The Creators Of 'Game Of Thrones' Talk About The Long Road To Their Newest Project
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In 2019, the final season of Game of Thrones aired, with writer-producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss now free to pursue other ventures. But after five years of silence, the two have now been talking about what is upcoming for them in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. That project is an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past book trilogy, which was released in the United States, and translated under the name of The Three-Body Problem.
Before arriving at The Three-Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss had a few other projects in the works that ended up nowhere. HBO had signed the duo on for the failed project known as Confederate, an alternate history series that would have seen the South successfully secede from the Union. It was meant to be an anti-racism story, but the reception to it was, as Weiss said, “kind of a low point,” with it being stated by many as woefully wrongheaded. The project was scrapped, and the two moved on.
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Then one of the scrapped Star Wars projects was to be helmed by them. “We wanted to do The First Jedi,” Benioff revealed. “Basically how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber…” Weiss then added jokingly, “And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson] called his movie The Last Jedi. He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.”
That wouldn’t be why the project was scrapped, however. Moreover, Lucasfilm didn’t want to continue with it. “We had a very specific story idea in mind,” Benioff said, “and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.” Lucasfilm has since returned to the idea of a story centred around the first Jedi, with the Dawn of the Jedi era film of James Mangold.
For The Three-Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss were given the books to read by Peter Friedlander, Netflix’s head of scripted, who had been wanting to adapt the saga for years. During a return from a Thrones promotional trip to Tokyo, “We finished within 10 minutes of each other,” Benioff said, “and Dan came over to my seat and said ‘What do you think?’ I said ‘Well, that ending is amazing.’ And Dan says, ‘We’ve got to do this, right?’”
Weiss added, “What excited us about Thrones when we read George’s books was that this was something we had never seen onscreen before. In a lot of ways, this couldn’t be more different from Game of Thrones, but it had that in common.” Benioff concluded with, “It was the first thing we’d come across since Thrones where we were actually scared. We knew this is going to be hard.”
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As the creators of the Game of Thrones series, HBO had it in their contracts that they would be guaranteed producer credits on all future spin-offs. But the two turned that offer down, with confused HBO. Weiss stated of the decision, “I don’t think there is such a thing as free money. For us, if our name is on it, especially that, while being completely detached and uninvolved, it felt like the strain that would come with that hands-off approach – with its success or failure or anything in between – was not worth it.”
As a final word, the duo talked about how they work with projects, using a rather fun analogy to sum it up. “It’s the elephant strategy versus the sea turtle strategy,” Weiss explained. “The sea turtle has a thousand babies and points them all toward the ocean and hopes 10 make it. An elephant puts two years into one baby and guards it with its life and is devastated if the poachers come knocking. There are people who do amazing-amazing stuff while overseeing many projects at once, and I respect their ability to do that. It’s just not what we’re good at.”
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