David Benioff Discusses the Writing Process | Author of City of Thieves, 25th hour, GOT Script

David Benioff discusses screenwriting and other aspects of the writing process. Shot during the 2008 International Festival of Authors at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Part of a longer interview from the series WRITERS' CONFESSIONS.
Transcription:
"You get into certain habits as a screenwriter and you're exercising certain muscles and you're letting other ones go slack. And so for instance, when you're writing a screenplay, you get used to writing interior, living room, day, you know? And, that's it, you don't have to do anything else. And a production designer is gonna come along and figure out what the living room's supposed to look like, and you say how many people are in the room and a costumer is gonna decide what they're wearing, and the actors are gonna play the role. Again, it's a blueprint, you know, that screenplay you're writing is a blueprint for a movie, and you're trying to be as lean as possible. You want as few words on paper as possible because you're trying to tell an entire story in about 110 pages. So everything's about efficiency and keep things moving forward. In a novel, of course, if you don't put the words down on paper, the reader's not gonna be able to envision it. So, you've got to describe the room and you've got to describe the people in the room and what they're wearing and everything else. And that might sound like a kind of facile explanation, but in fact, it's quite, you know, after several years of writing screenplays exclusively, I had kind of, I think, lost the powers of description. I was having a hard time describing things And then beyond that, I think an even deeper issue is that unless you have voiceover in a script, or unless you do some kind of weird tricks, like in "Being John Malkovich" or something, but generally speaking, you don't have access to the character's minds. So, you know, the screenplay is always written in third person, it's always present tense. With the book though, I mean, the great advantage of a novel is you can get into anyone's mind, you know, whether it's sometimes just the one character, the first person, sometimes you're going into many character's minds. And so, it's a power, but it's also something that, if you're not used to doing it after a long time screenwriting, it takes a while to get back in shape for it. So, there are differences. I find them both fun to write, or I should say, that's not really true. I find screenplays fun to write. I find novels kind of torture. But at the end, the end result, the final book is much more satisfying as an object than the final movie, because the book is my own. Whereas the movie, even if I end up loving the movie, like "25th Hour", that's still Spike Lee's movie and the actors, you know, had a great deal to do with it. So, I take a great deal of pride in it, but it's not my own, you know, it's a collaboration. And I think at the end of the day, it's always going to be more, sorry, 'cause this sounds really pretentious, but it's gonna be more artistically satisfying to have that thing that you created on your own, as opposed to the thing that you were one of 400 people working on. And I remember going into the bookstore and seeing it on the shelf for the first time, which is something that novelists talk about a lot. Like, just that the first time you see it in a bookstore and know that it's real and that other people have looked at it and that's pretty powerful. I mean, that's the thing. You know, it's a very strange process because it all starts off in your brain as just these imagined characters in an imagined world and then, you put it down on paper and then a year later, there it is and it's in an actual book. And it's true with the movie too. I mean, with the movie, in some ways it's even stranger because you meet the people who are going to play the characters that you created, you know? And so, I remember meeting the actress who played the character Naturelle in "25th Hour" and she came over and said, "I'm Naturelle." And it was just like, you know, it's like a "Twilight Zone" episode where these people that have been only real in your brain are now walking towards you and smiling at you and waiting for you to say something. So, it's an interesting alchemy and it's a lot of fun."
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