David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have a prolific, successful creative partnership, working as co-writers, co-creators, co-producers, and co-directors. One of the reasons their collaboration works so well is sheer familiarity â these two have known each other for years.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, Benioff and Weiss explained how they first met and connected when they were at Trinity College in Dublin. “We were two American Jews in Dublin,” Weiss said, “with no Irish roots of any kind, obsessed with Irish literature and trying to find a functional gym in Dublin in 1995.” Instead, they found each other, and they both benefited from Benioff’s realization that he wanted a bigger and more emotionally invested audience for his work than he was ever going to get in academia. Weiss had a little bit of experience working in Hollywood, so Benioff hit him up for a combination of collaboration and tutoring. “I’d never written a script before,” Benioff said, “and I didn’t know to do it, so I asked Dan [Weiss] if he would write one with me, because he had written a bunch already. I thought I could learn it from him rather than reading a book or something.”
They scrapped their first co-writing project, a horror movie where a boarding school’s headmaster is really Satan, before they even sent it out. But they didn’t stop working â and eventually their diligence began to pay off in spades.
