David Benioff's Strange Alchemy
Chris Bolton, Powells.com
Reviewing David Benioff's new novel, City of Thieves, in the New York Times Book Review, Boris Fischman wrote:
I want to hate David Benioff. He's annoyingly handsome. He's already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee's most heartbreaking film, The 25th Hour — for which Benioff was asked to write the screenplay, leading to a second career in Hollywood....He takes his morning orange juice next to Amanda Peet. And he's still in his 30s.
 It's easy to envy Benioff, but he's earned his success. His debut novel, The 25th Hour, was a gripping combination of crime thriller and character study that revolved around a young drug dealer's final day of freedom before he begins a prison term.
Then came When the Nines Roll Over, a short story collection that remains one of my favorites. In my Powells.com review I wrote:
Benioff's stories thrilled me, made me laugh, had me making faces as I read, and reached me in a way that precious few short stories do. And when the book was finished...I wanted to turn to the first page and revisit each story again.
That remains as true today as it was when I first read the book. I've waited years for Benioff's next novel, during which time he has embarked on a lucrative screenwriting career whose credits include Troy with Brad Pitt, the recent adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's runaway bestseller The Kite Runner, and next summer's Wolverine, with Hugh Jackman reprising his role as everyone's favorite sociopathic mutant with unbreakable claws.
Set during the Germans' brutal siege of Leningrad in World War II, City of Thieves is narrated by Lev Beniov, a seventeen-year-old Jew struggling to survive a hard winter in the midst of an unbreakable German blockade, nightly bombing raids, and starvation so rampant that there are no squirrels or cats to be found anywhere (and people have started missing, too). When he's caught looting the body of a dead German parachutist, Lev is thrown into prison and expects to be executed by morning. He isn't prepared to be summoned — along with his older, wiser, far more confident cell mate, Kolya — by a Russian army colonel who gives them one chance to survive: find a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake.
The impossible mission sends Lev and Kolya on a harrowing, surreal, and surprisingly funny odyssey through a land ravaged by war, where they will encounter the best and worst that humanity has to offer in the face of unimaginable hardship.
City of Thieves has earned rave reviews, being called "a smart crowd-pleaser" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), a "gut-churning thriller [that] will sweep you along" (Kirkus, starred review), "a funny, sad, and thrilling novel" (Entertainment Weekly), and "a rough-and-tumble tale that clenches humor, savagery and pathos squarely together on the same page" (Washington Post).
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"Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[G]lorious...a wild action-packed quest, and much else besides....This gut-churning thriller will sweep you along and, with any luck, propel Benioff into bestseller land." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Benioff's finest achievement in City of Thieves has been to banish all possible pretensions from his novel, which never wears its research on its sleeve, and to deliver a rough-and-tumble tale that clenches humor, savagery and pathos squarely together on the same page." The Washington Post
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"Eight deliciously accessible stories....All of these will hook you fast, and they'll keep you hooked....Technical accomplishment that's matched by a generosity of spirit." Kirkus Reviews
"The book's eight stories are written with both a literary writer's care and a film writer's instinct for courting his readers or viewers." USA Today
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"[A] spellbinding portrait....Brilliantly conceived, this gripping crime drama boasts dead-on dialogue, chiaroscuro portraits of New York's social strata and an inescapable crescendo of tension." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Benioff's first novel is as unusual as it is well-wrought: it resonates with a Whitmanesque sense of the city's possibilities and unsatisfied longings." The New Yorker
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"[A] film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject." The San Francisco Chronicle
"Lee has created that rarity in filmmaking: a movie we need, right now." The Washington Post
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Chris Bolton: First, I want to say congratulations on City of Thieves. I think it's fantastic.
David Benioff: Thank you. It's been a long time coming.
Bolton: How long did you work on it?
Benioff: I wasn't working on it full-time, but I proposed this idea to the publisher back in 2001. I actually had a one-page sketch of what the book would be back in 2000. So it was about seven years from the conception of the story to the book actually showing up in bookstores. Again, that's not sitting at the computer every night typing on it, because there were a bunch of things that came up in between. But I wrote that first line, I think, in the year 2000.
Bolton: Did you have the line first, before you knew what you were going to do with it?
Benioff: No, I knew the basic storyline, and I had the first paragraph, with some changes, pretty much as-is, written in 2000. I had a lot of trouble going back and forth about whether, aside from the preface, it was going to be written in first person or third person. Then I was writing a bunch of screenplays, so I just got kind of sidetracked after that first paragraph, before I could write the second paragraph. [Laughter]
Bolton: How much time passed between the first and second paragraphs?
