David Benioff and Dan “D.B.” Weiss know what you think about fantasy; they thought it themselves before they were given the reins of Game of Thrones, the massive fantasy series on HBO. When you see a hulking castle and some dudes in armor, do you automatically think of the French taunter and the Knights Who Say Ni? Weiss is right there with you: “You’re very aware of the fact that at any given moment in the show you are probably no more than fifteen degrees away from Monty Python,” he told Jim Windolf in an extensive interview for our April issue cover story. “And it’s so tempting sometimes, because it was another formative influence for me, and it would be really funny to steer it into Monty Python.”

Benioff chimes in: “To the point where we shot the pilot in the castle where the shot Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

The work of the great British pranksters is far from the only reference covered in Windolf’s massive, wide-ranging interview; Benioff and Weiss talk about their shared study of Irish literature, the reference to Akira Kurosawa in the Game of Thrones pilot, their shared admiration of Breaking Bad, and even how one Game of Thrones character’s accent compares to one in A Fish Called Wanda. The two run the show together, and have each directed episodes of the series, but shared with Windolf the disaster that was their first pilot for the show:

Tom McCarthy, who made the The Station Agent, was the director of the original pilot, but that version never aired. Is that right?

David Benioff: There are a couple of scenes from it, but most of that was re-shot. Dan Weiss: The whole pilot was such a tremendous Mount Everest-steep learning curve for everybody involved. Our whole thing, when we pitched it to HBO, was, “No one’s ever done anything like this before.” That’s exciting, but on the flip side—no one’s ever done anything like this before. And we had to find what it really was in the process of making it.

David Benioff: We made very basic, fundamental mistakes in the script for the pilot. About fifty feet away from here, actually, we had a few of our writer friends come over to watch, to screen the pilot, and to get notes from them. And I remember watching them as they watched it, and it’s a really horrible feeling, because by that point we’d already put a few years into this. And watching them and knowing that they did not like it at all was just a horrible feeling. That last scene in the pilot, where Jaime and Cersei, brother and sister, are making love—they didn’t know that they were brother and sister, which was completely our fault.

The plot information didn’t come across?

David Benioff: Never. Crucial, very basic information got lost.

Dan Weiss: “Of course they’re brother and sister! It says so in the script! They both have the same last name!”

David Benioff: “They’re both blonde, can’t you see?” I’ll always remember, we finished it—it was three of our friends, Scott Frank, Ted Griffin, and Craig Mazin. Scott and Ted are both very diplomatic and friendly guys. And Craig is not, God bless him for it, and he said, “You guys have a massive problem.” And that line stuck in my head.

Dan Weiss: I had a yellow legal pad and I remember writing massive problem in all capital letters and underlining it three times.

Windolf’s complete interview with Benioff and Weiss is available below. Game of Thrones returns to HBO on April 6.

The Lot, West Hollywood. The Game of Thrones co-creators are taking a break from final post-production work on season four. (This interview has been edited and condensed but not much.)

You have a lot of people coming new to Game of Thrones each season. With all these shows, people binge-watch. They catch up.

David Benioff: I didn’t start watching Breaking Bad until season three or four, I think. It was a certain weight of dozens of friends telling you how great it is, and at first you’re like, “Yeah, sounds good, I don’t have time.” Then, finally, enough people say it and you start feeling like a dipshit for not watching.

I didn’t start watching Game of Thrones until I was flipping past and saw the scene with Peter Dinklage dragging a chair across the room while everybody stares at him. I didn’t expect that kind of comedy.

David Benioff: That’s all Dan. That whole bit.

It’s great because the whole sequence is silent.

David Benioff: Except for the squeaky chair. We spent a lot of time in sound design, getting that squeak just right.

Dan Weiss: It’s funny. When we shot the original pilot, which was then later re-shot—it was a pretty grim, dark world, the world of the story. As the seasons have gone on, we consciously take any opportunity we can to inject some light into the situation in a way that doesn’t break the reality of the show.

The wolf bread [which the character named Hot Pie gives to Arya as a parting gift] is also very funny.

David Benioff: That’s from the same episode. We both directed it. The problem is, the DGA [Directors Guild of America] makes it very difficult for one director to get credit, so we flipped a coin. Last year I got credit on that one. This year we co-directed another episode, and Dan will get it.

The actor who plays Arya Stark, Maisie Williams, sells the joke of the wolf bread so beautifully.

David Benioff: She’s so good, that girl. Casting that role was one of the scariest things, because we knew how big the role would get and how dark it would be. The first fifty or so girls we saw just weren’t right. We’ve got an incredible casting director in London, Nina Gold, and she was bringing in all these girls, and no one was right, and it was getting kind of late in the day and we hadn’t found anyone remotely close. I remember we were sitting—in Morocco, right?

Dan Weiss: The Berber Palace Hotel.

David Benioff: We were on location, scouting Morocco, and the one place we could get internet access was by the hotel pool. So we were sitting by the hotel pool on a laptop looking at these—the casting director will send these little casting videos, with thumbnail pictures? So there were forty thumbnail pictures of these girls, and we saw this one, literally that big on the laptop screen, and I was just like, “There’s something interesting about that face,” and clicked on it, and she was amazing. From that point on we had our Arya.

How old was she when she started on your show?

Dan Weiss: She was twelve when we met her. Sophie [Turner, who plays Sansa Stark] was thirteen. We aged everybody up a bit from the books. Finding a twelve-year-old who could shoulder the dramatic weight she had to shoulder was a needle in the haystack. Finding a nine-year-old who could have done it would have been impossible.

And Robb Stark is fourteen in the first book.

Dan Weiss: Yeah. And we justified it by saying that it’s vaguely medieval and in the middle ages people had to grow up fast.

Where did you grow up and how did you meet each other?

Dan Weiss: I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Chicago and met David in graduate school. I had come to L.A. for a little bit and then I decided that school was a safer place to be, so I went to Trinity College in Dublin, to study Anglo-Irish literature, and that was where I met this guy.

You studied the same stuff?

David Benioff: Dan wrote his thesis on Joyce, on Finnegans Wake, and I was writing on Beckett.

Dan Weiss: We were two American Jews in Dublin, with no Irish roots of any kind, obsessed with Irish literature and trying to find a functional gym in Dublin in 1995, which is not something that most Irish people in 1995 were all that preoccupied with.

Did you meet in the gym?

David Benioff: It was the first orientation session. I had taught high school in Brooklyn for two years and I lived in San Francisco a year, just working in a bar, and I decided I didn’t want to be a high school teacher, I wanted to be a college professor. So I decided to get my master’s in literature with the thought that I would then go on to get my PhD back in the states. It was a great year and I loved it, but after writing my thesis on Beckett, and kind of killing myself to write this paper, and then realizing that three people on the planet would read it, maybe, I decided that academia wasn’t going to work for me. I was going to get too frustrated. So I thought maybe writing about dragons would be better for me.

Was it a one-year program?

Dan Weiss: One year. I went there after working as P.A. on movies such as Viking Sagas for New Line Cinema. And I also was probably the ninth of nine personal assistants for Glenn Frey for a brief period of time.

Did you watch the recent Eagles documentary?

Dan Weiss: It’s weird that you mention that because I started watching it last night.

David Benioff: When I met you, you were the Hollywood guy.

Dan Weiss: Having bought Glenn’s toilet paper for several weeks in 1993, I was obviously the go-to guy.

