“It’s been immensely gratifying,” admits David Benioff about the success of the chart-topping “3 Body Problem,” his latest collaboration with “Game of Thrones” partner D. B. Weiss. The multiple Emmy-winning duo serve as co-creators and producers of Netflix’s mind-bending sci-fi drama “3 Body Problem” with writer/producer Alexander Woo (“True Blood”). Watch our exclusive video interview with Benioff, Weiss and Woo above.
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“Honestly, until the show comes out, you never know, and Dan and I at least, had the same experience with ‘Game of Thrones,’ where we worked so hard on that first season, and had really no concept of how it would do. I remember being scared!” he reveals. “You really don’t know. I mean, people can pretend they do. But I just I don’t think there’s any way of gauging how something like this is going to play out.” Now that the show has become a success for Netflix, both commercially and critically, Benioff says the team is hoping for a potential second season. “Our fingers are crossed. We’re hard at work outlining. Right before we got on this call I was in the middle of writing something for the outline in episode eight of Season 2. Nothing official yet!”
“3 Body Problem” is based on the Hugo Award-winning novel “The Three-Body Problem” by Chinese author Liu Cixin, the first in Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. Benioff, Weiss and Woo co-wrote the pilot together, titled “Countdown,” which takes place in both 1960s China and modern-day England, where astrophysicists try to uncover and expose what is ultimately revealed as an existential threat to humanity from a distant and more advanced alien civilization known as the San-ti. The sci-fi drama stars Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng as the older and younger version of Ye Wenjie, a brilliant scientist who came of age during the oppressive Cultural Revolution of 1960s China. Ye becomes a revered astrophysicist concealing secrets from her dark past that will impact humanity’s future. The large ensemble also includes Benedict Wong, Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzalez, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Marlo Kelly and “Game of Thrones” alums Jonathan Pryce, John Bradley and Liam Cunningham.
SEE Exclusive Video Interview: Rosalind Chao (‘3 Body Problem’)
“The major topic of conversation throughout most of the pandemic between the three of us was how we were going to wrestle this thing down to the ground,” Woo recalls about adapting a series of novels that many have labelled as “unadaptable” because of its dense plot, “hard sci-fi” mythology and its focus on grand existential concepts over meaningful character development. “It was an exhilarating read, for all of us, and the thing that was most important at top of mind for all of us was to preserve the spirit of those novels, the feeling that we all got from reading them,” he says.
“We are such believers in character being the central point of any great TV show. If there’s a secret at all to the work that any of us have done, it’s that it’s the connection between the viewer and the characters that takes you from one episode to the next, and then to the next season into the next season, and before you know it these characters are people in your lives,” Woo explains. “That’s a hugely powerful experience. It’s emotionally as real as your real friends might be. So, no matter how unusual the genre might be, the key is to root it in character, so that when the crazy stuff starts happening, you care about the people. That was the impetus behind pulling some of the protagonists in book two and three into Season 1 and getting all the chess pieces out on the board as soon as possible, so that when all the crazy things start happening, that start happening pretty fast, you know who it’s happening to, and you’re already invested in them and they have relationships with each other.”
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