David Benioff and Dan Weiss on the pleasures of reaching the Game of Thrones halfway point

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss recently spoke with HitFix about their approach to the show as it enters its fourth year. Having already written and filmed what they see as the halfway point, we can start to expect some payoff, as the story rounds the bend.

“Now that we’ve passed what we see as the halfway point, one of the great pleasures of the show for us is seeing some of these disparate plot threads come together, and seeing characters who have never met each other finally occupying the same frame. It feels like this is the season where the “GoT” universe finally stops expanding and starts contracting, and the resulting collisions can be a lot of fun.”

Some of these collisions can be expected during the Royal Wedding, which gave David and Dan the opportunity to linger in one setting for the majority of an episode, and create some interesting character pairings.

“For us it’s fun to see characters who normally occupy separate storylines collide like charged particles in an accelerator. What if Cersei met Brienne? What if Loras bumped into Jaime? But beyond those moments, there’s great pleasure in taking a show which normally bounds between locations and slowing it down, lingering on the moment. Later in the season we have an episode that takes place in one night, in one general location. The decision to focus on one storyline is driven by the story itself. When a wedding congregates so many of our characters, we dwell on that congregation at length. When it’s time for a great battle, we want to see both sides.”

Dan Weiss also spoke with Vulture about handling the aging child actors. Many of the characters in the ASOIAF series are much younger than their television counterparts, and as years pass in the real world, only weeks pass in the story. So how are they going to handle the rapidly growing disparity?

“It’s a complicated question, and there’s no simple answer,” Weiss said. “I would say that there are a lot of factors at play, and we keep them all in mind. Ideally, of course, we would like George’s books and the show to hit at the same time, but we just kind of make the best show that we can, based on this amazing road map. I think Sophie’s already taller than I am, but what are you going to do? It just comes with the territory, where you buy it that people are aging at a different rate on the show than they do in the real world. You kind of buy into that.”

Visit Vulture for more from from Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who is guilty of a few growth spurts, and the man who has to carry him around, Kristian Nairn.

• Published on 03/31/2014 at 9:37 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:43 PM CDT