Game of Thrones (Spoilers serie-libro)

Congratulations on Game of Thrones’ 13 Emmy nominations. Are you at all surprised that the Academy has embraced the show? Or, given the overwhelming audience reaction, is that to be expected?

David Benioff: Thank you. “Surprised” is an understatement. “Stunned” or “shocked” would be more accurate. I was writing in our office when Dan said, “We got nominated.” For a few seconds I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I thought of those lines from The Magnificent Seven. (“You get elected?” “No, but I got nominated real good.”)

D. B. Weiss: The night before, we made a dinner bet with some friends that the show wouldn’t get a drama-series nomination. I never would have made this bet if I thought there was a real chance of us being nominated. I really had no intention of buying them dinner.

Benioff: Actually, I still don’t.

Weiss: Yeah! Screw them!

Many were shocked that Emilia Clarke failed to nab an Emmy nomination, though the supporting-actress category this year is likely to be a bloody battlefield. Why do you think her stunning performance as Daenerys was overlooked?

Benioff: I imagine it’s always hard for a newcomer to earn a nomination. The name recognition isn’t there yet for voters. But I’m not too worried about Emilia. Dan and I will be long forgotten, playing shuffleboard down in Florida, bragging to our geezer friends about how we discovered Emilia Clarke.

Weiss: In my unbiased opinion, she deserved a nomination. But there will be many other nominations and awards in her future. As to why she didn’t get it this year … some of her most powerful work was in the last two episodes. Maybe those hit too late? I don’t know. If I could predict and explain the behavior of large groups of people, you think I’d be working in Hollywood? I’d be Warren Buffett.

What lessons did you learn from the first season—in terms of adaptation, breaking episodes, production, etc.—that you’ve taken on board for season two?

Weiss: In general, across the board, we learned the necessity of planning ahead with a show that strives to be ambitious without completely breaking the bank. We can’t afford to waste expensive shots, or shooting days, or ketchup. So we try to stay as far out ahead of everything as we can, we eat what we kill, and now it’s all smooth sailing!

Benioff: Whatever lessons we’ve learned from the first season are mitigated by the increased difficulty of the second season. We have more characters, more locations, more dragons. I wish we could say we’ve found a nice groove and life is easy now, but I still find myself waking up from anxiety nightmares at 4 in the morning.

You’ve cast Carice van Houten as Melisandre and Skins’ Hannah Murray as Gilly in season two. What do each of these actors bring to their respective roles? What about their auditions stood out to you?

Benioff: In both cases, Dan and I looked at each other after the auditions: She’s the one. Hannah brings a wonderfully damaged quality to Gilly—the character is a bit like one of those girls who is kidnapped and abused for years, and brainwashed by her captor into thinking he’s a prophet and a righteous man. Hannah understands that intuitively; her Gilly is also lovable and fetching and sympathetic.

Weiss: We were very excited to cast her. She has an immediately compelling quality. A few years ago, someone sent us an episode of Skins, the U.K. teen show she was on, and she pops right off the screen. As for Carice, she has always been in the forefront of our minds, ever since we saw Black Book five years ago.

Benioff: Melisandre is a tricky role, and very few actresses have all the attributes required. Drop-dead gorgeous? Check. Charismatic and fiercely intelligent? Check. Able to convey a sinister, menacing presence without going over-the-top villainess? Check. In Carice’s hands, Mel is like Lady Macbeth and the three witches rolled into one.

Weiss: When you put it that way … yeah, it is a tricky role to cast. If we hadn’t gotten Carice, we might’ve just had to put Lena [Headey] in a red wig.

The show drew some criticism during season one for its use of so-called sexposition and a reliance on nudity. Why do you think that some critics and viewers reacted so strongly to the inclusion of the nudity, considering George’s novels are rife with them and this is HBO? Do you intend to address the “sexposition” issue in the show’s second season?

Benioff: We will address this issue with a 20-minute brothel scene involving a dozen whores, Mord the Jailer, a jackass, and a large honeycomb.

Weiss: There will always be those who want to see less sex, and those who want to see more sex, and those who want to see sex in big tubs of pudding. You just can’t please everyone. This year, we’re going to focus on the pudding people.

