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By Thomas Barrie
At 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, the future has been revealed. David Benioff and Daniel Weiss (better known by his initials D. B. ), the former directors of Game of Thrones, were returning to the United States after an intense press tour in Japan. , where they were selling the final season of a series in which they had spent a decade of their lives wearing down their projects. It was the summer of 2019, and back on the field, a furious debate raged among enthusiasts about whether Benioff and Weiss had done the show justice to their debatable final season. Would Daenerys have gone mad and interrogated her own subjects like that?Was Bran the Broken the best choice to rule the Seven Kingdoms?Eight seasons and the Night King collapses in one fell swoop?Fans disputed the denouement with an ironclad ferocity that would make the series’ Dothraki heart-eater look like one of their bookish maesters.
But Benioff and Weiss weren’t thinking about the reaction. Instead, they were preoccupied with a trilogy of dense, cult science fiction novels, collectively known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past, through Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Benioff, who had read the books in vans, airplanes, and hotel rooms during the press trip, I finished the last volume, Death’s End, and closed the book. Soon after, Weiss scoured the aisle of the plane to locate him. He himself had finished Death’s End five minutes earlier. “He said, ‘What do you think?’ Benioff recalls. I said, ‘We have to do it, don’t we?’He said, “Yes, we have to. “
3 Body Problem star Jess Hong a scene set in a simulation
Benioff and Weiss, after all, had an answer to a question that had been on their minds for a decade: What to do next?The end of Game of Thrones had closed the door on some 70 hours of television, which the cast and crew brought to life dragons, fictional cities and bloody battles during months of filming in Croatia, Iceland and Spain. The show was, is, arguably one of the most successful television shows ever created. It’s definitely the biggest fantasy TV show ever seen in the world. small screen. Not since The Sopranos has I had a show so concretely rooted in popular culture. With 59 wins out of 159 Emmy nominations, it is the most awarded drama series of all time and has introduced or revived the careers of an entire generation of actors. Nearly 20 million more people in the U. S. alone watched the final. So, sitting in the sky somewhere between Osaka and Oahu, Benioff and Weiss had nothing left to prove.
Or at most nothing. To say the divisive ending might exaggerate the number of other people who enjoyed it. It’s been called “a little empty” (Time), a “mess” (USA Today), a “drama-turned-sitcom” (The Atlantic), and much worse on Reddit. Some of the most die-hard enthusiasts spearheaded a petition to remake the final season, which garnered a staggering 1. 86 million signatures, roughly the population of Northern Ireland, where much of Game of Thrones was filmed.
But that’s in the past. For Benioff and Weiss, the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, separately titled The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death’s End, was the future. Not only were they leaving Thrones, but they were also done with HBO, at least for a while. while. It was Peter Friedlander, Netflix’s vice president of original series, who included them in the books during a dinner one night in mid-2019. Conceptually epic, with some 8 million copies sold in more than 20 languages worldwide, Liu’s novels were intellectual assets that could rival Thrones. Just 3 months after the end of Thrones, Netflix announced a deal worth $200 million to exclusively guarantee the participation of the showrunners and the 8-episode series, titled 3 Body Problem, after the first volume. of the trilogy, would be the first of his new productions. It seemed like the best vehicle for Benioff and Weiss to launch a triumphant comeback, or at least, for the naysayers, attempt a comeback.
Producers Alexander Woo, David Benioff and DB Weiss
The Problem of the Three Bodies is a very thorny novel to tackle. “It’s the story of human civilization from the first contact with extraterrestrial beings to the end of time,” says Alexander Woo, who previously served as an executive producer on HBO’s True Blood. before joining Benioff and Weiss to paint 3 Body Problem in 2020. This summary provides an idea of the breadth of the novels, but is a bit careful about the details. In short, the premise is as follows: extraterrestrial beings called Trisolars, from a stellar formula several hundred years away, realize that their house will soon be destroyed; they look for other planets to settle on, they locate the Earth and it’s beautiful. Humans disagree. Organize a race to prepare defenses against the invasion that ends.
