the time and patience—and the idea of just having a story that’s got a real beginning, middle and end. Even some of my favorite series from the past, you kind of get a sense, midway through, I don’t think they really knew where it was going from the beginning. They might have figured it out by the last season, like, “Here’s where we want to go.” But a lot of series don’t have a real sense of narrative arc. With this one, we had a pretty good idea where we wanted to go from the beginning. We had no idea if we’d get to take it there. We still don’t.

And Weiss adds shortly after:

In the first season there’s a scene where it’s Tyrion, Bronn, and Shae, playing a drinking game for nine minutes. It’s a novelistic license that you can take. As long as it gives you insight into the character and it keeps you entertained, you can do that without any qualms. You can’t do that in a movie, really, unless it’s some kind of three-hour epic movie.

Know Your Show Before You Throw

It might be easy to pitch something half-baked to executives and even audiences — say, “It’s The Sopranos in Middle-Earth,” as HBO initially sold Game of Thrones as — but from one creative to another you need to really know what you’re creating. Benioff and Weiss have told the story of their first long lunch meeting with George R.R. Martin in many an interview, how it helped them to be able to respond to questions about characters from the books, including some where the answers are not directly stated (yet) on the page.

Had they just been a couple of guys with a minor interest in just cashing in on the books, they wouldn’t have convinced him they were the ones to translate his words for the screen. The first, brief instance of the story seems to have shown up in a 2011 New York Times interview, but it was elaborated further in the 2013 Academy of Television Arts and Sciences panel seen below. Here’s the quote from Weiss:

He asked us, “Who is Jon Snow’s mother?”  We had discussed it before, and we gave a shocking answer.  At that point, George didn’t actually say whether or not we were right or wrong, but his smile was his tell.  We knew we had passed the Wonka test, at that point.

However: total familiarity with the material helped when throwing the pitch, but it backfired for them in the production of the pilot, in a way. They knew the story so well, they didn’t realize that they failed to communicate all the necessary details in their script and the show made from it. Here’s that other oft-told story, via Variety in 2015:

Benioff: God, we got everything wrong on a very basic level with the writing of it. We brought three of our friends over just to get a reaction from them. Watching them watch the pilot was a deeply humiliating, painful experience, because these are very smart individuals, and it just clearly wasn’t working for any of them on a very basic level.
At the very end of the pilot, Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pushes Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) out the window. Jaime is lying with his sister, Cersei (Lena Headey), and none of (our friends) realized that Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister, which is a major, major plot point that we had somehow failed to establish.

Weiss: We’ve learned a lot about how information needs to flow effectively amongst a group of people. They need to be fed information, and it needs to be on this constant conveyor belt. The conveyor belt wasn’t moving fast enough, and people weren’t getting what they needed in a timely fashion. We learned how to make decisions more quickly and how to streamline that process.

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Christopher Campbell began writing film criticism and covering film festivals for a zine called Read, back when a zine could actually get you Sundance press credentials. He's now a Senior Editor at FSR and the founding editor of our sister site Nonfics. He also regularly contributes to Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and is the President of the Critics Choice Association's Documentary Branch.