The magical success of ‘Game of Thrones’

An exclusive interview with the creators of one of television’s most popular cult series, discussing the story behind the show’s fantastical rise.

By MOSHE ARENSTEIN
DAENERYS TARGARYEN, played by Emilia Clarke, surveys a map of the kingdom of which she is on a quest to reclaim her right as heir to the throne. (photo credit: HELEN SLOAN/HBO)
DAENERYS TARGARYEN, played by Emilia Clarke, surveys a map of the kingdom of which she is on a quest to reclaim her right as heir to the throne.
(photo credit: HELEN SLOAN/HBO)
Neither Dan Weiss nor David Benioff is sure why Game of Thrones is such a big hit in Israel.
It’s possible that the success of the show in the Holy Land could give us a clue how to solve the conflict in the Middle East – after all, the TV series is one continuous war.
“Maybe because it’s fiction, it’s not American or anywhere real,” Benioff says in a phone interview from their offices in Los Angeles.
Benioff and Weiss are the executive producers and writers of the show, a fantasy-war drama about dueling noble families which has gripped audiences the world over.
“One of the ways we convinced HBO this would be a great show is that we thought it could appeal to the whole world. It’s not about America or England or Korea or Brazil, none of us are from Westeros [one of the seven kingdoms in the story line].”
The story lines rely heavily on exploration of the notion of power and its effects on hierarchy, loyalty, corruption and punishment. “No one watching the show needs to feel like a foreigner peering through the glass, trying to understand the strange customs,” Benioff says.
“The customs are strange for all of us. So maybe this is one of the appeals to Israeli audiences.”
Indeed, the show has become a worldwide phenomenon.
According to HBO, it is shown in 207 countries and territories. “Every country experiences the show differently. It is really popular in Canada, which is the most peaceful place on earth. Maybe they identify with the ice,” Weiss jokes.
An average of five million live viewers watched the show’s Season 3 finale in the US, and it is considered among the most illegally downloaded TV series ever. The show has been nominated for 40 Emmys, winning 10. At the start of the fourth season, HBO committed to a fifth and sixth season.
Because of its high demand in Israel, Game of Thrones is shown on the Yes! cable channel simultaneously with its telecast in the US – the first time a show from abroad airs at the same time as its original broadcast. That means when the show premiers on Sunday evenings in the US, Israeli viewers can watch it live at 4 a.m. on Monday.
THE STORY behind the friendship of Benioff and Weiss has now become folklore. The two met as graduate students attending Trinity College Dublin, where they were studying Irish literature.
In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Weiss reminisced, “We were just two American Jews in Dublin with no Irish roots of any kind, trying to find a functional gym in Dublin in 1995.”
After university, the two moved to Hollywood, working a variety of odd jobs to break into the business. The New York City-born Benioff worked as a teacher and nightclub bouncer, while the Chicago native Weiss took on production assistant jobs. All the while the two wrote different scripts, waiting for their big break.
The first success came when a screenplay Benioff wrote, The 25th Hour, was picked up by Spike Lee. It starred US film star Edward Norton as a convicted New York drug dealer who, while cornered by the DEA, reevaluates his life over the course of a single day.
Benioff was then tapped to write the scripts for the blockbuster film Troy starring Brad Pitt, and the adaptation for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Weiss published the novel Lucky Wander Boy while also writing screenplays.
But their big TV break came with Game of Thrones. The story began in 2007 when Benioff was sent the fantasy novels of A Song of Ice and Fire, written by George R.R. Martin. At first, Benioff was not interested.
“There was no way I’m going to read these books,” he says.
“I haven’t read fantasy books in years, and here the shortest book was 800 pages and the longest one 1,100 pages.”
But the novels proved highly addictive, and Benioff was surprised by his state of suspense while reading. In one standout scene, a character is thrown out of a window of a castle tower – which Benioff says took him completely off-guard.