And yet, even this summary does not include the plethora of harsh clinical theories contained in the trilogy’s 1,600 pages. Author Cixin Liu is a 60-year-old Chinese computer engineer from Henan province, south of Beijing. Before emerging into the nascent Chinese science fiction scene of the 1990s, Liu graduated from North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power. He’s an engineer and scientist by training, and it shows. A good example: the “3-body problem” itself is a real-life puzzle that has yet to be solved by physicists, similar to the unpredictable way in which the respective gravitational attractions of 3 celestial bodies interact with each other. (It is this instability of the trisolar formula that drives them to attempt to colonize the Earth; they live in a “tri-solar” formula with 3 suns. )
While on the set of London’s Shepperton Studios, surrounded by extras holding small red books and chanting Maoist slogans, the scale of the challenge was not lost on Derek Tsang. The director joined us to direct the first two episodes of 3 Body Problem when Benioff and Weiss approached him after watching his 2019 coming-of-age movie, Better Days. The first scene of the series called for recreating Tsinghua University’s 1966 Cultural Revolution, and they thought, as a Hong Kong-born Mandarin speaker, he would do it justice.
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The opening scene of the show takes place in China’s Cultural Revolution.
Fearful of falling into what he calls “a bastard version” of Chinese history, Tsang interviewed parents and grandparents of friends who had fled mainland China in the 1970s, hearing stories of seven hours of swimming with basketballs as floats to escape what was then a “bastard version. ” Hong Kong Hong Kong, British. He and set designer Deborah Riley referenced a Maoist propaganda e-book by Taschen as a source of visual inspiration: huge posters of the president, noble Red Guards, smiling staff raising shovels.
Modern times presented another production challenge. A key scene concerned the depiction of a mysterious new simulation of a virtual truth in which the suns interact with the Earth at the same time. The unpredictable softness of the sun that this demanded made gentleness tricky for the cinematographer, so the production team built a huge soundstage surrounded by thousands of adjustable LEDs, which can instantly bathe the actors in the light of the “suns” or plunge them into darkness. Such was the attention to detail that the light can be programmed specifically to suit each actor’s skin. Tones.
Anyone thinking about how to adapt The Three-Body Problem finds themselves temporarily grappling with difficult conceptual questions. How do you show a sunset on a planet where three suns rise and set at other times?How do you write a script that involves extraterrestrial beings who have no linguistic perception of the lie?What does it look like when, as they do in the e-book, trisolarians “flash” the background radiation of the universe to demonstrate their power?Curtains are intellectual science fiction, more Contact or Arrival than Star Wars. “It was very clear,” Weiss says, “even as I flipped through the e-book, that this was a real piece of science fiction built around complex ideas. Mind-blowing ideas.
Still, rather than remaining in the domain of hardcore fans, the series has outgrown its genre, whether in China (where Liu has long been a familiar person) and around the world, introducing casual readers to hardcore science fiction in the same way as Thrones. Once he did. for the ultimate fantasy. Long before Benioff and Weiss came to read them, Liu’s books had gotten help from the likes of Elon Musk, George R. R. Martin and Barack Obama (“The first thing we saw was a quote from the president of the United States about the canopy of a Chinese science fiction novel,” Weiss says, “which I consider atypical. “)Ask a fan why they love The Three-Body Problem, and they’ll most likely mention how incredibly important the stakes are: a literally universal war, and a narrative taste that also presents questions about the cosmos as if they could be solved like a crime novel. Like existential arguments that scare you if you think about it too much.
Soldiers in a Chinese parade ground
Jess Hong as Jin inspects the parade field
It’s also not hard to see why Benioff and Weiss, who, along with Thrones, helped prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that limited series can be as cinematic as cinema itself, would be drawn to the source material. Throughout The Three-Body Problem, there are some impressive sets that required meticulous planning and production. The series is more restrained in its use of violence than Thrones, until episode five, when a fully transformed tanker truck is sliced to pieces, equipment included, after navigating through an invisible web of ultra-strong filaments. (“Like God’s nails scratching his board,” is how one character describes the sound of the helmet disintegrating. )Benioff described this series as “the biggest of the whole series” and “a monster”.
