David Benioff

David Friedman (/ˈbɛniɒf/ /ˈfriːdmən/; born September 25, 1970), better known by his pen name David Benioff, is an American screenwriter and television producer, writer, and director. Along with his collaborator D. B. Weiss, he is best known as co-creator, showrunner, and writer of Game of Thrones (2011–2019), the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of books A Song of Ice and Fire. He is also known for writing Troy (2004) and co-writing X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009).

Benioff was born David Friedman in New York City, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family with ancestral roots in Austria, Romania, Germany, Poland and Russia. He is the son of Barbara (née Benioff) and Stephen Friedman, who is a former head of Goldman Sachs. He is a distant cousin of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff.He has two older sisters, Suzy and Caroline. and grew up in Manhattan, first in Peter Cooper Village, then on 86th Street where he spent most of his childhood, before eventually moving near the U.N. headquarters when he was 16.

Benioff is an alumnus of Collegiate School and of Dartmouth College. While at Dartmouth he was a member of Phi Delta Alpha Fraternity and the Sphinx Senior Society. After graduating in 1992, he worked in a number of jobs: for a time as a club bouncer in San Francisco, and as a high school English teacher at Poly Prep in Brooklyn, New York City for two years, where he served as the school's wrestling coach.

Benioff became interested in pursuing an academic career and went to Trinity College Dublin in 1995, for a one-year program to study Irish literature. While in Dublin he met D. B. Weiss, who would later become his collaborator. Benioff wrote a thesis on Samuel Beckett while at Trinity College, but decided against a career in academia after writing the thesis. He worked as a radio DJ in Moose, Wyoming for a year—mostly as a side job, which he mainly accepted to take a year in the countryside at a writer's retreat. He then applied to join the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Irvine after reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon (an alumnus there), and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing there in 1999.

In 2001, People magazine included Benioff on its list of America's Top 50 Most Eligible Bachelors.

As an adult, he began using the pen name "David Benioff" when his first novel was published in 2001. "Benioff" is his mother's maiden name. He explained that he did this to avoid confusion with other writers named David Friedman. For legal purposes, his copyright filings from the 2010s onwards list him as "David Benioff Friedman".

Writing career

Benioff spent two years writing his first published novel The 25th Hour, originally titled Fireman Down, and completed the book as his thesis for his master's degree at Irvine. He was asked to adapt the book into a screenplay after Tobey Maguire read a preliminary trade copy and became interested in making a film of the book. The film adaptation, titled 25th Hour and starring Edward Norton, was directed by Spike Lee. Benioff then wrote a collection of short stories titled When the Nines Roll Over (And Other Stories) (2004).

He drafted a screenplay of the mythological epic Troy (2004), for which Warner Bros. pictures paid him $2.5 million. He also wrote the script for the psychological thriller Stay (2005), which was directed by Marc Forster, and stars Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. His screenplay for The Kite Runner (2007), adapted from the novel of the same name, marked his second collaboration with director Marc Forster.

Benioff was hired in 2004 to write the screenplay for the X-Men spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). He based his script on Barry Windsor-Smith's "Weapon X" story, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's 1982 limited series on the character, as well as the 2001 limited series Origin. Hugh Jackman collaborated on the script, which he wanted to be more of a character piece compared with the previous X-Men films. Skip Woods was later hired by Fox to revise and rewrite Benioff's script. Benioff had aimed for a "darker and a bit more brutal" story, writing it with an R rating in mind, although he acknowledged the film's final tone would rest with the producers and director.

In 2006, Benioff became interested in adapting George R.R. Martin's novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, and began working with D. B. Weiss on a proposed television series, Game of Thrones. The pilot, "Winter Is Coming", was put into development by HBO in 2007 and the series greenlit in 2010. Benioff and Weiss acted as the executive producers, showrunners, and writers of the show, which began airing on HBO in 2011. Benioff and Weiss had previously worked together on a script for a horror film titled The Headmaster, but it was never made.

In October 2007, Universal Pictures hired Benioff to write an adapted screenplay of the Charles R. Cross biography of Kurt Cobain, but the screenplay was not used. In 2008, Benioff's second novel, City of Thieves, was published.

On April 10, 2014, Benioff announced he and Weiss had taken on their first feature film project to write, produce, and direct Dirty White Boys, a novel by the Pulitzer prize-winning author Stephen Hunter. On July 19, 2017, Benioff announced that he and Weiss would produce another HBO series, titled Confederate, after the final season of Game of Thrones. Benioff and Weiss said, "We have discussed Confederate for years, originally as a concept for a feature film, but our experience on Thrones has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO." The announcement of Confederate was met with public animosity, and as of August 2019 (when Benioff and Weiss' deal with Netflix deal was announced) would not be moving forward.

On February 6, 2018, Disney announced that both Benioff and Weiss would write and produce a new series of Star Wars films after the final season of Game of Thrones is completed in 2019.

Towards the end of the final season of Game of Thrones, a petition to HBO was started on Change.org. It described showrunners Benioff and Weiss as "woefully incompetent writers", and thus demanded "competent writers" to remake the eighth season of Game of Thrones in a manner "that makes sense". The petition eventually amassed over 1.5 million signatures. Richard Roeper, writing for the Chicago Sun Times, described that the backlash to the eighth season was so great that in his 25+ years of reviewing movies and television, he doubts that he has "ever seen the level of fan (and to a lesser degree, critical) vitriol leveled at" Game of Thrones.

In early August 2019, Benioff and Weiss negotiated an exclusive multi-year film and television deal with Netflix worth US$200 million. Due to their commitments to Netflix, Benioff and Weiss exited their contract to produce Star Wars films for Disney and Lucasfilm.

In September 2020, it was announced that Benioff, Weiss and Alexander Woo will write and executive produce a Netflix series based on The Three-Body Problem trilogy.

Directing career

Benioff and Weiss together directed two episodes of Game of Thrones, but used a coin-flip to decide who would get the credit on the show. Benioff was given the credit for season 3 episode 3, "Walk of Punishment", while Weiss was credited with season 4 episode 1, "Two Swords". Benioff and Weiss co-directed the series finale.

Benioff and Weiss's first project on Netflix were as directors of the stand-up comedy special Leslie Jones: Time Machine.

On September 30, 2006, Benioff married actress Amanda Peet in New York City. Together they have three children. The family divides their time between homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills.

Author

Film

Television