'Game Of Thrones' Recap And An Interview With Executive Producer D.B. Weiss
By MAUREEN RYAN
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Here is Part 1 of our conversation, and look for the third portion of this interview soon. "Game of Thrones" fans will also want to check out HuffPost TV's interviews with Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Richard Madden (Robb Stark).
Someone pointed out to me that HBO shows typically don’t run for 10 or 12 seasons. My response was, but this is a somewhat anomalous show for HBO in a few ways. So to me, that wasn't an area of concern -- whether the show would ultimately get the number of seasons it would need to tell the full story. I guess I just assume that given the upward trajectory of the ratings and the show's media buzz, it's not a huge issue at this point. But is it ever an area of concern for you and David Benioff [co-executive producer]? Do you ever think that it would really need 10 or 12 seasons and that's a long time for HBO to commit to a show?
Well, I guess typical HBO shows don’t involve dragons or ice demons either. [Laughs.] So in some ways, this is clearly not a typical HBO show, and in other ways, we think it is very much a typical HBO show. Yeah, we realize if it all goes well, it could potentially be quite a long commitment, but we realized that going in. We'd read the books, same as anyone, and we had spoken to George about where things were going, and we went in with eyes open, knowing that if all went well, we would end up with a very, very long, coherent story that spanned several seasons of television. That was the attraction for us, really. I mean, I just I feel like that’s something new. Maybe with the exception of "The Wire," which has that overarching, novelistic feeling to it, there are few examples of that kind of truly long-form, consistent storytelling out there, especially in this genre, which seems so tailor-made for it. It seems to be a feature of this genre -- building a world of this size and playing [the story] out over many, many years. George has done a better job of that than anyone that I know of. That was really what it was all about for us.
If you thought things were looking dicey for the show at any point, would that ever tempt you to change the story to kind of leave things in a more conclusive place at the end of a particular season?
No. It's always seemed like an all-or-nothing, damn-the-torpedoes kind of enterprise. It's something that you're either going to do right or you're not going to do at all. So to the best of our ability, we're going to keep trying to do it right and not make any emergency/contingency plans because I don't think fear is going to help make the show be what it should be. I mean, George’s series is a bold series in many ways and we hope to emulate that and really go for broke on it.
As far as the adaptation itself goes, I feel like the show has gained a lot of confidence.
Thank you. It means a lot to us to hear you say so.
Oh, well, as I said in my Season 2 review, I really I did love so many aspects of Season 1, especially towards the end of the season. And over the course of it, I really felt there had been this growth and this momentum that developed. But Season 2 -- it seems to have taken a great leap forward. And I hope that doesn’t sound like a backwards insult of some kind.
No, I think in every aspect of the production, it just felt like ["Game of Thrones"] kind of found its groove in the second season [in a lot of ways and] in terms of just the voice of the show. It’s an overused term, but I can’t think of a better one. In terms of the tone of the show and what fit in the show and what didn’t fit in the show, we felt like we had a better sense of that this year than we did the first year. So it's just good to hear that somebody else thought so too, because sometimes, you think those things and you're completely wrong.
Well, to me, it was a sense of feeling like there was this greater confidence in many arenas, like you said -- knowing what works and what doesn't from a visual standpoint, from a tonal standpoint, from an adaptation standpoint. Is that a good word to use -- confidence?
Yeah. Sometimes it's a confidence to violate the letter of the books to do better service to the spirit of the books, which is something we did in the first season ... It really is about the show finding its own legs. I do think it really is about just being willing to take the risks that are necessary to do justice to the show as a show.
Were there any sort of staffing changes that you made or certain production things that you can point to in terms of the Season 2 leap forward? I know you brought Alan Taylor on board as a producer and director.
Yeah, I think there were, probably. It's so hard to think about. There are so many people who are such integral parts of the show and the machinery of the show [is vast]. Alan certainly is one of [the key players]. By the time Season 2 is finished, he'll have directed 6 of the 20 episodes. It's almost a third of the show. We feel like his look in many ways epitomizes the way we want the show to look. The way he directs is just something we've had so much love and admiration for, and now, so much jealousy since he's been stolen away to go do "Thor 2." So we love you, Alan. And fuck you, "Thor"!
You just broke my heart, sir. I'm going to go in the corner and cry.
I know. I makes me sad, but everyone is happy for him obviously and jealous and greedy. We want to keep him for ourselves.
No doubt.