Benioff: I wrote an opening chapter a long time ago and then I threw it away. There were several opening chapters that never worked. There was a whole different opening that started with Lev at a concert performance, based on an actual event. The Leningrad Symphony was playing and they were broadcasting it all around the world, trying to raise awareness of what was going on during the blockade. It was this triumphant moment, because the Germans knew about it so they were trying to bomb the concert hall. It was a great historical scene, so I thought that would be the opening of the book. I kept trying to write it, and it never worked.
Ultimately, between the first paragraph and what actually became the second paragraph of the book, or at least the opening chapter, was probably five years.
Bolton: That sounds like a huge, gripping opening. How hard was it to just throw that away?
Benioff: It was tough. It was a great set piece. But it involved a whole lot more backstory to explain why Lev was there, and I also liked the idea of him seeing the parachutist dropping. It was tough to give up, for the set piece itself, specifically. In terms of how it all fit into the rest of story, it was making things tough for me. But I still think about that scene.
Bolton: In the preface, you're talking with Lev, your grandfather, and you're taking notes, telling him, "I just want to make sure I get everything right." He says, "David, you're a writer. Make it up." So I just have to ask — how much did you make up?
Benioff: About 99.99 percent of it. [Laughter] It's definitely a full-on work of fiction. Readers should take everything between the two covers with a big dose of salt.
Bolton: Except the mutant screenplay part.
Benioff: [Laughter] That's right, the screenplay and the blue-eyed girlfriend.
Bolton: So, is Lev really your grandfather?
Benioff: No, my grandfather's name was Shim. I've been reluctant to get too specific with people. If you write a memoir, obviously you owe it to your reader to give them the truth. That's what you're saying when you put the word "memoir" on the cover. But when you're writing a novel, for me anyway, you owe the reader a good story, and I don't think you have the obligation to pick through and say which parts are true and which parts aren't.
That said, Lev is not my grandfather's name.
Bolton: How much research did you end up doing?
Benioff: A lot. I went to St. Petersburg back in 2001. It's kind of a strange story because I knew I was going to write this book and I was trying to figure out a way to get to St. Petersburg. And then, out of the blue, I got this phone call from a magazine editor saying, "We're doing a story about these Russian bride tours, where American men go overseas" — at this point it was to Russia and the Ukraine — "and are introduced to hundreds of young, single Russian women, with the eventual aim of trying to bring them home as their brides. We'd like you to go into St. Petersburg undercover on one of these tours and write about it."
It was kind of incredible. I got this all-expenses-paid trip to St. Petersburg. During the day I was researching this article — which was fun and surreal in its own right, because I was one of this group of 16 men, all of us reportedly looking for our wives. That part of it was insane.
During the rest of the day, I'd travel around St. Petersburg and go to the different sites that I already knew I wanted to write about. They have two siege museums there, which are great places to do research. One of them recreates what an apartment looked like at the time of the blockade, and they actually have replicas of the rations. You can see the size of the weekly ration bread, which is staggering, to think that people were living off that. I also traveled around talking to survivors who had been there at the time.
The rest was a lot of reading and research. Many, many books, but particularly the two I thank in the acknowledgments, The 900 Days by Harrison Salisbury and Kaputtt by Curzio Malaparte. They're completely different, but I would highly recommend them to anyone who's interested in the siege. The 900 Days is one of the great works of reportage that I've encountered. Kaputt is much more novelistic and impressionistic, but it's beautiful. I think Malaparte is one of the great writers — I should say great unknown writers, because people know about him but he's not properly known. He's not as famous as he ought to be, because I think he's one of the great stylists of that period of history.
Bolton: What made you decide to write in your faux-grandfather's voice, as opposed to inventing a character from scratch?
Benioff: From the beginning, that was always the conception for the story, that this was what my grandfather was telling me. There's not a whole lot of strategizing that I do with these things. The story comes — definitely not fully formed, it's in a very fragmentary form, but it did come to me as two young men looking for eggs during the siege. I always knew the first line was, "My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was 18." That was the first thing I knew about this story, so that was always the framing device. I knew it was going to be the grandfather's story as filtered through the grandson's narration.
Bolton: It's a great opening line, too, because you automatically set up this counter in the reader's head where they're thinking, Okay, there's the first one... and there's another one coming...
Benioff: [Laughter] Well, they aren't too far apart, are they? I think about a page. It could have been more effective suspense if there was one early in the book, and one later.
Bolton: Lev's voice feels so authentic. Was it easy to capture?
Benioff: No, I had a great deal of trouble with his voice from the beginning. For a long time I couldn't get it, so I thought I'd try to write in third person, but that just didn't seem right. It was a bit intimidating for a 21st-century American to try to write from a teenage Russian boy's perspective in 1942. It was very hard to get a grasp of it, and it took many tries. There's that great Beckett line: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That was my experience working on this book.