“I didn’t see that coming at all. I was so into it that after a month, my wife asked me: Are you still reading those books?” He passed them on to Weiss, who was equally hooked. “It was like crack on paper,” Weiss says.
It was then they decided to make it into a series for television, thinking the story was too long and too complicated to adapt into one movie. The key, they decided, was to be faithful to the books.
“The whole reason we wanted to write the adaptation is because we really loved these books. That’s why with even one or two minor exceptions, all the story lines and characters are in the TV show,” says Benioff.
However, explains Weiss, “it is easy to make the mistake to stay too faithful to the books and create a situation where you only have three minutes with each character, because you are going back and forth between all the plot lines.”
Next they had to sell the idea to Martin. During a long lunch, Benioff and Weiss told Martin they would like to pitch the story to HBO, to which the author replied, “I never imagined it anywhere else.”
But Martin had a test for the screenwriters, “Who do you think is John Snow’s real mother?” he asked, referring to one of the main characters in the series and one of the biggest mysteries to viewers. Benioff and Weiss relate that when they gave their answer, Martin kept a poker face, then smiled – and that was it. They were in. HOW DID Benioff and Weiss convince HBO that two writers, who had never done TV before, could get such a complicated project done? “We wrote this very long letter telling them that no one has reinvented fantasy in the way that HBO was known to do with other genres – like what The Sopranos did for gangsters – and this was their chance to do just that,” says Benioff.
The unique aspect of the series was that Benioff and Weiss could tell HBO how the series would play out over a few seasons.
“Because of the books, we could tell them ahead of time what the story arcs would be; for instance, that one of the most amazing scenes will occur in Season 3. It is sort of like a long novel with a beginning, middle and end, but we were starting to know where we were going – as opposed to some other TV series, when five years in you see they are trying to figure out where to go.
“We feel that we are right in the middle now – we are rounding the corner and heading for home,” says Benioff.
It still took them three years to make the pilot.
After investing endless effort and hours, they held a small pilot screening. But when one of their trusted business insider friends told them his opinion, it came out as follows: You have “a massive problem.”
“The massive problem was the whole pilot!” Weiss exclaims with laughter. “I wish it had just been one little ‘massive problem,’ as that would have been a minor problem. But the whole thing was a mess. The story was not understandable, the relationships were not clear.
And that line, ‘massive problem,’ stuck in my head.
“But we fixed it. It was a learning experience, to say the least.”
Despite the rocky start, HBO green-lighted the first season, which has evolved into a viewer cult obsession. One season of Game of Thrones has 100 locations, 3,000 costumes, 4,000 props, some 300 cast members and 700 crew members, and around 87,000 visual effect frames.
Four seasons later, on any given day, there are two directors shooting two different episodes in two different countries. What could possibly go wrong? “The saying on-set goes: ‘The worse the weather is gonna be, the better it’s going to look on screen,’” Benioff says.
The commitment to the show is palpable. Both Weiss and Benioff are married and have two kids each, and their families have adapted to their schedules and travel with them to Northern Ireland, the primary location for shooting, for long stays before returning to Los Angeles to attend school. Then Benioff and Weiss start visiting the other countries on the shooting schedule. The show is shot in spectacular locations in seven countries: Malta, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Croatia, Morocco, Iceland and in the US, California.
The next major deadline the authors faced was June 1, by which all scripts for Season 5 had to be ready. Following that, shooting starts at the end of July in Belfast, where they expect to stay till mid-December 2014.
WHAT IS it about this show that viewers grab onto? “Everyone is vulnerable,” Benioff jumps in. “It isn’t like going to a Spiderman movie where you know that Spiderman isn’t going to die. Here, the main guys are dying left and right. So you while you are attached to the characters, you know that your time with them might be short.
“We are completely immersed in the world of the show and the conflicts of the show, and there is never an attempt to shape it to history or resonate with things happening in the real world.”