David Benioff: He had written screenplays. Then, after Ireland, we both went different places for a while and then ended up in L.A. I decided I wanted to write a screenplay. I’d never written a script before, and I didn’t know to do it, so I asked Dan if he would write one with me, because he had written a bunch already. I thought I could learn it from him rather than reading a book or something. So we wrote an incredible movie called The Headmaster, in which the headmaster is Satan at a boarding school.

Dan Weiss: Spoiler. So much for the future of that project.

Did that get made?

David Benioff: That was never even sent out.

It sounds a little like that Jon Stewart horror movie—can’t remember the title.

Dan Weiss: The Faculty! Ours was not dissimilar to The Faculty.

David Benioff: Kind of a cross between The Faculty and School Ties.

How did you wind up back together in L.A.?

Dan Weiss: After Trinity, I went back to school in Iowa to get an MFA in creative writing, and David went to Irvine to do the same thing, and we stayed in touch and both ended up here.

David Benioff: Living in Orange County wasn’t really working, so I moved up here.

Dan Weiss: We both ended up in Santa Monica around 1998. I was reading scripts, doing coverage, for CAA. Reading hundreds and hundreds of scripts, across the board, from blind submissions to Brokeback Mountain. It was not always a pleasant task but something in hindsight I’m glad I did. Reading lots and lots of people doing things wrong can be brutal but also really helpful in keying you into realizing, “Oh, this thing I’m doing now reminds me of that thing that made me grind my teeth when I was reading it with someone else’s name on it.”

Did you grow up in New York?

David Benioff: I did. Started out in Peter Cooper, moved up to 86th Street. I lived there most of the time and then we moved down near the U.N. when I was sixteen. Manhattan my whole life.

Where did you teach in Brooklyn?

David Benioff: A school called Poly Prep in Bay Ridge.

I taught at Friends Seminary for a year, the one in Manhattan.

David Benioff: That’s where my wife [Amanda Peet] went. She went there twelve years.

When you two met each other, did you just hit it off as friends? Or was it more like a writing partnership from the beginning?

Dan Weiss: With the exception of The Headmaster, Game of Thrones is the first thing we’ve ever really written together.

David Benioff: The Headmaster almost torpedoed the whole thing. I mean, it was fun, but the result wasn’t that pleasing to anybody.

Did you find you got along as collaborators?

David Benioff: Yeah.

Dan Weiss: Going into this job, once we got the green light for the show, everybody said, "You don’t know what this is going to be. You don’t know what you’re in for. It’s more work than you’ve ever imagined." It’s one thing to hear it. And then to experience it is something else. I don’t know how people do this job collaboratively if they don’t really get along. You’re spending all day every day for months and years on end with somebody.

David Benioff: We’ve definitely heard stories about shows where the people running it do not get along, and it just sounds like it gets transmitted down to the set.

Dan Weiss: It gets ugly. It kind of brings things back to the Eagles, in a way.

David Benioff: The only thing we knew about TV, because neither of us had done anything in TV before, was that line you kept quoting from [David] Mamet. What was it?

Dan Weiss: He said, “Making movies is like running a marathon. Making TV is like running till you die.”

David Benioff: It’s kind of like parenthood. People tell you, you know, it’s going to change your life, and you’re not prepared for it, you don’t really realize what it entails until you get into it. I’m sure there are classes in it, but there is no way to know what the job actually means until you’re there.

Dan Weiss: Unless the class involves sleep deprivation. Like if the teacher comes into your house at night and wakes you up with a foghorn after three hours of sleep.

David Benioff: And flies you to Northern Ireland.

Dan Weiss: It seems like a silly thing to complain about, because it’s also just the greatest, most fantastic experience you could possibly imagine having. I can’t imagine a professional experience that could be better than the one we’ve had.

David Benioff: It’s funny, because now I look back to when I was just writing features and I know I was complaining about stuff back then. I don’t even remember what. Complaining about the deadline or something. And now I look back to that time as being—everything was so easy.

Dan Weiss: I remember when my first child was born, and I had a script that was due, and I asked the guy I was writing it for, a guy who I’m now friends with, but at the time was not friend with. “Can I have some extra time? I had a kid born.” He’s like, “No, we need it now.” So I had to work, I had to actually write a script in the month, the whole month, after my kid was born. It just seemed like such an unreasonable imposition on my lifestyle. And I was so angry at this guy. “How dare you make me write three pages a day, you bastard, when I have a baby in the house?” And now I’m like --

David Benioff: Your second son was born in Belfast while we were shooting, and he missed like one dinner.

Dan Weiss: I missed a half hour of the shooting day, and I missed the next day, and I was back on set the day after. It just rebuilds you professionally into somebody who has a different conception about how you work. For me, it has made me a lot less precious about where and how I work. If I’ve got time in an airport, waiting for a plane, that’s time you can actually use to your advantage and not check my email again.

So people who write one script a year—they must seem like slobs, in retrospect, to you guys.

David Benioff: We have friends, really great writers, working months and months, and they’ve got thirty pages or something. It seems great, and I’m really envious, but, yeah, once we get going, we basically have to turn in a script a week, to keep the pre-production machine going.

Do you shoot scenes for different episodes at the same time?

David Benioff: Sometimes we’ll shoot scenes from the last episode of the season in the first week of production. So in order to get everything prepared ahead of time, we have to turn in all the scripts well in advance of when we start shooting. I think this coming season, we would have scripts one through ten in by June 1, is it?

Dan Weiss: Yeah.

So you’re writing season five now?

David Benioff: We haven’t started but we should. We haven’t quite started yet.

I think you said to Mike Fleming of Deadline Hollywood that you see the show as eighty hours. Is that still the plan—eight seasons, ten hours a season? Are you still committed to that?

Dan Weiss: We know there’s an end somewhere in the seven- or eight-season zone. It’s not something that goes ten, eleven—it doesn’t just keep on going because it can. I think the desire to milk more out of it is what would eventually kill it, if we gave in to that.

David Benioff: If you look at the shows that we love, it’s so rare for a series to go beyond that length and maintain quality. And, you know, looking at Breaking Bad, which is probably the most consistently great show in history, and I think the fact that they decided relatively early, it’s going to be five seasons and that’s it, I think that was an incredibly smart choice.

Dan Weiss: Would I have watched another season of Breaking Bad? Of course. Would I have watched another two seasons of Breaking Bad? Of course. The fact that I would easily have watched much, much more than I got made the ending so much more poignant and stronger and better for me.

David Benioff: There’s a sense when you’re reading a good book—and this is actually why I’ve started going back to print. For a while I was reading a lot on the Kindle, because with all the travel, it’s just so much easier; it’s so much lighter and all. And then I realized I just wasn’t enjoying books as much. And part of it is that weird thing, when you’re really into a book and you know there’s only so much left in your right hand—the weight is getting lighter and lighter. That has the sense of momentum. If we’re a series and we’re four seasons, five seasons in, and it’s indefinite as to how long it’s gonna go, then I don’t think there’s as much pressure as far as, the end is coming, the end is nigh. So, for us, whether it ends up being seven or eight, it’s right around there. I think we’ve always felt—we just completed the fourth season—this is the midpoint. And we’re coming around the bend right now.

