Weiss and his partner Benioff don't just have to adapt thousands of pages of George R.R. Martin's novels to translate Game of Thrones to television. They have to film an entire world, one that included seven kingdoms, more than a thousand characters, old gods, new gods, dragons and constant political plotting. Even Martin has said he sometimes loses track of life in Westeros, confessing to The New Yorker that fans once caught him switching the sex of a horse from one book to another. Lost among the accolades for their show -- for the brilliant, multi-tiered dialogue, the sweep of the battle scenes, the complexity of the characters -- is how easily we accept it all. Using storytelling techniques like sexposition, they've placed us deeply in another world without resorting to flashbacks, voiceovers, or long "Star Wars"-like crawls of information.
"The only thing that bothers me," adds Weiss, "is when people say, 'Oh, you've made it so much more sexual than the books,' which is patently untrue. When you're seeing a person's naked body on screen, it's much more in your face than in the page." He went on to describe a scene Martin wrote for book 5, "A Dance with Dragons," involving eight very naked dancers of both genders having sex with each other as part of the performance, which is something they could never show, "And then there are graphic sexual scenes in the books with 14-year-old girls, which would have us all thrown in prison if we showed them that way." Benioff nods agreement. "If we’d shown all of the sex in the book we’d be behind bars right now," he says. In an interview last year, Weiss admitted: "There’s a lot of sexual content in the books. Some of it involves children, and we couldn’t film it for legal and moral reasons. But the sex is one of the things that we like about the books – the characters really think about it." Or has he eloquently explained it to Westeros.org, "I don’t think Bilbo Baggins ever got a boner, but in these books the characters think about sex, and that seems real for us."
Weiss insists their goal has always been to adapt George's whole story, not just this book or that book to the screen. "Sometimes in the service of that adaptation we've found that the best way to present a fully rounded vision of his world is to introduce elements or characters that aren't actually in the books," he explains. "There's things we can't explore the way the book explores them. The book uses exposition or it uses flashbacks or it uses all kinds of things we try to avoid. So far George has proven understanding." Benioff adds: "We don't have the luxury of going into characters' minds since we never have voiceovers. For us to get the backstory it's got to come out through dramatic dialogue, or what we hope is dramatic dialogue."
The Littlefinger sexposition scene from season one that some people objected to was some of the best exposition since the monkey with the date in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.' "We enjoyed it," says Weiss. "In the episode following that episode, Khal Drogo rips someone's tongue out through the hole he just made in their throat. And I never really heard any complaints about that scene. It is objectively worse to get your tongue torn out through a hole in your throat than it is to witness or experience what happened in the sexposition scene. If someone had a dramatic issue with it, that's one thing. But if the issue is the content of it I'm just sort of a bit confused by it." In fact the pair once joked they would address the sexposition criticism with 'a 20-minute brothel scene involving a dozen whores, Mord the Jailer, a jackass, and a large honeycomb.' "There will always be those who want to see less sex, and those who want to see more sex, and those who want to see sex in big tubs of pudding," noted Weiss. "You just can’t please everyone. We’re going to focus on the pudding people."
In a discussion with Heyuguys, the pair said they didn't know whether more people be watching or would less people be watching if the sex quotient changed. "We prefer explicit sex to implicit sex," said Weiss. "We do what we feel the story merits, what we feel is necessary and maybe this is naive but I assume that everyone in the world has an internet connection and we’re not showing anything people haven’t seen far more of, far more explicitly than we would ever want to show. I’m, in a way, surprised that the violence doesn’t register more than the sex because violence is objectively worse than sex! HBO have never made us cut a scene, there were a couple of times…in season two when they said ‘Really…?’ and we said ‘Yeah, really! It was something that we thought served a real purpose and we thought belonged in the show. We’re very committed to the physical and mental well-being of the people on the show, not putting them into situations which are going to be psychologically damaging to them. That’s a line we won’t cross. If we psychologically damage the prudes of America then we’re happy!"
In an interview with Collider, Benioff riffed further on the subject. "We didn’t want to have something where it was the equivalent of a shower scene, basically just showing someone naked, for the sake of having a little bit more nudity in the show," he said. "It is a very sexual world. We want to see Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) with a prostitute in a brothel, and not cover it up daintily with sheets, the way you would have to on network television or in a PG-13 movie. It’s equal opportunity nudity. Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) comes in and does what he does, quite brutally with his young wife, and it should feel brutal. It’s supposed to be terrifying for her. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) is a young girl. Even though she is not as young in the show as she is in the book, she is still quite young, and she was virginal. We wanted that scene to have the power that felt right for her, and that meant not being coy about it and really seeing what you had to see. Luckily, we had actors who embraced that. I think it was much more terrifying for them than for us because they were the ones doing it. They’re the ones that have to reveal everything."
One of the those set to reveal everything next season is Rose Leslie as flamed-haired temptress Ygritte. The actress will "bare" the responsibility of one of the book's most iconic love scenes and revealed in conversation with George Stroumboulopoulos that she was completely in the dark about her character and what the role might eventually require. "I shouldn't really be saying this, but I kind of went into the first audition unprepared," she said. "I was unaware of the show, I hadn't watched the first season, and I'd kind of just heard from guy friends who'd been watching it that it was amazing. So it was all kind of word of mouth. And I didn't realize the pressure. And had I realized the pressure, I don't think I would have landed the job in the first place." Although the question of nudity was never a consideration for her, Leslie said: "I feel, especially with Game of Thrones, that [nudity] is necessary. There are times that it calls for that to happen, and whether it is gratuitous or not, it works with the scene, and helps push the scene forward."
For what it is worth, Weiss thinks the levels of nudity and sex in season one and two were about the same and there's every reason to expect similar levels going forward. "There’s not a checklist," he explained to Entertainment Weekly. "You just have to do what feels right to you and not worry too much about it. [You don't] start counting how many breasts per episode or how many full‑frontal male nudity shots. There are always going to be people who think there’s too much. There will be some who want to see less. One of the benefits of HBO that we can give a more well‑rounded representation of life. And that sex is a part of it and darkness is a part of it, and so is the humor."
Ultimately, there are two different complaints, though; intertwining them muddies each, thinks Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz. The first concerns the appropriateness of graphic sex and/or nudity; the second is about the show’s "gaze," which is undeniably heterosexual and male. But it’s possible to enjoy sex and nudity without guilt or bluenosed justifications while simultaneously pointing out that the scales of spectatorship are out of whack. Seitz would like Game of Thrones to enlarge the scope of its fantasy — to show more same-sex couplings and male nudity — as Starz’s Spartacus series has done with such panache. For all its tough, complicated women characters, Thrones is perceived as too much of a sausagefest. The producers could change that perception, concludes Seitz, by adding more sausage.
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