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"#GameofThrones was basically an expensive film school [for us]"—David Benioff & D.B Weiss
@forarya:
At 3PM David Benioff and D.B Weiss #DnD started a session at the #AustinFilmFestival, I am a little late, but will live tweet as soon as I get there. #GameOfThrones
I've seen a lot of chatter about this on twitter in the context of privilege and failing upwards.
Despite this they were handed a series with a 60 million dollar budget.
Apparently they both came from extremely rich families, and there was a family connection between one of them and a HBO director.
The part that annoyed me was how they kept complaining about losing 'ten years of their lives' on Game of Thrones - the kind of amazing opportunity that others will work hard for their entire careers and not get.
Yes, I know, a twitter thread, sorry. But honestly, after reading this litany of facepalm moments, it's a surprise Game of Thrones didn't become a giant carwreck sooner.
Choice quotes include:
and:
and:
Honestly, this pretty much hits home the point for me that the only reason a lot of Game of Thrones was considered "quality television" was due to the source material by GRRM. Apart from that, yikes...
What's especially interesting is that the stuff they had no idea how to do was generally on point. It was the writing that fell down, and that's ostensibly the thing they were confident about going in.
Towards the end it all became a bit incoherent though. The costume design started to look more like a fashion show than fitting for the scenes, for instance. But as a PM that's a familiar story for me. If you leave engineers to their own devices they're going to go building stuff that's fun to work on rather than stuff that's actually beneficial. I have to assume costume and set designers are the same way. You gotta have a decent auteur to direct that energy to the right place.
When you put it like that, I wonder if it's cause and effect. Where they were aware of their lack of experience, they left the specialists to it and got good results. Where they had (misplaced) confidence, they charged ahead and the mistakes made it through to the final product.
Yeah, it seems to me that there was a lot of talent involved in the TV series, even G R R Martin himself was involved in the show's production and he has plenty of experience writing for television. It's more of a case that when the ship's crew knows what to do, all the captain has to do is to not pilot the ship towards the rocks.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. I don't think he meant it like that at all. Rather people thought it was quality TV when it really wasn't. If making good TV was so trivial, how did DnD flunk so bad at it?
But that's the thing. They didn't.
Eh ... I think most people would say they did make it work. They messed up the seasons where they didn't have source material to rely on.
Yeah I realize I was mostly thinking about the last few seasons.
I was mostly thinking about the last season. But generally the series took a nosedive when the source material dwindled.
If GoT was their film school, they flunked.
Oh, come on now. Yes, the final two seasons sucked. Yes, the last season ruined the ability to rewatch show without the looming dread that it will all go to shit. But let's not act like the whole series was a complete failure. It was the best show on television during its peak, and it accomplished the rare feat of being a "water cooler" show in the era of streaming.
If anything, they had an A going into the final, but flunked it and ended up with a B/B-
Which, given some of these quotes, shows how talented these guys are. If you go into something without the experience to handle some basic apects of it and do a fantastic job, that shows you have great talent. Unfortunately, their ability to adapt someone else's work didn't really do much for their own creativity and the final seasons suffered because of it.
Their main weakness is original script-writing for sure. The drop off after they ran out of source material is pretty stark. Also, one could argue that their conflation and omission of certain characters while they were still working from source material made it much more challenging to wrap the story up once they could no longer rely on the books to guide them.
I do give them credit for the indisputable success of the first six seasons, but I still wonder if GoT would have been successful with any half decent showrunner at the helm. We'll never know. What I can say with certainty is that they selfishly ruined the show's legacy when they had every opportunity and resource to do it justice.
The earlier season do show some signs of poor adaptation, specifically the Dorne/sand snakes branch. Really, they had all the money they could want to film an amazing show with excellent source material, and the first several seasons show how good that source material is despite the incompetence of Benioff and Weiss.
They had an A going into the final because their smart friend was writing their papers.
And it shows.