Dan Weiss: You’re aiming at something, for all these characters. For most of the major characters, we know the vicinity of where they’re headed, for the most part. And it’s just the idea of it barrelling toward some conclusion as opposed to just rolling down the road.

I read an interview with John Irving where he said he always knows the ending when he starts a book and he makes a beeline for it. I guess it helps center your brain.

Dan Weiss: It helps lend a sense of constructedness. Martin Amis always talked about the control tower. He talked about the reason he didn’t like William S. Burroughs—who I actually liked a fair bit once upon a time—but Amis didn’t like William S. Burroughs because he would read his books and feel like there was no one in the control tower. One of the things that made Breaking Bad so powerful, for me, was I’d never felt that somebody was more on the job, in the control tower, than on that show. Everything little thing I was seeing was there for a reason and would come back into play in some surprising but retroactively inevitable way, shape, or form.

It’s an advantage to have the books. Even if you stray from them, you have a blueprint. You don’t have to bend to the will of the fans, if they are screaming for something to happen. You’ve got George R. R. Martin.

David Benioff: Well, it’s a little complicated, because we have the five books, but then we don’t have anything beyond that, because he’s still working. It’s sort of an unusual position in terms of adaptation because, you know, we’re catching up. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. And we’ve talked to George. The lucky part is that George works with us and he’s a producer on the show. Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up, and where exactly that would be. As you were saying before, if you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we sat just down with him and literally went through every character and said, “So what’s the destination for Daenerys? And Arya?”

Did you feel like he knew? Or was he figuring it out?

Dan Weiss: In some case he had very definite ideas, and in other cases he had left those story lines more open, for the time being.

I guess it’s conceivable you could pass him.

David Benioff: Yup.

They both laugh. Maybe a little too hard.

I read that New Yorker story about the schism in George R. R. Martin’s fan base: if he writes a blog on a football game, they go: “What the hell are you doing with your time? We want our story!”

David Benioff: There’s probably more anticipation for his books than for almost any other writer I can think of, maybe aside from J.K. Rowling. But there’s that great article that Neil Gaiman wrote: "George R. R. Martin Is Not Your Bitch."

Dan Weiss: I’m not entirely sure that George writing about the Jets—I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I don’t think the time you spend blowing off steam about the Jets is actually taking away from your Song of Ice and Fire time. I don’t think that’s how the writing mind works.

David Benioff: And at the end of the day no one is going to give him bonus points for turning in the book six months early. We want it to be, all the fans want them to be, the best possible books. He works at his own pace, and I think George is pretty impervious to the idea that he’s going to accelerate his deadlines.

There’s a similar thing with Vikram Seth. Viking Penguin dropped him because he was two years late with the sequel for *A Suitable Boy.*

Dan Weiss: My guess is the people who dropped him will end up feeling pretty stupid.

David Benioff: At least it’s not like movies, where they drop you and hire someone else.

What books, movies, and TV shows did you like before you were studying Joyce and Beckett?

Dan Weiss: It was really across the board. Taste came relatively late to me. I just sort of liked everything. It would be great to get back to that place of just watching without judgment. I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably like ten years old.

The Stand is a huge book when you first read it.

Dan Weiss: That was a mind-blowing thing. My father read all the Stephen King books, and I would sit there and look at the covers. I remember being both entranced and horrified, when I was five or six years old, by the cover of Carrie, of the girl with all the blood on her. At one point I made him tear the cover off the book because I didn’t want it in the house. But then he tried to throw it away and I wouldn’t let him throw it away.

David Benioff: When I was a kid I was obsessed with fantasy writing. So, obviously, J.R.R. Tolkien but also Fritz Leiber. I went through a phase where I read every single Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser book. And Lloyd Alexander and Ursula K. Le Guin. And then there was a very abrupt drop-off, around thirteen or fourteen, I just stopped reading that stuff, pretty much, when I hit puberty, and went into this long pretentious literary phase where I was only reading writers I thought made me seem impressive if somebody saw me reading them on the 79th Street crosstown bus. And that probably lasted through Ireland.

Dan Weiss: I still think reading something like Ulysses takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.

David Benioff: That was a great experience. I read Ulysses in Dublin and I remember, it’s like one of those books where I remember where I was, because I pretty much read the whole book lying on the couch in that apartment on Dame Street. And right next to me I had that book...

Dan Weiss: Was it Stuart Gilbert’s book?

David Benioff: It’s like a giant guide book. So you read a page in Ulysses and you’re like, “I don’t understand,” and you check it. It’s like reading the Bible and the Talmud at the same time.

Dan Weiss: It was like a secular version of a religious reading experience. We went on the Bloomsday walk in Dublin, and you’d eat a cheese sandwich at the bar, which, if my brain worked better, I’d still remember the name of.

That’s nice, those memories of reading, and you remember where you were.

Dan Weiss: I was in Kenya when I read Catch-22 and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya, whenever I think of Catch-22, I think of Nairobi.

David Benioff: Thinking about those books that gave you the most happiness while you read them, Catch-22 is definitely—just the love I had for that book. Or what’s that Kingsley Amis book?

Dan Weiss: Lucky Jim.

David Benioff: I remember reading Lucky Jim in Ireland. A friend was golfing, and I don’t golf, and he went out golfing, and I was sitting in the clubhouse, reading Lucky Jim, just having the greatest time, to the point where he got back and I was like, “Wait, wait, I got five more pages.” Or something like Beckett’s Endgame, which is so wildly funny and just stays with you for years and years afterward. You can remember moments from that play, whether it’s something you saw onstage or from reading it.

So you come from fantasy and Stephen King, but you also love Joyce or Beckett—that combination is something you can maybe see in the show. The distinction between bastard genres and literature is melting away.

Dan Weiss: If your ground floor, if the soil you grew out of, was this genre, even if you left it behind decades ago, there’s something [about it] that seems natural and normal to you. This show, for us, is all day every day of the year, pretty much. If there was anything tongue-in-cheek about it, if it didn’t feel real or like it meant something, personally, I don’t see how somebody would be able to maintain a real commitment to it over the long haul.

Your show has humor without camp. There’s never a feeling that you’re not taking the characters’ situations seriously.

Dan Weiss: You’re very aware of the fact that at any given moment in the show you are probably no more than fifteen degrees away from Monty Python. All you really need to do is turn it and take it there. And it’s so tempting sometimes, because it was another formative influence for me, and it would be really funny to steer it into Monty Python.

David Benioff: To the point where we shot the pilot in the castle where the shot Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Tom McCarthy, who made the The Station Agent, was the director of the original pilot, but that version never aired. Is that right?

David Benioff: There are a couple of scenes from it, but most of that was re-shot. Dan Weiss: The whole pilot was such a tremendous Mount Everest-steep learning curve for everybody involved. Our whole thing, when we pitched it to HBO, was, “No one’s ever done anything like this before.” That’s exciting, but on the flip side—no one’s ever done anything like this before. And we had to find what it really was in the process of making it.

David Benioff: We made very basic, fundamental mistakes in the script for the pilot. About fifty feet away from here, actually, we had a few of our writer friends come over to watch, to screen the pilot, and to get notes from them. And I remember watching them as they watched it, and it’s a really horrible feeling, because by that point we’d already put a few years into this. And watching them and knowing that they did not like it at all was just a horrible feeling. That last scene in the pilot, where Jaime and Cersei, brother and sister, are making love—they didn’t know that they were brother and sister, which was completely our fault.

