Game of Thrones Showrunners Comment On Series After Controversial Final Season

Game of Thrones showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff gave a rare post-series interview to the Japanese satellite network Star Channel. In the interview, the showrunners reflect on the show following the controversial final season. “To have it become what it became, and to be able to spend not one year or two years but more than ten years of our lives making it at this level, with the people we got to work with, all them, behind the camera…”, Weiss says.

“We didn’t have any idea that the show would be so big because when we first started going to Northern Ireland, where we shot the show, the customs officers would ask us what we were doing there,” Benioff adds. “We’d say ‘We’re working on this show…’ And they’d say, ‘What is Game of Thorns?’ And then, by the third season, we’d see the customs guys and — literally this happened in the Heathrow Airport — and the guy was reading A Game of Thrones, George [RR Martin]’s book, and we knew that something was starting to cross the threshold of public awareness.”

It seems despite the reaction to the show’s conclusion the showrunners are happy to look back on the good times when the show was rising to the peak of its pop-culture status. For his part, A Game of Thrones author George RR Martin has been supportive of the way Benioff and Weiss concluded their version of the fantasy saga, reminding fans of the differences between the prose and television mediums.

“I am working in a very different medium than David and Dan, never forget,” Martin wrote in a blog post. “They had six hours for this final season. I expect these last two books of mine will fill 3000 manuscript pages between them before I’m done… and if more pages and chapters and scenes are needed, I’ll add them. And of course the butterfly effect will be at work as well; those of you who follow this Not A Blog will know that I’ve been talking about that since season one. There are characters who never made it onto the screen at all, and others who died in the show but still live in the books… so if nothing else, the readers will learn what happened to Jeyne Poole, Lady Stoneheart, Penny and her pig, Skahaz Shavepate, Arianne Martell, Darkstar, Victarion Greyjoy, Ser Garlan the Gallant, Aegon VI, and a myriad of other characters both great and small that viewers of the show never had the chance to meet. And yes, there will be unicorns… of a sort…”

What do you think of Game of Thrones now that it’s over? Let us know in the comments.

(h/t Watchers on the Wall)