But two people who have just been completely instrumental who don't see a whole lot of media because they're too busy actually toiling away on the nitty-gritty of getting things done are [producer Bernadette] Caulfield and [co-producer] Chris Newman. Bernie came on for Season 2, and the show is an immensely complicated and ambitious thing to achieve on a television schedule: shooting 10 hours of drama and trying to make it as cinematic and as epic as you possibly can, but in the amount of time you would usually spend on a two-and-half-hour movie. You have to do four times that much, and it shoots in many different countries with an immense cast of characters and lots of production challenges surrounding the action and the horses and the visual effects and the elaborate sets. There are just so many moving pieces to it, if we didn’t have Bernie and Chris keeping those moving pieces in order and well-oiled and constantly going forward, the whole thing would collapse under its own weight in the space of a week.
What's been rewarding for me as a viewer is that it’s not just that these are beautiful pictures and the visuals are epic or even really down-and-dirty and gritty. It's that when all of these things come together -- the feeling, the tone, the visuals, the writing and acting -- you get so many different nuances that it's as if it was 100 pages of the book that were condensed in a scene or a sequence.
That's always the goal. All you can do is work as hard as you can and have everybody around you working as hard as they can and [you] hope that you can achieve what you just summarized. I think that really is the idea. You want it to be something that will withstand multiple viewings and something that will invite multiple viewings and something that people can really lose themselves in in the way we lost ourselves in George’s books the first and second and third times we read them. The immersiveness of the experience is really is one of the big draws of the project for us and it remains one of our goals with the show: to just have something that every Sunday night, people can turn on and disappear into.
It seems, as you said, there are perhaps more scenes that maybe didn’t necessary occur in the books, at least not the way we see them on the show, but these scenes draw upon information that is in the books or convey information that we need to know. Do you and David feel more confident and more sure of yourselves when you take on things like that? Is it happening more this season, do you think?
Yeah, I think it does happen more this season. It's episode to episode -- there is no blueprint for it. [Through the post-production process], you watch each episode many, many times, and you realize as you're watching them that some of them have a great deal of new material and some of them are weighted in favor of the scenes that appear in the books.
It really is a question of: What’s the best way to get the characters where they’re going? What’s the best way to unfold [their lives] dramatically? What’s going to be the most satisfying way? Sometimes, the dramatic necessity pulls you away from the book. If the book deals with a piece of character information in a expositional way, where you [learn] a backstory way that's very hard to dramatize, maybe you come into that element of a character from a different direction.
Look for the final part of the D.B. Weiss interview this week.
Source.
I like Benioff a lot more than Weiss, so as long as he keeps giving the interviews I'm good. But this interview was ok from Weiss imo. Also, this gif is me during next week's episode tbh. GARDEN OF BONES, INDEED.
![Image and video hosting by TinyPic]()
By MAUREEN RYAN
Here is Part 1 of our conversation, and look for the third portion of this interview soon. "Game of Thrones" fans will also want to check out HuffPost TV's interviews with Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Richard Madden (Robb Stark).
Someone pointed out to me that HBO shows typically don’t run for 10 or 12 seasons. My response was, but this is a somewhat anomalous show for HBO in a few ways. So to me, that wasn't an area of concern -- whether the show would ultimately get the number of seasons it would need to tell the full story. I guess I just assume that given the upward trajectory of the ratings and the show's media buzz, it's not a huge issue at this point. But is it ever an area of concern for you and David Benioff [co-executive producer]? Do you ever think that it would really need 10 or 12 seasons and that's a long time for HBO to commit to a show?
Well, I guess typical HBO shows don’t involve dragons or ice demons either. [Laughs.] So in some ways, this is clearly not a typical HBO show, and in other ways, we think it is very much a typical HBO show. Yeah, we realize if it all goes well, it could potentially be quite a long commitment, but we realized that going in. We'd read the books, same as anyone, and we had spoken to George about where things were going, and we went in with eyes open, knowing that if all went well, we would end up with a very, very long, coherent story that spanned several seasons of television. That was the attraction for us, really. I mean, I just I feel like that’s something new. Maybe with the exception of "The Wire," which has that overarching, novelistic feeling to it, there are few examples of that kind of truly long-form, consistent storytelling out there, especially in this genre, which seems so tailor-made for it. It seems to be a feature of this genre -- building a world of this size and playing [the story] out over many, many years. George has done a better job of that than anyone that I know of. That was really what it was all about for us.
If you thought things were looking dicey for the show at any point, would that ever tempt you to change the story to kind of leave things in a more conclusive place at the end of a particular season?
No. It's always seemed like an all-or-nothing, damn-the-torpedoes kind of enterprise. It's something that you're either going to do right or you're not going to do at all. So to the best of our ability, we're going to keep trying to do it right and not make any emergency/contingency plans because I don't think fear is going to help make the show be what it should be. I mean, George’s series is a bold series in many ways and we hope to emulate that and really go for broke on it.
As far as the adaptation itself goes, I feel like the show has gained a lot of confidence.
Thank you. It means a lot to us to hear you say so.