The plot information didn’t come across?

David Benioff: Never. Crucial, very basic information got lost.

Dan Weiss: “Of course they’re brother and sister! It says so in the script! They both have the same last name!”

David Benioff: “They’re both blonde, can’t you see?” I’ll always remember, we finished it—it was three of our friends, Scott Frank, Ted Griffin, and Craig Mazin. Scott and Ted are both very diplomatic and friendly guys. And Craig is not, God bless him for it, and he said, “You guys have a massive problem.” And that line stuck in my head.

Dan Weiss: I had a yellow legal pad and I remember writing massive problem in all capital letters and underlining it three times.

Were the problems apparent to you when you were watching it?

Dan Weiss: You make accommodations with yourself and you let a little bit in at a time. But that “massive problem,” for us—we were kind of like, O.K., let’s just open the doors and let all of the reality, the horrible reality, in at once and deal with it. I think it was shortly after that, Mike Lombardo, then-president of HBO, came in unannounced to watch the pilot. Maybe we’d done some post-"massive-problem" tweaks to it. But it was still a massive problem.

Did you add in offscreen voices saying things like, “Hello, brother!”?

Dan Weiss: Basically. To fill in the informational gaps. It was like: “My sweet sister!” I had already seen it seven hundred times. We needed to get to series. Mike came in. He had had enough waiting. And I was just staring at Mike’s face. It was like a horror movie. Not Mike’s face, which looked great, but his expressions. To his credit, he didn’t want me to feel terrible. He was trying to keep his face impassive.

Were the performances the same? Did it look as good as the eventual pilot? Was it cheesy?

David Benioff: Nothing was as good. Every single department stepped up. As Dan was saying, certainly we hadn’t done it before. I don’t know if anyone had done this type of genre on this type of scale. For instance, I think we had the best costumer in the world. Her name is Michele Clapton. I think she’s a genius. But coming off the pilot, we realized all the costumes looked brand new. They all looked like they’d just been made the day before. So what happened was, they said, “O.K., the pilot’s not so good, but we’re just going to go ahead and make season one, and you’ll re-shoot the first episode while you’re doing season one.” So we had the whole order for the season, and we went back in with Michelle, and we made the decision, all of us together, that the costumes needed to look lived-in. This is a period where people weren’t taking their things to the dry cleaners. Aside from maybe the queen, everyone’s clothes look dirty and sweat-stained. She really took that to heart, to the degree where now in the costume department, there’s the actual making-of-the-costumes section of it and there’s a whole other section, which is breaking down the costumes. And the difference between what we had originally shot and what you see in season one is dramatic. For all the departments it was like that: for production design, in terms of the look of the sets; for the D.P.s; for us, with writing the scripts. The great thing about that experience, as rough as it was in the moment, was that we had a chance to learn from our mistakes and go back and try to correct some of it.

Dan Weiss: To be given the opportunity to do something like this one time is a pretty rare gift. To be given the opportunity to do more or less the exact same thing twice is an extremely rare gift.

HBO is great at taking genres, like prison, with Oz, and the Western, with Deadwood, and making them dirtier and updating them. But fantasy seems like the least respected genre, in a way.

Dan Weiss: That was one of the big uphill sells when we went in to talk with them initially. We loved the same classic HBO shows that everybody loved, and we knew that this fit in that world. It was just a question of convincing them that it applied to a genre that had never seriously crossed their minds before. People in general got it in their heads that anything in the pre-defined fantasy genre—as opposed to stuff that had elements of the fantastic in a recognizable world—was squarely aimed at thirteen-year-olds, and that was kind of the cut-off for it.

David Benioff: What you were saying about taking genres and exploding them, we had originally pitched the show to one regime, Carolyn Straus, who was [HBO] president at the time. We pitched it and she picked it up. But then a new regime came in, and we had to convince the new regime to go forward and green-light the pilot. So we ended up writing them this letter, like a five-page letter, a second pitch explaining why this would work, and it was exactly what you’re saying, in terms of, "This is what you guys do. Whether it’s taking the cop show with The Wire or gangster shows with The Sopranos and making them dirty and reinventing them." But no one had really done fantasy in that way. When you think of fantasy on TV, it was like Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess.

Dan Weiss: Before we shot the original pilot, we went up to the Kodak archives in Rochester and we just spent two days watching five or six movies a day that Jim Healy up there pulled for us, just to see what some of the fantasy movies you grew up with looked like. We were watching Kurosawa movies and Anthony Mann Westerns and Polanski’s Macbeth.

Polanski’s Macbeth is grisly and bloody. It kind of looks like your show. Why Rochester?

Dan Weiss: They’ve got the largest archive of pristine 35-millimeter prints. We told them what the show was about. We told him what we were going for. Like we were saying, "We want to see Ran, if you’ve got that."

David Benioff: It was like you’re talking to a human algorithmic filter. This is a guy who has an encyclopedic knowledge of film. We told him what we were doing and so it’s almost like the Netflix algorithm: "Then you might be interested in this."

Dan Weiss: There was Navigator, that weird New Zealand time-travel movie from the eighties. All sorts of interesting bizarre little movies.

David Benioff: If there is an ideal for us in term of look, it was Kurosawa, whether it’s the great panoramic exterior vistas, or the interiors, which are so beautifully set-designed, and the costumes. Everything in those movies, it all comes together and it all feels of the time. Not to say that we’re coming close to those heights, but that’s the look. We saw those and we’d say to our DPs, “Try to get Kurosawa.” I remember a shot in the first episode. When we went back and re-shot it, our brilliant director of photography, Alik Sakharov, who was D.P. on about thirty episodes of The Sopranos, he has a shot, if you remember—there’s a Night’s Watch ranger who gets captured south of the Wall, and Ned Stark ends up beheading him. So there’s a shot, after the cold open, after the title sequence, where the Stark guards are coming up over the hill. You see him first; then you see the horses coming up behind him, to capture him; and it’s very much a Kurosawa shot. I remember seeing that in dailies and being like, “That’s the look!”

Dan Weiss: Those really deliberate, deceptively simple compositions and set designs don’t really call attention to themselves. Alix, he’s a [Russian director Andrei] Tarkovsky freak, so we ended up watching a fair amount of Tarkovsky.

He did the original Solaris?

Dan Weiss: Yeah. The camera is never announcing itself. But in the process of never announcing itself, you realize, Holy shit! It must have taken four days to get that shot down, because the staging is so complex. But it’s all the more impressive for not waving a flag and saying, “Look at me!”

You sense Ned Stark is a good man, and immediately he makes a wrong decision when he beheads the ranger. You know you’re not in good-versus-evil territory from minute ten of the series.

David Benioff: Ned is a good man who’s got very rigid ways. This is the way things are done, and your personal preferences have nothing to do with it. This guy violated the law, the punishment for violating the law is beheading, and there’s no gray area for him. He’s a man who thinks everything is very black and white entering into a very gray world, and how does he adapt to that? And in Ned’s case, he doesn’t, really. He isn’t able to.

Dan Weiss: One of the things about George’s books that stood out to us so much when we read them is, not just in fantasy, but in most genres, especially mainstream versions of most genres, honor and decency are the armor you wear to get through any difficult situation and come through the other side of it. But in his world, as often as not, it’s a liability, when you’re playing against people who aren’t weighed down by honor.

