There’s just a fortnight to go until we return to Westeros for the seventh season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have been discussing their excitement over the penultimate season of the epic fantasy series.
“To me what’s most exciting is being able to play interactions between various characters that for years we haven’t been able to play,” said Weiss. “There’s a whole bunch of reunions and first time meetings that people have been waiting for for a long time and when you put it on paper you just want to do justice to the work that these guys have done building these characters over so many years. You want to give them as much as you can.”
“Everyone steps up their game every season. I know you probably get sick of hearing us say that,” added Benioff. “We say it every year. But it’s kind of astounding to us. We were looking at a battle scene and we set more stuntmen on fire in one of these shots than have ever been simultaneously set on fire … But every department constantly improves, from the effects to the acting. [Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner] have been great from the beginning and how they’ve grown as actors — I mean everybody in the cast has, but in them it’s especially pronounced since they started as kids. Now we’re coming into the final season and it’s very gratifying. We’ve managed to keep everybody on the same path moving the same direction for so long.”
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The showrunners also went on to discuss how the shortened season length – and the current events in the series – has led to a change in pace:
“For a long time we’ve been talking about ‘the wars to come.’ That war is pretty much here,” stated Benioff. “So it’s really trying to find a way to make the storytelling work without feeling like we’re rushing it. You want to give characters their due, and pretty much all the characters left are important characters, even the ones who might have started out as relatively minor characters have become significant in their own right.”
“The scope of the story naturally has increased season to season,” said Weiss. “That also probably feeds in a little bit into the pacing, that things are coming to a head and the war is here. It’s this urgency from within the story that drives the pace rather than any external decision. Things are moving faster because in the world of these characters the war that they’ve been waiting for is upon them, the conflicts that have been building the past six years are upon them and those facts give them a sense of urgency that makes them move faster.”
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Game of Thrones returns for its seventh season on July 16th.
Originally published July 2, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