Oh, well, as I said in my Season 2 review, I really I did love so many aspects of Season 1, especially towards the end of the season. And over the course of it, I really felt there had been this growth and this momentum that developed. But Season 2 -- it seems to have taken a great leap forward. And I hope that doesn’t sound like a backwards insult of some kind.
No, I think in every aspect of the production, it just felt like ["Game of Thrones"] kind of found its groove in the second season [in a lot of ways and] in terms of just the voice of the show. It’s an overused term, but I can’t think of a better one. In terms of the tone of the show and what fit in the show and what didn’t fit in the show, we felt like we had a better sense of that this year than we did the first year. So it's just good to hear that somebody else thought so too, because sometimes, you think those things and you're completely wrong.
Well, to me, it was a sense of feeling like there was this greater confidence in many arenas, like you said -- knowing what works and what doesn't from a visual standpoint, from a tonal standpoint, from an adaptation standpoint. Is that a good word to use -- confidence?
Yeah. Sometimes it's a confidence to violate the letter of the books to do better service to the spirit of the books, which is something we did in the first season ... It really is about the show finding its own legs. I do think it really is about just being willing to take the risks that are necessary to do justice to the show as a show.
Were there any sort of staffing changes that you made or certain production things that you can point to in terms of the Season 2 leap forward? I know you brought Alan Taylor on board as a producer and director.
Yeah, I think there were, probably. It's so hard to think about. There are so many people who are such integral parts of the show and the machinery of the show [is vast]. Alan certainly is one of [the key players]. By the time Season 2 is finished, he'll have directed 6 of the 20 episodes. It's almost a third of the show. We feel like his look in many ways epitomizes the way we want the show to look. The way he directs is just something we've had so much love and admiration for, and now, so much jealousy since he's been stolen away to go do "Thor 2." So we love you, Alan. And fuck you, "Thor"!
You just broke my heart, sir. I'm going to go in the corner and cry.
I know. I makes me sad, but everyone is happy for him obviously and jealous and greedy. We want to keep him for ourselves.
No doubt.
But two people who have just been completely instrumental who don't see a whole lot of media because they're too busy actually toiling away on the nitty-gritty of getting things done are [producer Bernadette] Caulfield and [co-producer] Chris Newman. Bernie came on for Season 2, and the show is an immensely complicated and ambitious thing to achieve on a television schedule: shooting 10 hours of drama and trying to make it as cinematic and as epic as you possibly can, but in the amount of time you would usually spend on a two-and-half-hour movie. You have to do four times that much, and it shoots in many different countries with an immense cast of characters and lots of production challenges surrounding the action and the horses and the visual effects and the elaborate sets. There are just so many moving pieces to it, if we didn’t have Bernie and Chris keeping those moving pieces in order and well-oiled and constantly going forward, the whole thing would collapse under its own weight in the space of a week.
What's been rewarding for me as a viewer is that it’s not just that these are beautiful pictures and the visuals are epic or even really down-and-dirty and gritty. It's that when all of these things come together -- the feeling, the tone, the visuals, the writing and acting -- you get so many different nuances that it's as if it was 100 pages of the book that were condensed in a scene or a sequence.
That's always the goal. All you can do is work as hard as you can and have everybody around you working as hard as they can and [you] hope that you can achieve what you just summarized. I think that really is the idea. You want it to be something that will withstand multiple viewings and something that will invite multiple viewings and something that people can really lose themselves in in the way we lost ourselves in George’s books the first and second and third times we read them. The immersiveness of the experience is really is one of the big draws of the project for us and it remains one of our goals with the show: to just have something that every Sunday night, people can turn on and disappear into.
It seems, as you said, there are perhaps more scenes that maybe didn’t necessary occur in the books, at least not the way we see them on the show, but these scenes draw upon information that is in the books or convey information that we need to know. Do you and David feel more confident and more sure of yourselves when you take on things like that? Is it happening more this season, do you think?
Yeah, I think it does happen more this season. It's episode to episode -- there is no blueprint for it. [Through the post-production process], you watch each episode many, many times, and you realize as you're watching them that some of them have a great deal of new material and some of them are weighted in favor of the scenes that appear in the books.
It really is a question of: What’s the best way to get the characters where they’re going? What’s the best way to unfold [their lives] dramatically? What’s going to be the most satisfying way? Sometimes, the dramatic necessity pulls you away from the book. If the book deals with a piece of character information in a expositional way, where you [learn] a backstory way that's very hard to dramatize, maybe you come into that element of a character from a different direction.
Look for the final part of the D.B. Weiss interview this week.
Source.
I like Benioff a lot more than Weiss, so as long as he keeps giving the interviews I'm good. But this interview was ok from Weiss imo. Also, this gif is me during next week's episode tbh. GARDEN OF BONES, INDEED.