And it extends through the whole Stark family. It’s a family trait.

Dan Weiss: You would think they would have figured it out somewhere along the line.

It leads to the Red Wedding, because they’re playing by old rules that are fading out.

David Benioff: It’s interesting to see, as the story develops, how the children start to adapt to it. A few of them do start to figure it out. You especially see, in season four, how they do figure it out.

Arya figures it out.

David Benioff: Sansa, too.

Dan Weiss: Some Stark figurin’ is going on in season four.

Did you have a champion at HBO who said, based on this pilot, that they would commit fifty million dollars for a full season?

David Benioff: That’s the thing I still don’t entirely understand.

Was it a specific person? Did you have scripts written?

Dan Weiss: We had an outline at that point, so they had a very specific idea of what the shape of the season would be. Mike [Lombardo] and Richard Plepler and Susan Naegle made a very foolhardy decision.

I guess a season of Game of Thrones costs as much as one semi-big-budget movie. So in a way it wasn’t that big a bet.

David Benioff: The other thing is, otherwise, the ten million or whatever it was that we originally spent on the pilot would have just been sunk. So you’re in the gambler’s dilemma.

Dan Weiss: Luckily, they fell prey to the gambler’s fallacy, and now, thanks to that, we have a show.

David Benioff: The thing, I think, that saved us, actually, was, well, yes, having the support of Richard and Mike, but also the sense that internationally the show might work in a way that a lot of American TV shows don’t, because it’s not about Americans. It’s not set in America, and so there was a sense that there was going to be more of an appetite for this overseas, which turned out to be true, because people from anywhere can relate to it. There are certain things about, say, The Sopranos where, if you happen to be from the states, you’re just going to pick up on some inside jokes that someone in Portugal might not get as readily. But there’s nothing about Westeros that’s got anything to do with U.S. politics.

Dan Weiss: Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.

David Benioff: When you look at fantasy movies, whether it’s the Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit or Harry Potter, and how well they did internationally, it’s far more money made overseas than here. Even thought they were very successful here—but triple that overseas. So when we wrote this big pitch letter, or pitch number two, explaining to them why they should make this amazingly expensive show, that was part of the pitch: the chance, at least, that this show could really work for an international audience.

Lost worked internationally.

Dan Weiss: People on an island!

Are you huge in Australia and England?

David Benioff: I think Australia is our number one illegal-download country.

Dan Weiss: Yes! I’ll take it!

David Benioff: In the U.K., it’s definitely gaining in popularity. When we first started flying to Belfast, you know, when you go through customs, they would always ask, because we have work permits, they would say, "What are you working on?" We’d say, “A TV show.” “What’s the TV show?” “Game of Thrones.” “Game of Thorns? What’s that?"” In the last year, one of the times we came through, a woman at the customs desk was actually reading one of the books. They know the show now. They watch the show. It’s getting there.

You worked on the show three years before you got to the pilot stage?

Dan Weiss: Our first pitch to Carolyn [Straus] was in March of 2006, and we shot the first pilot in 2009.

Were you doing other things, too, in that time?

Dan Weiss: I worked on the adaptation of the video game Halo for a year, which ended up sort of imploding, with Guillermo del Toro and Neill Blomkamp, who then went on to do those great movies. And I did work for hire.

Are you in the same room when you’re writing the episodes?

David Benioff: We don’t write together. We tried to do that on the very first day. We’ll take a half. We’ll basically divvy it up. You get first half, I get second half, and then we swap halves and rewrite.

Dan Weiss: We tried to write the first page of the pilot together, and it literally took us four hours to write three quarters of a page. It was like trying to drive a car, like, “O.K., I’ll do the gas, and you do the brake, and I’ll hold this side of the steering wheel and you hold that side.”

So it’s easier to have one person play writer and the other play editor and then switch roles?

David Benioff: Yeah, yeah.

Dan Weiss: Pretty much. We’re just passing things back and forth. The work happens so quickly and there’s so much of it that I have very little recollection of who did what by the time we end up shooting stuff.

David Benioff: Before we start, we write a really detailed outline, the two of us, and then there’s Bryan Cogman, who started out as our assistant, and now he’s one of the writers on the show—and now, for this coming year, Dave Hill, who was our assistant the last few years, and we’ve promoted him to staff writer. So once we start outlining the season, the four us will sit together, coming up with scenes and plot lines, putting index cards on the board, you know, traditional writers’ room stuff. And then there’s about an eighty-page outline, a scene-by-scene outline, and we divvy up episodes. Last year we wrote seven episodes, Bryan wrote two, and George Martin wrote one.

When you started working together on the adaptation, did you have George Martin’s blessing?

Dan Weiss: The first person we had to convince to let us do this was George. We went out to a lunch that shaded into a dinner. He was here and his books had been out for a long time. I think the first book came out in 1997, and it was only when A Feast for Crows premiered at number one on The Times bestseller list that they decided to go out and try to sell them. So we read them and loved them and wanted very badly to do them as a television show. But we didn’t even know if George wanted to do it as a television show. The upfront payday would have been a lot greater, if he had sold them to any one of a number of [movie] studios that wanted to buy them. And so we had this lunch where we had to convince him it was a TV show and then convince him that we, who had never produced a minute of television in our lives, were the people to do this television show, that we were the people for him to give his child to. The first was very easy, because he knows television and he knows film storytelling. He knew there was no way to reduce his story to a feature film without completely vandalizing it and gutting it. So that part was a relatively simple conversation. Convincing him that we were the ones to do the job took the rest of the three-and-a-half hour lunch.

Did you have to show your mastery of Westeros trivia?

Dan Weiss: Oh!

David Benioff: Yeah. I mean, he—he asked us at the very end of this lunch—George worked here in television, he worked on two different shows, so he had a healthy skepticism of Hollywood and of us, you know, before he met us, and probably even after he met us. And at the very end of that lunch, he said, “Who’s Jon Snow’s real mother?”And it was very much like a test question. It wasn’t like, “Ha-ha!” He asked it and stared at us.

Is it the woman Ned Stark meets when he’s off on the campaign? Did you know the answer?

David Benioff: It hasn’t been revealed yet, in either the TV series or in the books.

Dan Weiss: Basically, it was like: “Guess. I want your guess to be intelligent and I want it to be based in the facts of the world.” Maybe if we had gotten it wrong but had a really good reason for thinking what we thought, it would have been O.K. But it needed to be a good guess.

Did you make a guess?

David Benioff: Yeah, we made a guess. After a nerve-racking silence.

Did you both have the same guess?

Dan Weiss: We had already discussed it. We’d had like a two-hour conversation about it.

So you had nerded out on it already.

Dan Weiss: Luckily, it was pretty well-trammeled territory for us, at that point.

Was the answer satisfactory to him?

David Benioff: It was satisfactory. He gave us his blessing to take it to HBO and pitch it there and see what happened.

Dan Weiss: We knew there was just one place that this could live. There was no other company on earth that could do this the way it needed to be done. That’s not just saying it to pay lip-service to HBO. It couldn’t be a movie, so there goes every studio.

David Benioff: It has to be expensive.

Dan Weiss: There are other networks—and now even more so—other networks that do amazing programming. But they don’t have the resources to do it on this scale.

Even Mad Men is in a fight every year over the budget, it seems like.

David Benioff: Didn’t Netflix spend a hundred million dollars on House of Cards?

