While “Game of Thrones” is a distant memory, its creators David Benioff and DB Weiss are excited about their latest television series, “3 Body Problem.” Although it is made with Alexander Woo, screenwriter and producer of the vampire TV series “True Blood”, there is not a single dragon or vampire in the entire series, reports the BBC.
No dragons, just aliens, photo capture video trailer movie
“Game of Thrones” ended after 59 Emmy Awards and eight series in 2019. After dropping a “Star Wars” trilogy that year, David Benioff and DB Weiss chose to adapt a highly successful Chinese sci-fi novel. It is Liu Cixi's The Three-Body Problem, a novel published in 2008 that has sold around nine million copies worldwide and won a Hugo Award .
Without spoiling your viewing pleasure, we'll just tell you that the action revolves around an invasion of Earth by aliens from an unstable solar system with three suns orbiting each other, hence the name, “ Three-Body Problem”.
They also offered a short role to former president Barack Obama
Weiss, the creator of the “Thrones” series, explains that they were impressed by the complexity of the book, calling it “unlike anything we've ever read, certainly unlike anything we've ever thought of bringing to the screen.”
Fans of Liu's novel include former US President Barack Obama, who named him “extremely imaginative”though he ultimately declined to play a small role in the series.
“He signed a really funny note when we tried to get him to do a cameo,” Benioff told USA Today. “It was along the lines of, 'If there ever is an actual alien invasion, I think I should save myself for that crisis.'” he also said.
Asked why they left the fantasy genre behind when dragons brought them such success, the two producers, David Benioff and DB Weiss, told the BBC that they felt it was time to move on.
Despite the large number of fans, not everyone was thrilled with the ending of “Game of Thrones”. In 2019, 1.8 million fans even signed a petition, asking for the eighth series to be remade, with a different script. But producers didn't want to return to that world after spending “10 full years” making 73 episodes in the kingdoms of Westeros.
“It was the greatest experience of our lives,” says DB Weiss, “but we really wanted a new set of challenges at all levels. (…) “3 Body Problem” is as far as possible from what we had just done in “Thrones”.
After finally settling on Liu's book, the two producers also co-opted “True Blood's” Alexander Woo into the project.
In turn, he names the novel “a very interesting challenge to adapt”. “I was very excited to adapt the novel. There were ideas and images and stories there, and I almost couldn't imagine how a single author could have come up with something like that.” said Alexander Woo.
They needed a crash course in physics
The three have been working on “3 Body Problem” for the past four and a half years with a team of around 1,000 people.
The book is full of knotty scientific problems that weren't easy to translate into a TV series, so a crash course in physics was needed, and the creators say they would have been lost without the help of the two scientific experts they have called.
They talked to Matthew Kenzie, who DB Weiss says was a part of “from the team that discovered the Higgs boson particle”, and with Bobak Ferdowsi, flight engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“Bobak was in many control rooms when missiles were launched,” explains DB Weiss.
“The two scientists guided us through a kind of physics for fools” and were crucial throughout the series, producers said.
The film begins during China's Cultural Revolution in 1966 and travels to present-day Britain via Badajoz in Spain, the United Nations headquarters in New York and Cape Canaveral in Florida. Plus a lot of outer space, too. But we'd better leave it to you for your viewing pleasure, because it will be released on Netflix on March 21st.
The creators of the series hope to capitalize on the popularity of the book on which the film was based, especially since the novel is the first part of a trilogy called “Remembrance of Earth's Past”, and they want to finish the story.
