Interview (Written): David Benioff & D.B. Weiss (“Game of Thrones”)

A Deadline interview with David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, showrunners of the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones”:

Your background was books and features and you once said early on that your unfamiliarity with episodic TV sometimes left you short of scenes that had to be written hastily. What other learned lessons will help you the rest of your career?

Benioff & Weiss: One practical thing we’ve learned as writers is how to work almost anywhere. We had specific, persnickety routines, before. This chair, this coffee mug, this time of day. When we started Thrones, it quickly became apparent that our old ways of working would prevent us from getting the scripts done on time, and that this in itself could destroy the show. So we got better at working wherever we were, whenever we could. And that’s been really helpful, realizing that what we thought we “needed” to work effectively was really just a kind of magical thinking, and that we could get words down anywhere. They weren’t always good words. They often needed to be rewritten, and rewritten again. But they fed the machine, and kept things moving.

What’s the most enjoyable and challenging parts of working on this large a canvas, week after week?

Benioff & Weiss: The source of the joy and the challenge are the same: the opportunity to tell a story encompassing so many characters and so many places, over such a long stretch of time. To be able to bring a world to life, and actually have it be a world, as in, one with different continents, the one that George bequeathed to us. We try to maintain a strong sense of forward momentum, especially at this late stage in the story.

But even with all that, the scope of the thing gives us time to let characters spend a few minutes with each other here and there without propelling the plot forward.

For the rest of the interview, go here.