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The exhibit is peppered with equally impressive moments. A hallucinatory ghost staged through the Trisolarans has the sky “reflecting” the Earth’s surface, with incredulous humans craning their necks to see farmland and cityscapes suspended a mile above them. Legions of foot soldiers on an old parade floor mimic a Turing device through flashes of banners of other colors to reflect the binary, like a virtual army made of terracotta. The convergence of 3 suns sets a planet on fire, causing animals to flee in all directions, screaming and inflaming. After 10 years of war scenes from Sturm und Drang of Thrones, one can believe how much those sets may have attracted the filmmakers with Benioff and Weiss’s appetite for emphasis.
In some cases, Benioff, Weiss, and Woo have found it difficult to translate Liu’s descriptions of momentous moments in physics from an imagined medium (a novel) to a visual medium (television). At the time of writing, they haven’t been commissioned yet, concepts like extra dimensions come into play. “There are certain things that Liu describes in the books, and I still don’t know how we’re going to film,” Benioff says. I don’t know what we’d see on the screen. “
They struggled enough to understand the physics of the screen, so much so that the producers ended up hiring some professors to come and lecture the cast and crew, to give them a better grounding in what it meant. . . what happens to the characters. ” At some point,” Weiss observes, “conceptual artists will have to take a back seat to mathematicians and computer scientists. Your brain works in three dimensions, four, eight, ten. It’s much harder to visualize it in your brain than a dragon or an ice demon.
Several actors, who were destined to play geniuses, took the issue into their own hands to find out what was going on. Jess Hong, who plays Jin Cheng, a Chinese-born theoretical physicist, taught herself rudimentary string theory and immersed herself in physics books. TED talks and physicist Brian Cox and Robin Ince’s podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage. She and her spouse Jovan Adepo, who plays a fellow scientist and friend of Saul Durand de Cheng, traveled to Oxford University to meet PhD researchers and see where they lived and functioned. Adepo says that before auditioning for Benioff and Weiss, he “tried to go through the SparkNotes” of The Three-Body Problem to get a better sense of it. They didn’t exist.
One of the program’s scientists envisions a particle accelerator
The series wasn’t going to be a Netflix project. In March 2018, the Financial Times reported that Jeff Bezos, who had just obtained the rights to what would later become The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for $250 million, also intended to buy the rights to Liu’s novels. According to some, perhaps dubious reports, he came up with a staggering $1 billion. (Weiss rejects the idea that any studio would have invested that much for the rights or the budget of the series: “I’m going to record and say that [it costs] less than a billion. Netflix was far from the only fan group in town. “I think a lot of other people tried to get the rights,” Benioff says. .
Rights are worthless without smart writers, and Benioff and Weiss were also in high demand. Before agreeing to work with Netflix, they dined with most of the studios in town: Amazon, Disney, Apple, HBO. They vaguely knew what they were looking for. What to do after Thrones is still an epic genre. But they didn’t know what or where. (A short-lived idea, a drama about the history of the American Civil War exchange titled Confederate, was canceled after an online outcry. )
Initially, it looked like Disney and its subsidiary Lucasfilm had won. In 2018, even before Thrones ended, Lucasfilm announced that Benioff and Weiss were working on a new Star Wars trilogy. However, a year later, they subsidized the partnership, thus making time constraints conflicting with Netflix’s new deal. Was 3 Body Problem a suitable substitute?”” Star Wars has shaped our lives,” Benioff says, “but there have been so many videos right now and so many TV shows. “Peter Friedlander advised them to read Liu’s novels, The Three-Body Problem, virgin territory (Three-Body, an ultra-faithful 30-chapter Chinese adaptation seen by very few people in the West, had not yet been made). a little cooler. Instead of being the 43rd man to participate in a Star Wars project, arriving very early with 3 Body Problem, anything new, ex-parenting.