Dan Weiss: I think that may have been for two seasons.

David Benioff: But still. Fifty million a season.

Dan Weiss: That’s a lot. Yeah. But in terms of shooting in foreign locations, on location three countries, sometimes four—five, if you want to count the visual-effects shoots for two, three weeks here.

David Benioff: Season three we were in Northern Ireland, Iceland, Morocco, and Croatia. And then we shot the visual effects.

Dan Weiss: Shot a week or two of visual effects with wolves and bears here.

Was it your conception from the start to do the entire book series? All or nothing?

David Benioff: That was part of the big draw for both of us. Both of us have written novels, and one of the things that’s always kind of frustrating, writing feature scripts, is there’s always so much time pressure on it. You’re trying to tell a story in roughly a hundred script pages, and that doesn’t allow for a huge amount of character development. It means that it’s almost like a short story. Everything’s got to be so concise. You’re constantly cutting, cutting, cutting. And so the idea, the attraction, of having this massive canvas, where you can take these characters, characters that we loved from the books, and have years to spend on them and to get to know them and to tell their stories with the time and patience—and the idea of just having a story that’s got a real beginning, middle and end. Even some of my favorite series from the past, you kind of get a sense, midway through, I don’t think they really knew where it was going from the beginning. They might have figured it out by the last season, like, “Here’s where we want to go.” But a lot of series don’t have a real sense of narrative arc. With this one, we had a pretty good idea where we wanted to go from the beginning. We had no idea if we’d get to take it there. We still don’t.

Are you year to year, with the renewals? Is that how it works?

David Benioff: It’s year to year, yeah. But at least it’s looking, at this point—we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to finish it out. And that’s a rare, a really rare gift, to have that much time to tell a story.

Dan Weiss: In the first season there’s a scene where it’s Tyrion, Bronn, and Shae, playing a drinking game for nine minutes. It’s a novelistic license that you can take. As long as it gives you insight into the character and it keeps you entertained, you can do that without any qualms. You can’t do that in a movie, really, unless it’s some kind of three-hour epic movie.

David Benioff: My Dinner With Tyrion! Also, in that particular scene, we were forced to. There was supposed to be a big battle scene there, and we ran out of money.

Dan Weiss: It’s cheaper than a battle.

You often show people going off to battle and coming back from a battle, rather than the battle itself.

David Benioff: There’s a grand tradition on stage of having battles off-stage and the characters come back.

Dan Weiss: “What, ho, my Lord?”

David Benioff: “Boy, that was a rough one out there.” We knew we’d have to do some of that. The great thing about having the money is we can also have some big battles.

Dan Weiss: You can literally choose your battles.

David Benioff: Exactly.

Dan Weiss: There are people who are military history buffs, and there’s no amount of that that would be too much for them. But the average smart person watching the show, that’s not what they’re watching it for.

It was entertaining to see Tyrion [the character played by Peter Dinklage] get knocked out early in the first battle he’s involved in. The camera stays with him and then he gets up and there’s smoke on the battlefield.

David Benioff: That was one of those things like, “God, I hope this works.” It’s really so much because of Peter and his performance and Alan Taylor, who directed this, who did such an amazing job with it. We actually really wanted that battle. We chose to shoot that battle. We had this whole idea of shooting it from Tyrion’s perspective, where you go into the battle at his head height and you’re wading into the carnage, and we had mapped it out with the director, and we were very excited—and then just completely ran out of money.

It was a good fix.

David Benioff: Thanks.

Dan Weiss: He had a moment [in the book] where he actually did miraculously get to kill somebody and not get killed himself, and we saved that moment for the following season.

The series is about power and how to get it and how to keep it. I love how Renly Baratheon works the charm angle. He passes some guy and says, “How’s your leg?”

Dan Weiss: Gerald!

David Benioff: He knows people’s names and that’s why everyone loves him so much.

Dan Weiss: The charm offensive: not so effective in medieval times. You had to wait for the post-Renaissance.

David Benioff: Too far ahead of his time.

And Renly’s brother, Stannis, is a stickler—it’s funny when he corrects Davos for saying “less” when it should be “fewer.”

David Benioff: That’s one of my favorite moments.

Dan Weiss: [The actor] Stephen Dillane did such a great job with that. He doesn’t look at him when he says it. It’s like a reflex action.

Almost every character has a foil that they are forced to spend time with, like Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth. And Arya and the Hound. Tyrion and Bronn.

Dan Weiss: It’s funny. The books are written in a point-of-view chapter technique, where each chapter belongs to somebody. It’s third person but it’s told through their point of view and it allows you access to their minds, and you can characterize them directly by how they are mentally responding to things. Without voiceover for every character, there’s no way to do that in a show. So every single piece of characterization, every single element of a person that you want to put out there, needs to come out through their interactions with somebody else. It’s not a very deep thought, but you start to realize that, on the scale that the show was going to take place, you really needed clearly defined ways to let you know who these people are relative to each other, which involves not just strong characters but strong relationships between different characters.

You need people to set other people off.

David Benioff: Sometimes there are scenes in the books that we really like, but so much of it is within the character’s head. The eternal challenge for screenwriter adapters is figuring out how to make something work on screen, when so much of what made it work in the book were the thoughts of the character, and obviously wanting to avoid voiceover. So a lot of those pairings are that way in the books, but we would kind of extend it, so we would get more of these characters talking to each other and have it more come out in dialogue as opposed to interior monologue. And some of it is just the fun of seeing these actors playing off each other.

Dan Weiss: Sort of like a Supercollider theory. If we smash those characters together, what’s going to come out of it, emotionally?

David Benioff: Like Tywin and Arya in season two. I don’t think they’re together in the book. But we have these two actors. Charles Dance is such a phenomenal Tywin Lannister, and we already talked about Maisie, and we knew they were going to be in proximity to each other, so it actually made sense that they would come together in the world. And then it was just: how much fun would it be, to write scenes for Charles and Maisie?

Another funny pairing is Jon Snow and Ygritte, which led to the meme “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” Did you know it was going to be a catchphrase?

David Benioff: We very much knew it was a great line, from the books, like “Winter is coming.” Actually, I think we were trying to be more parsimonious, because there’s a temptation to just have Ygritte say it every time.

Especially with that northern accent.

David Benioff: It’s great. She’s fantastic.

Is that [actor] Rose Leslie’s real accent?

Dan Weiss: No, no, no. Very ultra-proper English. Like she would say, “Relly.” It’s like that line from A Fish Called Wanda: “Do shut up.”

Peter Dinklage told me you enjoy the pranks, and one of you called him and told him the show was canceled and he was out of a job. He was crushed for six hours.

David Benioff: I think it was when the pilot was picked up. I was with Tom McCarthy and we called him from a Yankees game.

What’s the mood like in Northern Ireland? Do you live in hotels?

Dan Weiss: We have apartments there.

David Benioff: When Peter comes out, he’s in the same apartment complex.

Dan Weiss: We have a sort of a commune, and they’re perfectly fine apartments. They’ve gotten used to our presence there.

David Benioff: It used to be an Army barracks. They built an apartment complex where the British army had been stationed. We end up being there about half the year, and Peter comes out for a couple months straight, and Lena Headey [who plays Cersei Lannister].

Dan Weiss: A lot of us, and Peter and Lena, we all have kids.

You both have kids?

David Benioff: We each have kids.

