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The \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were finishing off their hit HBO series after an eight-season run and wondering what was next. That was when the Netflix executive Peter Friedlander approached them with a trilogy of science-fiction books by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin called \u201cRemembrance of Earth\u2019s Past.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew that it won the Hugo Award, which is a big deal for us since we grew up as nerds,\u201d Benioff said of the literary prize for science fiction. Barack Obama was also on record as a fan.<\/p>\n
Benioff and Weiss dipped in and were intrigued by what they found: a sweeping space invasion saga that begins in 1960s China, amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and involves a superior alien race that has built a rabid cultlike following on Earth. A heady mix of science and skulduggery, featuring investigations both scientific and criminal, it felt utterly unique. \u201cSo much content right now feels like, \u2018Oh, here\u2019s another forensic show, here\u2019s another legal thriller,\u2019 it just feels like it\u2019s a version of something you\u2019ve seen,\u201d Benioff said. \u201cThis universe is a different one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or, as Weiss added, \u201cThis is the<\/em> universe.\u201d<\/p>\n Those novels are now the core of \u201c3 Body Problem,\u201d a new series that Benioff and Weiss created with Alexander Woo (\u201cTrue Blood\u201d). It premiered on opening night at the South by Southwest Film Festival and arrives Thursday on Netflix. The setting has changed along the way, with most of the action unfolding in London rather than China (although the Cultural Revolution is still a key element), and the characters, most of them young and pretty, now represent several countries. But the central themes remain the same: belief, fear, discovery and an Earth imperiled by superior beings. Among the heroes are the gruff intelligence chief Thomas Wade, played by the \u201cThrones\u201d veteran Liam Cunningham, and a team of five young, reluctant, Oxford-trained physicists played by John Bradley \u2014 another \u201cThrones\u201d star \u2014 Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonz\u00e1lez, Jess Hong and Alex Sharp. Can they save the world for their descendants?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In an interview in Austin the day of the SXSW premiere, the series creators discussed life after \u201cThrones,\u201d their personal ties to \u201c3 Body Problem\u201d and the trick to making physics sexy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.<\/p>\n The series is quite different from the books, particularly the settings and characters, both of which are a lot less Chinese. How did this come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n D.B. WEISS <\/strong>Once the long process of acquiring the rights to the books was finished, we ended up with the rights for an English-language adaptation. So if we had kept all the characters Chinese in China, then we would\u2019ve had a whole show set in China in English. We also thought it was really important to the nature of the story that the group of people working together to solve this problem look like the world. Obviously, there\u2019s going to be an American involved. There\u2019s a Chinese person who was born in China, but also the Chinese diaspora. There are people from Southwest Asia. There are people from Latin South America. It just made fundamental sense to us to broaden the scope of it, because if this happened to the world, it feels like that\u2019s what would happen in the process of dealing with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d was a cultural behemoth. How did that experience inform how you approached this show?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n WEISS <\/strong>I thought we were making a show for a lot of Dungeons and Dragons players. Of which I am one.<\/p>\n DAVID BENIOFF<\/strong> And it wasn\u2019t a behemoth out of the gate. In case anyone from Netflix is listening: It took years for that show to become big, and they had faith in it and stuck with it. But one of the things I think we learned on \u201cThrones\u201d was to hire really good people who know what they\u2019re doing, and then make sure they understand what you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been talking a lot about Ramin Djawadi, our composer from \u201cThrones,\u201d who\u2019s also the composer on this show and hopefully the composer on everything we ever do. Nine times out of 10, when he delivers a cue to us, we\u2019re like, \u201cThat\u2019s great, Ramin.\u201d And then the 10th time \u2014 sometimes we don\u2019t even know exactly what\u2019s wrong with it, it\u2019s like, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d And he\u2019ll think about it for a second and say, \u201cLet me just take another shot at it. I get it.