Game of Thrones' showrunners talk about writing Season 8

The hype game for Game of Thrones Season 7 is at the maximum right now, with the season premiere being only 3 days away.  A lot of cast and crew interviews have been dropping, and among the latest bunch, is one from the people responsible for adapting Game of Thrones for TV, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, and they discussed writing Season 8. Read on!

David Benioff and Dan Weiss were interviewed by TIME as a part of their Game of Thrones special, and they talked about quite a few things. Starting off, they were asked how long the writing process takes, to which Weiss replied :

“It’s hard to say with this one especially, because so much of the endgame is stuff that we’ve been discussing for at least four or five years, if not longer. So a lot of the pieces have been put on the board years ago. You could go back to season 2 and some of these ideas started to come out.

We did 7, we sort of planned 7 and 8 together in a way, and we focused more on 7, but as we were focusing on 7, we were putting stuff into place for 8 as well.”

The pair had an interesting dialogue about how they divide up the writing of a season :

“BENIOFF: We really do split it. Writing-wise, we split halves of the script. We’ll have an argument before the season where we’ll go over the coming season. There will be six episodes, and I’ll say here are the halves that I want to write last half of episode whatever — and Dan will say…

WEISS: Those are exactly the halves that I want to write!

BENIOFF: And then we’ll do some horse-swapping.”

Weiss went on to talk about how Season 8 was different in this matter :

“This was the hardest season. Usually, it’s figured out within 40 seconds. This season was a whole day of emails going back and forth. The final season — who writes which half, where the scene break would be, the second half of an episode, are you including that scene or not including that scene? It got to be more contentious than it’s been before.”

So, how long have they known how the story will proceed towards the end? Apparently they found out between Season 2 & Season 3.  Benioff said :

“That’s when we started talking to George and he was giving us a sense of things he was working on that were to come, that’s when he told us about the Hodor backstory, and endgame stuff. He had some great stuff that he could share with us, like the Hodor thing, but a lot of it, he wasn’t sure yet, because he was writing, and he discovers things by writing. For us as TV writer-producers, we have to be architects. Everything has to be planned out really far in advance. And for us, we can’t say we’re going to stop and figure things out for a couple years. We know we have to have a season every year, pretty much. We knew we were barreling towards an ending, because we knew from the start the show would run seven or eight years.”

Now, as you know, Game of Thrones has surpassed the storyline of the books, and we are now in uncharted waters. So how much pressure do the showrunners have to stick to how they know the books will end? Benioff said :

“It’s already too late for that. We’re already well past the point of it jibing 100 percent. We’ve passed George and that’s something that George always worried about — the show catching up and ultimately passing him — but the good thing about us diverging at this point is that George’s books will still be a surprise for readers who have seen the show. Certain things that we learned from George way back in that meeting in Santa Fe are going to happen on the show, but certain things won’t. And there’s certain things where George didn’t know what was going to happen, so we’re going to find them out for the first time too, along with millions of readers when we read those books. Some people wish we would wait until the books were finished to finish the show, but George works on his own schedule, which is the way any good writer should do it. He shouldn’t be beholden to a TV schedule to finish his novels, that would be completely artificial and would not serve him well. But we do have these actors and they’re getting older, and we have to finish.”

They discussed a lot of other things, like how the only good thing after the show ends, and they won’t hang out with Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy) as much, will be that they will drink less alcohol, and how Hodor was their favorite character to write for. The interview is interesting, so go check it out here. What do you think about this interview? Talk to us in the comments, down below!

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