On Friedlander’s recommendation, they brought in Woo, who had just finished The Terror: Infamy, as another showrunner, and the concepts began to circulate. Woo had known Benioff and Weiss professionally for years, and vice versa, having worked at the same studio (Carolyn Strauss, one of the executive producers on Thrones, had an office next to the writers’ room at HBO’s True Blood). The trio first met in person in March 2020 at Weiss and Benioff’s office, and they temporarily solidified. Nearly four years later, chatting in a convention room at Netflix’s New York workplaces, they talk about the series in animation and detail, swapping off concepts and drawing on each other’s thoughts. As Weiss explains concepts with the dry college intelligence of a postdoctoral fellow, Woo is expressionless and Benioff smiles. .
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Game of Thrones’ John Bradley as scientist Jack Rooney
At one point, in reaction to a question about the political context of the 3-body factor in China, Benioff and Woo smile and show off Weiss’s T-shaped blouse. “Can you see what that says?” Benioff asks cheerfully. I don’t know if you can read Chinese. “The blouse has the inscription “bad element” in Chinese characters, a reference to a Communist Party word used to describe the intellectual enemies of the Cultural Revolution. In other words, this is a difficult word to understand. I get the joke on the subject of the 3-body problem. If there’s ever evidence that they’re the right men for the job, it’s this.
Much of the filming took place under Covid restrictions. Derek Tsang was trapped in the UK due to quarantine regulations that forced him to return to Hong Kong. “I spent almost nine months in London before I was able to stop by and watch at the first casting dinner we had after reading the table, four or five other people ended up catching Covid,” he says. The showrunners also didn’t get a chance to meet with Cixin Liu, who Weiss tells was planning to stop in Shanghai. In the end, it didn’t happen, for pandemic reasons. “
Perhaps the biggest production-related story happened in 2020. The original rights holder of The Three-Body Problem was a Chinese corporation called Yoozoo. Since 2014, its CEO, a 39-year-old billionaire who is fond of science fiction and video games called Qi Lin, had spent more than $100 million to buy the rights to the global created through Cixin Liu, with the aim of launching a vast film project. Lin was an executive producer on Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, but he never saw his extensive projects come true: he was allegedly poisoned in December 2020 via a rival Yoozo executive. He died on Christmas Day. The executive’s trial began in October last year; Caixin, a Chinese business publication, reported that he was obsessed with Breaking Bad and allegedly tested more than a hundred toxins purchased from the dark web by feeding them to local cats and dogs in Shanghai.
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Benioff, Weiss, and Woo had little to do with Yoozoo, who were only the Chinese rights holders; Netflix’s lawsuits were about this facet of production. However, they quickly learned the news of Lin’s death, as well as the rumor that the supposed delivery approach had been poisoned tea. The next day, 3 T-shirts of the body, without a message, appeared on his door, accompanied by tea bags. “It’s incredibly suspicious,” Benioff recalls, but it turned out to be a sad coincidence: A Yoozoo worker had sent the produce and the teahouse as a welcome gift. And, as Caixin later reports, Lin was not poisoned with tea, but with probiotic pills.
Zine Tseng performs astrophysicist Ye Wenjie’s most youthful edition in 1970s China
Throughout its 8 seasons, Game of Thrones’ good fortune has depended far more on its characters (Littlefinger’s machinations, Tyrion’s witticisms, Cersei’s whims) than on its dragons. Martin’s twisted portrayal of strength and manipulation (Game of Thrones itself) was as important as the show’s raw spectacle, and was based on performances through a cast that combined royals (Sean Bean, Diana Rigg, Charles Dance) with perfectly played outsiders (Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke, Sophie Turner).
To try and bottle the same lightning bolt with 3 Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss chose the series in collaboration with Nina Gold, who worked on Thrones and is perhaps the closest casting director to being a surname, having been a component of everything from The Crown to Star Wars’ Paddington. Thrones alumni appear everywhere: Liam Cunningham, the former Ser Davos Seaworth, appears here against the grain as the swaggering, headstrong intelligence chief. Jonathan Pryce also appears as a dark figure with mysterious motifs, and Conleth Hill, who played the silky spymaster Varys, appears as the Pope.