Out of all the filming locations, unfortunately Israel did not make the shortlist. “We went to Morocco because they have a longstanding film industry there, and it was a good fit for Season 3. A lot has to do with geography, so it is about finding the widest range of geography to give us the scenery for this world and how we need to make it feel,” explains Weiss.
When asked if there is any Israeli connection to the show, Benioff placates with, “We are as close to Israelis as it gets on our crew,” though the majority of the crew is English and Scottish.
But why not Israel? The country has it all – oceans, deserts, mountains, even some snow. Maybe Season 7? I ask them. The line goes quiet, and clearly the rumors floating around about filming in Jerusalem are not true.
What about a Jewish angle, a biblical anecdote? I continue to push.
Benioff takes the bait. “We try to very consciously avoid biblical mentions since this isn’t our world – we wanted badly to use the word ‘Sodomite’ for example, but we couldn’t because there was no Sodom in their world, so the word wouldn’t have existed. We used pillow-biter instead. When you are trying to be nasty, there are ways that sound anachronistic and others that sound like they come from our world, so it is sometimes hard to find ways to be linguistically nasty to each other.”
I give it one more try. “Anything that relates to Middle East politics?” “We try to avoid real-world parallels when writing the show,” Benioff says. “There has never been a scene or plot line that functions as a commentary on current events. Instead, this fictional world allows us to explore what it means to be human in a place where Planet Earth politics and religions mean nothing, where the tribal allegiances we grew up with mean nothing and an invented set of tribal allegiances mean everything.
“But that doesn’t mean we don’t look for inspiration from real-world sources,” he continues.
“When Davos asks Melisandre, ‘How many ships does the Lord of Light have in his fleet?’ his question echoes Stalin’s question, ‘How many divisions does the pope have?’ “Littlefinger tells Ned Stark in season one: ‘We only make peace with our enemies, my lord. That’s why it’s called ‘making peace.’” This line was inspired by Moshe Dayan: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”
Benioff and Weiss work all year long, and are involved with all aspects of the show: sound, effects, art, acting. Is there one part in particular they enjoy most? For Weiss it’s the whole process, but he manages to point to one thing. “Being on set, the production is the biggest adrenaline rush. It is the most physically demanding, with six-day weeks and 10- to 12- hour shooting days. It is long, but the thrill of being out there with people that you love, doing what you love, is the best.”
“For me it’s casting,” says Benioff. “From the beginning it was a challenge first because there are so many parts, and then because you may have in your imagination an idea of what the character should be. But it is exciting to then meet the actors and find someone who is completely different.
“For example, Lena Headly when she read for Cersei [Lannister]. Everyone else who read that scene did it the way you’d expect an evil ice queen to be.
But Lena was damaged, funny and unique, and we knew that she was the one and we just had to convince her.”
“We searched for months and months to find Arya,” Benioff continues. “Nobody was quite right, and then Dan and I were at the pool in Morocco and looking at thumbnails, and saw Maisie Dee and thought she looked interesting. We wound up meeting her, and she was a great fit. Each character is a puzzle and we think that we have such a great cast, and it is so much fun to spend day after day with them.”
There is another problem looming. Martin has written five of the seven planned books, and based on his pace the programs are catching up too fast.
“We’ll figure it out,” Benioff says, nonplussed.
“We’re always talking to George and staying on top of what is going on in Westeros. We’ll look at the outline together of the coming season, and we really want to do as much justice to what he’s got coming.”
“It is much easier when you know how things will end up,” notes Benioff. What helps is that Martin is also a producer on the show.
What comes after for the relatively young writers of Game of Thrones? “Some sleep, hopefully,” Weiss says without hesitation.
“We began looking into a Stephen Hunter book – Dirty White Boys,’’ Benioff says. “An up-to-date Western. You know, people in jeans, cars, houses.
And no dragons.”
OK, so maybe finding correlations between Westeros and the Middle East conflict was a stretch. One has props, the other live ammunition. One is fantasy, one is real.
One is an escape, the other is here to stay.