Dan Weiss: Our wives and kids come out for the summer and then when school kicks up again they come back and we try to shuttle back and forth as best we can.

Game of Thrones has so many unexpected reversals. In the pilot, you expect Bran is going to be like a Sword in the Stone-type hero. It’s such a surprise when he gets pushed from the window. And the Red Wedding. And Ned Stark getting killed. The show doesn’t follow the usual rules.

David Benioff: Those three moments that you mentioned are three moments from the books where we were both convinced that this would be a great series, if we ever got a chance to do it. A Game of Thrones was the first fantasy book I had picked up probably in twenty-five years, and at first I was having a little bit of a hard time because it’s just—I think just sort of the prejudices that kick in after a while. It’s like, “Oh, here are these names.”

Dan Weiss: Luckily, George is good with names.

David Benioff: George is excellent with names. “Ned Stark.”

Dan Weiss: Still, it’s a lot of made-up names.

David Benioff: And in the moment where Bran gets pushed out the window? I so didn’t see that coming. Up to that point I thought, I’ll give it a hundred pages and then move on. And Bran gets pushed out the window, and all of a sudden I was hooked. I think that many readers had the same experience. And the Red Wedding, I just remember reading that, getting to the moment where your hear “The Rains of Castamere” playing, and thinking, “Well, that’s not good.” And then turning the page and seeing what happens. And then going back, and going, “Whoa! That didn’t actually happen.” It was almost unique for me, as a reading experience, in that I wanted to undo it in my mind by sort of flipping pages back.

Dan Weiss: I did that when Ned got his head chopped off. I read the page again, because I was like—they couldn’t have just chopped the head off the hero. You can’t do that in a fantasy novel!

You’re seasoned readers and yet you were tricked.

Dan Weiss: I came to it with genre pre-expectations that I had associated with this genre, and I had kind of internalized whatever there prejudices were, the general prejudices about the genre—and he uses that mercilessly against you.

David Benioff: I annoy my wife constantly, because we’ll be watching TV in bed together, and I’ll say, “This is about to happen.” And then usually it does. And she’s like, “Oh my God, how’d you know that?” It’s only because this is what I do for a living. You start to see how the sausage is made. And when you’re surprised by it, it’s just that much more gratifying. So whether it’s reading a book like George’s, or watching something, whether it’s Breaking Bad or—The Returned is the new show that I’m obsessed with. There are things that happen on that show that you’re like, “Whoa!” There are things that happen that completely surprised me. And, yes, it makes you even happier than before, because it’s harder to surprise you at a certain point.

Dan Weiss: Once Ned dies in that first book, from there on out, it completely changes the landscape of the world. It changes the tenor of the world. There’s people who [think], “Oh, I love Tyrion and I’m going to be marching lockstep through the story with him—and now I’m feeling like that may or may not be the case.” So when he’s in jeopardy, the jeopardy becomes real.

What happens if a character is popular? Would an executive say something like, “Peter Dinklage better stay alive, because the audience loves him.”

Dan Weiss: They don’t operate that way. That’s one of the great things about working for them. There’s not some giant room with ten million people on ten million dials telling them how they’re going to make their show. They pick people they trust and they pretty much let you make the show you want to make.

David Benioff: And I think the great thing about seeing a character that you don’t think is going to die—whether it’s Ned Stark or later Robb Stark and Catelyn—is, the other characters that you’ve become attached to, you’re that much more fearful for them. You realize that everyone is vulnerable and the rules are a bit different here.

Dan Weiss: We watched 24 when it was on, and you’re never sitting there thinking, “Wow, I think he’s going to buy it in this one.”

It’s a problem. In Skyfall, there’s an elaborate chase in the opening scene, and you don’t feel it that much. People are shooting at Daniel Craig, and you never feel worried he’s going to die.

Dan Weiss: We were talking about The Hurt Locker the other day. It’s so great. You see Guy Pearce, and this is the most famous guy in the movie, and he gets blown up in the first scene!

It’s like Janet Leigh in Psycho. Why do you think it is, in the world of Game of Thrones, that Theon Greyjoy gets the most punishment? Other people get a clean death and he is tortured.

David Benioff: Well, Alfie. Alfie Allen...

Dan Weiss: Basically, it’s Alfie.

What do you mean? It’s just the actor [Alfie Allen, who plays Theon Greyjoy]?

Dan Weiss: "Wouldn’t it be fun to tie Alfie to a cross with no clothes on?" And it hurts, being tied to a cross!

With a guy eating a sausage nearby?

Dan Weiss: Yes. A guy who gets to walk around and relax. Meanwhile, he’s just, all day, tied to that cross. But no. He’s a character that we loved, because he’s doing horrible things and he’s pulling you step by step into his increasingly bad decisions. Each step of the way, you completely understand, yeah, he’s kind of up against the wall here. He made that one mistake, and we all make mistakes, and that led to this bigger mistake, and that led to this mistake, and that leads to doing absolutely unconscionable things! But it’s unlike Joffrey, who was just born broken, in some way. Theon’s motivations are human. You understand. They come from a need to be respected and to know where you stand in the scheme of things. But then he pays for it.

David Benioff: The first time you see Theon in the book, it’s when Ned Stark beheads the ranger, and you see him kicking the ranger’s head afterward. So you know from that moment, like, “Oh, this guy...” And we didn’t want to do that, partly because we cast Alfie, and we liked him as an actor, and there’s something really quicksilver about him—you never quite know what he’s thinking in a really great way—and partly because we wanted to be surprised by it. You don’t want to go into it thinking like, “O.K., this is a character that we should be really suspicious of, because he seems like he’s probably villainous,” as opposed to seeing him experience this torturous relationship with his father and his sister. He’s been raised in this foster place for most of his childhood. His loyalties are divided. So, just keeping him a little bit more on the borderline, as opposed to pushing too villainous too early.

He doesn’t seem villainous.

David Benioff: And he’s not. No. Not at all. And he’s a character, he’s an actor, who’s really fun to write for.

He’s still alive, right, at the end of season three?

David Benioff: He’s still alive.

When he arrives at his home, he feels up his sister [Yara Greyjoy, played by Gemma Whelan] on the horse, not knowing she’s his sister.

David Benioff: When we were auditioning that part, we saw a lot of experience actresses, and then we saw her, and she’s really more of a standup comedian. She’s really funny.

Is she British?

David Benioff: Yeah, she is. And she does this standup thing where she plays a part. It’s like a 19th century spinster, and she’s wildly funny. But this part is so completely different from anything she has done before. It’s that old thing: if you want someone unpredictable in a role, cast a comedian, because they’re going to do something unexpected, and that’s what Gemma did.

How have your lives changed, since the show started?

Dan Weiss: It’s sort of swallowed those lives. The show is pretty much our lives. Which I’d say is ninety-five-percent great.

David Benioff: Far fewer friends than I used to have.

Dan Weiss: I’d like to think that I have friends, and our friendship is in suspended animation, and we’ll resume normal friendship activities once this is over. I do a whole lot less socializing. But we’ve got our families, our wives, and our kids, who are sort of being communally raised.

It’s like being in the circus.

Dan Weiss: We’re basically carnies.

Do you dream about the show at night? Do you see the characters?

Dan Weiss: Yeah. They tend to be really mundane dreams.