But it’s John Bradley, who played Samwell Tarly, Jon Snow’s suspicious sidekick, who is the biggest revelation among Thrones alumni. After watching Bradley change the production of Thrones, Benioff and Weiss discovered that the Mancunian talker had nothing to do with Candy Sam. While watching him woo in a pub in Northern Ireland with Harington, Alfie Allen and Richard Madden, the producers made the decision to write him a role in their next project. “John, as a person, is almost diametrically opposed to the character I was playing,” Weiss says.
This time, Bradley plays a brash billionaire scientist named Jack Rooney. Thrones were Bradley’s first paintings outside of drama school. In the end, he waited for the correct script to arrive on his agent’s desk, fearing he would be pigeonholed and dragged along. in a task that would last a decade. ” I had to ask David and Dan to ask me and give me that role,” Bradley says. “It made me need to do it again. “
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The character was literally called “John Bradley” in the first 3 drafts of the script. Later, the name replaced Jack Rooney, named after football player Wayne, whose memoir Bradley had read on set (“He’s one of the wonderful literary minds,” Bradley says). The Wythenshawe-born actor is a huge Manchester United fan; when we communicate over Zoom, we’re surrounded by United books and paraphernalia.
But Jack Rooney doesn’t exist in the novel The Three-Body Problem. Almost none of the characters in the TV series do that, at least not in the way Cixin Liu wrote them. In the biggest gap between e-book and adaptation, Benioff, Weiss, and Woo attacked the main characters of Liu’s work, combining elements of the Chinese character into a new and varied organization of scientists founded at the University of Oxford.
One of the few Chinese characters who has hardly changed is the fan-favorite and audience surrogate, Da Shi – “Big Shi” – a gruff ex-cop-turned-spy played by Benedict Wong. Wong tells me that he responded to Benioff and Weiss’ call in his trailer on the set of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. (He’s never been to Thrones, though he tells me, “I think there was a moment when there was interest. He doesn’t forget the character he was introduced to, but he thinks he might have been a banker. )Wong says he felt familiar with Da Shi’s story: Like him, the character was born to immigrants from Hong Kong. near Manchester in the 1970s. ” I talked to them about this and Alex [Woo] confessed that they had vaguely copied my Wikipedia page,” Wong says. Flattered to have been courted, he enlisted.
Redesigning Chinese characters may have been a risky decision at a time when questions revolve around representations of diversity on screen. Everyone I talk to, from the screen creators to the actors to Tsang, agrees that this major update has strengthened the screen. “The global is the destiny of everyone on the planet,” Weiss says of the exhibition’s growing diversity. It makes sense that an exhibition about the future of the planet would have characters from all over the planet among its heroes. Cixin Liu offered, spontaneously, recommending to the gender-swapping characters their first Zoom call with the displayrunners, anything they had discussed before.
“I think they were right to make it their own,” Bradley says. No matter what they do with it, no one can say they’ve had it without a hitch. “
Thrones’ Liam Cunningham as intelligence officer Wade and Doctor Strange’s Benedict Wong as Da Shi
There will no doubt be skepticism from enthusiasts about the decision to deviate so drastically from the source material. The angry reaction to the end of Thrones was sparked by the belief of some enthusiasts that Benioff and Weiss had betrayed Martin’s characters. When the show’s narrative though, despite everything, outperformed published books, Martin allegedly gave the showrunners the finishing touch for each character. However, it was at this point, seasons seven and eight, that many hardcore enthusiasts began to turn their attention to the show, suggesting that the quality of the scripts were waning without Martin’s detailed plans to follow.
“It would have been wonderful if everyone had enjoyed it,” Benioff says of the Thrones finale, “and said, ‘It’s amazing. ‘What a lovely ending. You’re the best. ” I wish the reaction had been like that, but it hasn’t. And none of the showrunners turn out to be willing to go back to the old turf. “These are very different properties,” Weiss adds.