Viewers were shocked by the death of Ned Stark, even though readers have known this for almost two decades. Were you surprised that nonreaders reacted so strongly to Ned’s death, and do you think, had this been originally written for TV rather than as a novel, there would have been more of a temptation to keep Ned/Sean Bean around?

Benioff: The vast majority of the readers did an incredible job policing the various websites and trying to keep spoilers from ruining the surprise for nonreaders. It’s hard to emphasize how much we appreciate that—our biggest surprise, probably, was that the moment remained a shock for so much of the viewing audience. The strong reactions make us very happy. Fury? Great. It’s apathy that makes us sad.

Weiss: Ned’s death was one of the things that made us want to do the show in the first place. It was presented as a fact on the ground from the beginning. Any network that would have insisted on keeping him alive would have been the wrong network for this show. The prospect was never raised at HBO. Not once in 10,000 meetings.

Filming is already under way on season two. Ten episodes is not a lot of installments to contain everything within A Clash of Kings. How difficult was it to structure the season, and how much—if at all—do you diverge from the source material?

Benioff: We’d prefer to let the audience watch season two and make their own judgments, rather than revealing too much now.

Weiss: Hodor.

Season two will see the introduction of such fan-favorite characters as Melisandre, Davos, Gilly, Asha/Yara, Stannis, Roose Bolton, Jaqen H’ghar, and others. Were you surprised by which of those ended up being the most fun to write?

Weiss: Don’t forget Brienne! Gwendoline Christie is fantastic. She so perfectly embodies the kind of wounded strength the character requires. And she’s been training. She will kick your ass.

Benioff: We’ve already shot many of the Yara-Theon scenes, and I’m happy to report that Gemma [Whelan] and Alfie [Allen] make an insanely good pair of siblings. We could make a whole series about the Greyjoys. Speaking of which, we’re negotiating with HBO Family on a Gilly Loves Samwell sitcom. Tom Wlaschiha is a deeply compelling Jaqen. Carice and Stephen Dillane—watching the two of them together is like watching a master class in acting. Liam Cunningham brings humanity and wit to one of our favorite roles, Davos Seaworth. We haven’t shot anything yet with Roose, but we know Michael McElhatton will be superb. And he’s got the palest eyes of anyone I know.

It’s never too soon to start thinking about season three. What about the hefty A Storm of Swords do you think will provide the most challenging aspect to adaptation? Have you given any thought—or have there been any discussions with HBO—about breaking it into two seasons? Or moving elements into season two?

Weiss: Season two is a 100-hour-a-week job. It doesn’t leave a lot of time to think about seasons three and beyond. But yes, Storm of Swords … very long, dense book.

Benioff: A Storm of Swords will not be a single season. Beyond that, we’d rather not speculate, as HBO has not yet confirmed a third season and we’re not in the mood to jinx anything.

What can you tease about how season two will stack up against season one for viewers who haven’t read George’s novels? And for those who have, what will we be most surprised by seeing on screen?

Benioff: For Tyrion fans (and really, who isn’t a Tyrion fan?), season two sees the Imp in fine form, serving as hand of the king and trying to make the best of the chaos in King’s Landing. The Stark children struggle for survival, now that Ned’s not around to protect them. And Daenerys Stormborn finds that life in the big city isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Weiss: And Theon. People are really going to like Theon, I think. He makes some bold moves.

Benioff: Right, and Hodor gets his big monologue. Shakespeare, watch your back.

My understanding is that BlueBolt is a pretty new company, but its founders have quite a lot of experience in VFX for film and television. What role has landing the lead vendor role on Game of Thrones played in the present and future of your company?

BlueBolt was in its infancy when we were approached by HBO, specifically Mark Huffam the producer. He knew our background history and persuaded HBO to come and meet us. It was a golden hand shake for a new company and allowed us to bring in some exceptional talent. The 3 founders of BlueBolt had been pivotal in building and creating one of the largest VFX houses in London, so had the experience to tackle this head on. Game of Thrones has certainly put us on the map as one of the best VFX boutique facilities in London.

Will BlueBolt be the lead VFX vendor in the second season? If so, has any preparatory work already started given that cameras are due to roll in late July?

Sadly not. As BlueBolt is a small new VFX house, tackling CG creatures with fur, plus CG fire and water would be too much of a stretch. Although we have all done this many times as individuals at previous companies, BlueBolt’s pipeline and development would struggle to do this in the short amount of time needed for the second series.