David Benioff: You’d think they’d be fun dreams, with magic, but they tend to be dreams where you’re sitting on set and the lines are wrong or the camera’s not working.

Dan Weiss: I had a dream the other day where Peter was delivering an entire monologue that I’d written and, as he delivered it, I realized it was completely horrible, that I had given him a turd of a monologue. There was a whole crew watching, and everyone looked like they had smelled something funny.

David Benioff: Most of my dreams are like—what do you call that little pack on the back of the camera that always breaks?

Dan Weiss: Codex.

David Benioff: Codex is this little machine on the camera that records all the information and for some reason it always breaks. And in my dream the Codex had broken, and we were just sitting around, waiting. I woke up and I was like, “Really? That’s what I’m dreaming about? The Codex breaking?”

Did you have the skill to direct movies or TV before you did the show?

Dan Weiss: No, but we did it anyway.

And now you know, for real.

Dan Weiss: We had a very charmed situation where we got to work with people we were already close with, actors and crew, people we had known for years, and we had fantastic DPs and a fantastic A.D. both years, who really let us concentrate on—on, you know, what we were going to have for lunch. And Drop7. And Candy Crush.

David Benioff: I think it would be hard to go back to the previous work, where I was writing scripts and turning them in and losing all control over it. After having been through this, just thinking about the casting—neither of us had done any casting before, and it’s such a crucial part of any screen storytelling. So the idea of going back to the place where you just have no say over it, I think it would be too frustrating. You know, you’re writing a feature script, you don’t have any say over the editing. You don’t even get invited to the editing room most of the time.

And once somebody owns your words, they can rewrite them.

Dan Weiss: It’s just a given that you’re being paid for the option of being told to go any way at any point in the process.

Would you go back to writing fiction?

Dan Weiss: That I could do.

David Benioff: Yeah.

Will you collaborate after this? Or do you think this is going to exhaust you?

David Benioff: My guess is that we’ll go on to do some things in collaboration, some things separately. Maybe one of us will direct something and the other one will produce and vice versa. But I think we’ve worked together for almost eight years now.

Dan Weiss: Is that what is was? 2006? Jesus fucking Christ.

Is there anything you can say about season four?

Dan Weiss: Making it almost killed us. How about that?

David Benioff: It was the hardest season to shoot.

Did you have the same number of production days?

Dan Weiss: It’s more about what you’re trying to do in those days. The logistical complexity of this year was such a dramatic leap.

Are they more expensive episodes?

Dan Weiss: More expensive. Every year it goes up. Every year it gets bigger budget-wise and accordingly bigger in terms of production logistics. Here, I think, the budget went to here, and the appetite for more new or different kinds of shooting and scenes went even beyond that.

Meaning more fights, more action?

Dan Weiss: The sorts of visual-effect type things that we hadn’t really done before.

I suppose the dragons are effects and they get bigger as the show goes on.

Dan Weiss: Yeah.

David Benioff: So there’s that. And it was more action this season than there ever has been before. And it’s just much more time consuming. To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days. But the actors have gotten better at the fighting. Yesterday we were watching this fight scene with Kit Harington [Jon Snow] in it, and he did this movement—“Is that sped up? Because it looks a little—”

Dan Weiss: "That looks fake! Let’s take the frame-rate..." But he was actually moving a thousand miles an hour with a heavy sword in his hand. He’s good. He’s really good.

I could see it becoming a problem, if the magic overwhelms the human element. Is that a danger in the later seasons, if it becomes all white walkers versus dragons?

David Benioff: That would be cool!

Dan Weiss: The way we read the books and tried to turn them into the show is that the fantasy elements were so gradually and sparingly rolled out. You throw the white walkers into the mix and then you acclimate to them over the course of the season. And then the dragons show up, and you acclimate to them. There are these new elements of unreality but you have time to incorporate them into this generally, psychologically realistic [world].

They have weaknesses, too. You can kill a white walker.

Dan Weiss: Nothing’s invincible. And by the time you get to those late, end-game scenarios, whatever they may be, you would be so invested—at least that’s the theory—you would be so invested in those characters that it wouldn’t yank you out of the reality. It would be all the more dire, that these things were happening to these people that you care about.

David Benioff: We feel the same way, about the danger of magic taking over the story. One thing that drew us to the books is that—even though they are fantasy books and even though there are dragons and white walkers and so forth—it feels very much a human story. George was careful, I think, in the use of magic. And we don’t want it to take up too large a role on the show. But, you know, it’s there. The white walkers are there. And we are building toward something with the white walkers. But what this series will not ever become is the epic conflict of good and evil. And that’s one of the very first things we said to HBO when we came in. Every fantasy we’ve seen, in the movies at least, has been that, where it’s good versus evil. It’s like the James Bond thing you were talking about, because, in the end, you always know who is going to win. There’s never been a fantasy movie of the epic battle of good versus evil that ended with evil winning. I mean, I’d like to see that movie, but...

Dan Weiss: That’d be great, actually, if Darth Vader wins. Yay! One of the things I loved about the story from the beginning is when something magical or mystical occurs, the way people in the world reacted to it was not that different from the way we’d react to it. It wasn’t like the dragons pop out and everybody goes, "Oh, great, dragons." The dragons pop out and it’s a giant, holy-shit moment for everybody who sees it. Because that wasn’t in their realm of possibility in their lives any more than it is in yours, or not much more. And there aren’t wizards running around doing magic for fun and people taking it as a matter of course.

With Harry Potter, I often wondered, "What does Voldemort want? What’s in it for him?"

Dan Weiss: He wants to do evil. I’m reading my son the first one now.

David Benioff: I didn’t read them, but they end up shooting power beams at each other and Harry wins, right? You kind of know that that’s what’s going to happen, because what else could happen?

Dan Weiss: Harry loses?

David Benioff: For me, that’s why the best character in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is Gollum.

Dan Weiss: Jonathan Lethem said if Shakespeare had written Lord of the Rings, it would have been called Gollum.

David Benioff: He’s not serving either side and he’s trying to get what he’s after. He does bad things but you don’t really think of him as evil. He’s just this fucked-up little being.

Even Jaime Lannister, from where he was in the beginning of the story to where he is now, going into season four, you begin to have sympathy for him. You also have sympathy for the Hound, which is cool.

Dan Weiss: It’s like when I got to the end of Deadwood and I found myself really rooting for Al Swearingen to succeed in some way—and then I remembered that the first time I had seen this character, his foot was on a woman’s throat. The fact that you could take somebody and put him in the most loathsome situation imaginable and then get a normal person to really be wanting this person to succeed is something we always keep in mind. It’s satisfying. There’s something kind of heartening about it, in a way.

Maybe people are sick of good-versus-evil. Although maybe not, because those movies still do great business.

David Benioff: They’re definitely still making movies like that, but if you look at the series, or at least the series that I’ve loved over the last decade, starting with The Sopranos, it’s not that. It’s so much more. Tony Soprano is a killer but you care about him. You don’t necessarily like him. Maybe you don’t admire him. But you care about what’s going to happen to him and you’re drawn into this character. All of those great HBO shows, whether it’s The Wire or Deadwood, and shows not on HBO, like the whole saga of Walter White—the fact that you can care so much about the fate of the world’s best meth cook is kind of a phenomenal achievement. It’s been a great thing. It’s great working in TV right now, just having the liberty to pursue these stories that studios have been rejecting for years and years.