- “Game of Thrones” showrunner David Benioff said that he cringes when watching ultra-violent episodes of the HBO series he created with D.B. Weiss.
- Benioff told a panel at the Austin Film Festival on Saturday: “I think we went too far with some of that stuff.”
- The pair also said in the interview that they tried to remove as many of the fantasy elements from George R. R. Martin’s original books as possible for the series, which enraged fans.
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“Game of Thrones” showrunner David Benioff told an audience at the Austin Film Festival on Saturday that he and co-creator D.B. Weiss may have taken the violence a step too far in the HBO series.
Appearing on a panel, Benioff and Weiss spoke about their beloved fantasy drama.
“To be honest, I think we went too far with some of that stuff,” Benioff said in audio uploaded to Soundcloud, which was shared by fact-checking site TruthOrFiction.com after a Twitter thread posted by an attendee with quotes from the event went viral.
“There are shots from our show that I see sometimes and I cringe,” he added.
Benioff pointed specifically to a scene in season one where Ser Gregor Clegane (also known as "The Mountain") kills Ser Hugh in a joust, and the viewer is treated to around 30 seconds of blood jutting from the defeated knight's throat.
"I remember watching [the jousting scene] with my wife and she was like, 'Why is it so gory?' And I said, 'I don't know.'"
The showrunner compared it to an episode of Netflix's "Ozark" wherein the lead Jason Bateman's toenail is removed: "I was like, 'Why am I watching this? Oh, that's why people got so angry.'"
She is asking about the violence. David: “TBH we went too far with some of those.”
He comments on the jousting scene with the Mountain and how when they killed Sir Hugh, that it was in the scene too long. He compares it to Ozark’s Jason Bateman’s toenail being ripped out.
— Needle & Pen (@ForArya) October 26, 2019
The showrunners received a lot of criticism from fans of George R.R. Martin's original book series after Weiss said that they tried to remove as many fantasy elements from the series as possible because "we didn't just want it to appeal to a fantasy fanbase."
"We wanted parents to love it, and people who played professional football to love it and we kind of wanted to reach a wider audience," Weiss said.
Esquire writer Gabrielle Bruney called the comments tone-deaf, and many fans on Twitter seem to support that notion.
"They wanted to remove as many fantasy elements as possible from fantasy books ?? Are they trolling ? I can't believe this is real and not from an Onion article," one fan wrote.
"I really can't fathom this panel. To summarize: they didn't like the fantasy part of the fantasy property, they didn't understand characters or plot, they didn't have a writer's room, they didn't know what they were doing at all. They conned HBO. These are all self admissions," tweeted another.
The panel comments came just before it was announced Monday night that Benioff and Wise had decided to walk away from their much-publicized deal with Disney's Lucasfilm to launch a "Star Wars" trilogy in 2022.
"There are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both "Star Wars" and our Netflix projects," the pair said in a joint statement to Deadline. "So we are regretfully stepping away."
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