We’ve read that the prep time before shooting began was very short, and that there were a number of rewrites that led to unbudgeted VFX requirements. On top of that, it’s been noted that a TV production has a few extra layers of approvals compared to film. Has there been any talks about reducing such issues, whether by streamlining approvals or locking down scripts at an earlier stage?

The prep time for us on Season One was 6 weeks which was incredibly tight, but admittedly we only had one director on board and the scripts were not ready, so it just made the shoot even harder and faster for us to keep up with prepping and shooting the whole way through, however in all fairness it was the same for all the cast and crew.

2.5D has played a role in some of the visual effects. Could you discuss some examples of the use of the technique, and what its advantages are over fully 2D or 3D shots?

Most of our big environment builds were done as 2.5D projections, or a hybrid of 3D and 2.5D. A good example of this was Winterfell. We built a basic model and applied basic textures for the whole of the Winterfell castle. For each shot the model was matchmoved into the shot and a basic lighting setup was done. This meant that the castle was always in the correct place and at the correct scale with lighting to match the plate. This was rendered out as the basis of the castle then additional matte painting work was done to add detail, aging, staining etc. This additional matte painting work was then re-projected back onto the model.

The problem with using pure 2D is that you restrict the camera move to being locked off or nodal, unless the CG you’re adding is so far in the distance you can get away with not noticing the lack of perspective shift. Using 2.5D allows the camera to be freed up a bit. As long as you are roughly viewing the CG from one angle it doesn’t matter if the camera moves and you get perspective shift to reveal new pieces of the CG. You wouldn’t want to use this technique with very extreme camera moves (especially on a highly detailed object) as you’d have to build so much detail into the model and use so many projection cameras that it wouldn’t be worth it.

The Red Keep of King’s Landing is spectacular, especially in the establishing shot in the first episode. How much of that was real world imagery and how much of that was purely a digital creation? Was the Red Keep itself a 3D build?

Most of this shot was created by BlueBolt. The base plate was taken of Valetta in Malta but we replaced practically everything. We added in the Irish hills in the background, changed a lot of the water and of course added the Red Keep. The original plan was to create the Red Keep as a 2D matte painting, but due to the number of different Red Keep shots and the uncertainty of orientation in many of them, BlueBolt took the cue to do a simple 3D build to allow us to move it around to suit the HBO executives’ requests.

On average, how many effects shots have there been per episode, and how long does it usually take to get all those effects rendered? Is there any type of VFX shot that was particularly prevalent for the show?

This really varied per episode, the heaviest being Episode One. This was due to us picking up shots from the pilot show a year earlier and trying to make them work with the shots we had shot during the main shoot. We also had a huge geography issue with the layout of Winterfell, to tie in with the Kings Arrival, Bran’s climbing, Bran’s fall etc. Winterfell as a set only had one tower and nearly every shot required some sort of set extension to it.

The most prevalent type of shot that BlueBolt delivered were environment shots – either extensions or full CG environments.

One criticism the VFX of the show has received—it’s received very little, we hasten to add!—is in the representation of Drogo’s Khalsar, his band of horsemen. The number 40,000 is repeatedly stated… but every time the Dothraki are shown as a group, it looks like there may just be a couple of hundred, with only the second episode hinting at anything grander using silhouetted figures in the background. I believe that some crowd duplication has been done on the show—the crowd at the tourney at one point—so what’s the barrier to showing a glimpse of this vast mounted army? Just the scope of it proving infeasible within the time and/or budget allotted?

I am afraid I agree, but financially only a certain amount of horses, riders and people on foot could be provided by production. We then composited more of the same, doing repeat passes in every available place. In order to put the 40,000 as in the books, we would have had to go into the 3D realm and build CG horses and people (as is done on epic films such as Troy, Kingdom of Heaven etc) and again we did not have the budget or the time to achieve this sadly.

Given remarks from the producers, expansive, VFX-laden battle sequences are going to be pretty rare on the show, and understandably—they seem to be one of the most expensive things to render at high levels of detail (right up there with anything involving water, apparently). However, the second season will see more battles, including one that’s probably even larger than what’s seen in the first season. What are the particular difficulties associated with such large-scale, rendered action sequences?