\u201d And that\u2019s rare, I think, to find someone who\u2019s such a high-level artist who\u2019s also that open and doesn\u2019t get easily offended. We have a number of people like that we worked with on \u201cThrones\u201d that we brought with us to this show.<\/p>\n How about having such a fervent fan base that wasn\u2019t shy about what they wanted, especially down the stretch of the series?<\/strong><\/p>\n BENIOFF <\/strong>It was interesting. We live in interesting times.<\/p>\n WEISS<\/strong> You want people to watch what you make, but you don\u2019t get to control people\u2019s reactions to what you make.<\/p>\n BENIOFF<\/strong> Not yet.<\/p>\n WEISS <\/strong>We\u2019re working on a device. I\u2019m sure somebody\u2019s working on it, anyway. But until they make the device, you make the story that you want to make, if you\u2019re lucky enough to have the backing necessary to do that, then let what happens happen.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t see a lot of series that look at Mao\u2019s Cultural Revolution. The opening struggle session sequence is terrifying.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n ALEXANDER WOO <\/strong>It\u2019s a part of history that is not written about in fiction very much, let alone filmed. And my family lived through it, as did the family of Derek Tsang, who directed the first two episodes. We give a lot of credit to him for bringing that to life, because he knew that it had not been filmed with this clinical eye maybe ever. He took enormous pains to have every detail of it depicted as real as it could be. I showed it to my mother, and you could see a chill coming over her, and she said, \u201cThat\u2019s real. This is what really happened.\u201d And she added, \u201cWhy would you show something like that? Why do you make people experience something so terrible?\u201d But that\u2019s how we knew we\u2019d done our job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThrones\u201d rolled out week by week and consequently received intense, sustained attention throughout most of its seasons. What has it been like working in the binge model, with the entire first season of \u201c3 Body Problem\u201d dropping all at once?<\/strong><\/p>\n WEISS <\/strong>That was one of the biggest changes going in, but we got our heads around it. We loved doing it the other way, but there are costs and benefits to both versions. And this one, in hindsight, might be something that\u2019s better dropped all at once, at least the first season. Netflix has given us what we need to tell a very difficult, challenging, ambitious and not at all obvious story. And the people we have partnered with across all departments have been great. I know this sounds like some kind of a \u201cManchurian Candidate\u201d thing: \u201cTed Sarandos [the Netflix chief executive] is the kindest, warmest, most generous, bravest, most wonderful human being I\u2019ve ever met.\u201d<\/p>\n Between your show and \u201cOppenheimer,\u201d physics has become sexy. This is an unlikely development.<\/strong><\/p>\n WOO<\/strong> We tried to make physics as sexy as possible. These things always come as a surprise. I don\u2019t think anyone thought chess was sexy until \u201cThe Queen\u2019s Gambit.\u201d At the heart of it, it\u2019s about people who are extraordinary at something. These are people with skills that you can\u2019t even fathom, and there\u2019s a kind of sex appeal to that. I think that\u2019s what made \u201cOppenheimer\u201d so fascinating and what makes the characters in our show so fascinating: They\u2019re capable of thinking and conceiving of these things that we can\u2019t, yet they\u2019re still part of our world, and they still face a lot of very human challenges that the rest of us do.<\/p>\n The series also seems to be wrestling with some ideas about faith and belief, with a faction of earthlings seeing these aliens as godlike saviors.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n BENIOFF<\/strong> Two characters ask in the opening 10 minutes or so, \u201cDo you believe in God?\u201d That\u2019s interesting for a series that\u2019s a science fiction show, not really a religious show. Those questions are also asked in the books, and we thought it was fascinating, that link between believing in a superior something out there and believing in the divine.<\/p>\n WEISS<\/strong> I think a lot of people who were writing religious literature or fiction 200 years ago, or in the 1700s, would have been writing science fiction in the 20th century, when the genre came into its own. The series looks at this idea of believing in something that\u2019s so overwhelmingly superior to you, at least on the surface, that you can\u2019t even conceive of what their motivations might be for doing what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n