Benioff agrees. These are two of the most ambitious and extensive sagas I’ve ever read, but they couldn’t be more different in the nature of their ambition. These are ambitious projects. But again, in completely different ways. “
Woo says writers who adapt novels for television want to “block out some noise” so they can tell the story, like athletes in a stadium. “Do you think about the enthusiasts when you’re in the middle of the game?Well, on a certain level, you hear applause, but you have to do it in what you’re doing. Your task is to make the shot or catch the pass. In a way, I understand the lifestyle of enthusiasts, and not everyone will like everything you do. But at the same time, I try to do the most productive task I can to set the scene.
Still, we still can’t help but wonder if it’s an ambitious gamble to deter purists by changing things up so drastically from the first episode. After all, it’s hard to complain about minor discrepancies between the book and the series when the main characters of the novels have been completely removed and the action has moved from Beijing to Oxford. Cixin Liu was also not as concerned about adapting his paintings as Martin, at least at first. According to Woo, Liu’s reaction was closer to that of Charlaine Harris, who wrote the vampire e-books that were the basis of True Blood. [Harris] was thrilled that all of a sudden all of her e-books were on the New York Times bestseller list. [She said:] “Do what you want. I’m thrilled that more people are buying my eBooks. Liu presented a similar blessing and then withdrew.
The visual effects sequences in 3 Body Problem are as outlandish as those in Thrones
Whether 3 Body Problem is a bet for Netflix or not depends on your point of view. While $160 million still sounds like a lot for a TV screen in 2024, no one can recommend that Netflix can’t do it; In 2023, they would have lost $13 billion in programming. After spending the year battling password sharing, the company announced an unforeseen 8. 8 million new subscribers in the third quarter of 2023, and survived last year’s writer-actor moves relatively unscathed, even as it agreed to pay writers higher fees and residuals for streaming content. Far from running out, the source of new content continues to flow.
Instead, the demanding situations the company faces are strategic, even philosophical. The streaming TV market is busier than ever and rarer than ever. At a time when Apple and HBO are racking up a lot of luck with shows like Severance (which earned 14 Emmy nominations) and The Last of Us (24 nominations, plus 3 Golden Globes), a Game of Thrones-level feature would be a hit. A surprising achievement for Netflix, which has failed to identify a culturally dominant original series. Having once identified the streaming services’ true reputation as a venue for high-profile dramas, the company has been accused, in recent years, of moving away from intellectual storytelling and toward the enjoyment of networked audiences.
No matter how many hours audiences spend watching reruns of Friends and Below Deck, those exhibits are what generate what used to be called laid-back moments: the delight of everyone talking about an exhibit as it happens. “When we started Thrones,” Weiss explains, “there was exactly one position that could succeed in any way that came close to the way it was meant to be done. “Sure, it was HBO, but when Thrones ended, there were a number of great characters. ambitious studios spend a lot of money, adding Netflix. Viewers are more capricious than they were in 2011; Their dollars increase even more with each new service they intend to subscribe to. The position in the streaming market is brutal. To paraphrase Logan Roy, a character from a series who is hard to believe he asked Netflix for, the war for eyes in the streaming game is rarely much like that of knights on horseback; It’s a fight for a knife in the mud.
To be successful, a TV series wants to have it all: stunning visuals, an animated cast, an incredible story, and, ideally, existing intellectual resources with a die-hard fan base. And a touch of behind-the-scenes drama, such as the return to action of two of the world’s most prominent showrunners.
If you ask the producers themselves about the situation, they are misleading. They’ve learned from Thrones not to put too much emphasis on online reactions. “All you can do,” Weiss says, “is be able to tell the story. “You have to tell it, the way you have to tell it, knowing that other people are going to like it and others aren’t. And then let the tweets fall where they can.
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Jess Hong (left) as theoretical physicist Jin Cheng