Time. The turnaround time of this show from filming to broadcast is incredibly fast and it takes time and manpower to create these large shots. The only way around this is to shoot these scenes first and get going on them, if HBO’s VFX budget on the next series can stretch to it.

The producers have hinted that the second season will likely be seeing CG direwolves, to convey their growing size and ferocity. How challenging will that be, to integrate digital animals into a live action television show?

CG creatures with fur are a whole different ball game. To build, model, texture and light with fur, makes these complex and very time consuming. As the direwolves grow larger than small ponies in the second season, this is the only way to do it,

Similarly, the end of this season has featured the hatching of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragon eggs, birthing her three dragons. We know that the author George R.R. Martin was heavily consulted in the design stage. Once that was done, what was the approach to creating this creature effect, and what were the challenges?

Once the design was signed off, a maquette was made (model) and BlueBolt had this scanned and began building it. As the 3 dragons are all the same size with different colouring and movement, the meant we only had to build one and then texture, light and rig the other two accordingly. The challenge was time – the turnover of these episodes came in February and we had to have them all built beforehand and ready to move on Daenery’s to get the blocking signed off by the producers. It was only a few shots but they are key and I think they look incredible.

How did you pull off the final shot of the season? Was it simply a matter of choreographing the actresses movements and then eyeballing placements, or were there some sort of physical props she could interact with which were then replaced/enhanced with VFX?

The whole sequence had been pre-vized ahead of time so that everyone knew where the dragons would be and what they would be doing. The actress had tracking markers on her shoulder and leg where the dragons were going to cling onto her to help us matchmove her in post. She was holding a green shaped small object to represent the dragon she would hold so that she moved correctly, especially as she stood up. It took a lot of roto animation and tracking to work them onto her body and the skin interaction was all done in post.

What do you find most rewarding about being part of this series?

It really is a combination of things but unlike other shows I have done, the scale of this is truly amazing and to watch the artisans - costume, setdesign etc -create these worlds from sketches to full-scale sets has been absolutely awe-inspiring.

Have you read all the books? If so, what do you think of Jaime’s later story arcs?

I know Jaimes story arc. Already at the very first meeting with Dan and David and Carolyn they told me about it and then Bryan has been brilliant in filling me in on the whole arc. I am almost through book 2 and I insist on reading the scripts before the books. But Jaime’s story I know and obviously I cannot wait to get out of jail!

Other than reading the first book, how did you prepare for the role?

There were some physical work, horseback riding and learning the fights. Other than that just a lot of thinking about what it would do to a person to grow up and to live under those very specific circumstances.

How his relationship with his sister and the impossible love has informed so many of his very early choices.

And obviously I have done a lot of thinking about him being the Kingslayer. How history is always question of point of view. In his mind his finest hour and yet. also he is a soldier and a lot more like Ned Stark that he cares to admit. He knows the court though and understands the game of thrones.

If you weren’t playing Jaime, which character from the books would you want to play?

Jaime is the one.

What do you find most rewarding about playing Jaime?

Don’t judge a book by the cover.

What do you, as a person, think of Jaime as a character?

I feel I know him and understand why he sometimes is so annoying and keeps provoking those around him. The guy is in pain and cant help himself. I don’t really think about whether I like or dislike. he is for lack of a better word - family.

Which of the cast do you think is most like their character off-set?

Bran is sweet—Isaac is adorable.

Which character do you think would be the most challenging to play?

They are all challenging.

How many episodes are you set to shoot this season?

That would be giving away too much info, right?

You remarked on some of the funny, early fan responses that were hung up on this or that feature. Now that’s the first season is done, how do you feel about the fan response?

We could not have dreamed or wished for a better fan response. Grateful!!

How does working on something on HBO compare to your experience filming for network television?

I had a great time working on both New Amsterdam and Virtuality. Truly great times. I love working on Game of Thrones. Obviosuly there are differences in scale but thats more to do with the nature of this particular beast. We might have more time here. Not sure. My job will always be to be 100% focused and committed no matter where I work and that is and has always been my goal.

If Jaime were to take the Iron Throne, what sort of king do you think he would be?

I cannot imagine Jaime on the Iron Throne. He already put his ass on that damn thing one time and look what good that did him. He doesn’t want it. Which is why he would be a great king.