Bolton: One of the things that drew me into the novel was the modern feel to the dialogue. So often there's a sense that in any story that happened before 1960, everyone spoke in proper English and very elaborate sentences. There's a sense that City of Thieves was translated for the modern vernacular.
Benioff: That's absolutely right. Also, you'll see people writing foreign dialogue that's been sort of fictively translated into English. They'll use little tricks to make it sound foreign; for instance, they won't use contractions. I think part of it is because people read these old Russian books and they were translated into English 100 years ago, or 80 years ago, so it's got that kind of slightly archaic feel. It seems slightly ludicrous to me. I just read a screenplay recently which is set in ancient times, and everyone's speaking as if they're in a Shakespeare play. I don't believe that people spoke like that 2000 years ago, and I don't believe they spoke like that 60 years ago.
One thing that was really helpful for the dialogue was looking at the diaries of people who lived through the siege. Not that many of them contain transcripts of the way people spoke, but there's a matter-of-factness to the way they related their experiences. The way people retain their humor, in spite of everything, was also really inspiring for the book. What could easily happen with a story like this, set during the darkest days of the war, is that it could turn into this grim catalogue of atrocity. I wanted to avoid that.
Reading the diaries further convinced me that wasn't the way to tell the story, because the people who were actually there and living through it were still telling jokes. There's a very specific, very Russian gallows humor that they never lost throughout all of this, and I really wanted to try to get some of that in there, because it's one of the things I loved about the people and their way of living. Whether it was during the war or the Revolution or the worst of the Communist days, when people were starving, they were always telling jokes. There were great jokes about Stalin and farm collectives. I was definitely hoping to get a taste of that into the book.
Bolton: Mentioning humor brings up Kolya, who, whenever things drift toward the grim and they're under siege, Kolya comes on. And he's just alive. In a historical novel, I find it pretty rare to encounter a character who feels so lifelike.
Benioff: Well, thank you for saying that, I appreciate that. It was interesting, because I always knew it was going to be these two characters. I didn't know much more about the story other than they were going after a dozen eggs, and there was going to be this contrast between the two, in terms of their personalities. I think that's part of the reason I ended up deciding to write it in first person from Lev's P.O.V. rather than third person.
It would have been impossible to tell The Great Gatsby from Jay Gatsby's perspective. You needed Nick Carraway; you needed that second personality who's not quite as massive and larger-than-life, who's actually just life-sized, who can be the reader's guide through the book.
It's one of the things I've always loved about that book, and it's one of the brilliant things about Fitzgerald. He knew that, even though Gatsby is the center of that book and he's the one you remember, it's Carraway's story, and it's Carraway's telling of it that makes it work. So, for me, it was always that way with Lev and Kolya, where certainly Kolya is the more charismatic figure, and he's the one that people tend to bring up first. Yet at the same time it's very much Lev's story, and it's Lev's narration that I think makes Kolya possible.
Bolton: Where did the idea for The Courtyard Hound come from? I have to tell you, you had me completely fooled until right before the moment where Lev figures it out.
Benioff: What gave it away?
Bolton: I have no idea. [Laughter] It must have been some strange intuition. Up until then I thought, I should really look for this book, it sounds great.
Benioff: Yeah, I had friends Google it, and they were like, "I can't find this Courtyard Hound thing."
I always knew that this character, Kolya, was going to be defending his thesis. I had another scene that never made it into the book, but there were students at the university in Leningrad during the siege who would defend their theses to their professors. They would sometimes do it in the bomb shelters while bombs were going off. There were all these incredible details that never made it into the book because there wasn't room for them.
But that was always part of the conception of the character. Originally he was going to be defending his thesis, and then, when I dropped it, I still wanted to keep the part about The Courtyard Hound — except the more I got into it, the more I decided I didn't want it to be a real book. I wanted it to be a made-up book. Then it just seemed to me like, Well, what about a made-up book that he made up himself?
I liked the idea that the character seems almost entirely fearless, except like anyone, he's not, really. No one is truly fearless. His fears just aren't the common fears. He's not afraid of giant cannibals so much as he's afraid of someone making fun of this book that he's writing. Knowing from being a writer, how terrifying it is the first time that you submit stories. Whether it's to your high school literary magazine or a college creative writing class, there's this terrifying prospect that people are going to tear apart this work that you've put so much effort into, and so much of your heart into.
That never goes away. It's the same now, when the book gets reviewed — whether it's in the New York Times or someone writing a review on Amazon, it's still a terrifying prospect that someone's going to bash this thing that means so much to you. It only gets worse, actually, because when you spend so much time on a novel, as opposed to a poem that you wrote in a day in high school, or a story that you spent a week on in college, when you've spent years working on a novel, it's incredibly close to you. It is a daunting prospect that you're going to send it out into the world and, inevitably, some people are going to hack away at it.
Bolton: This probably only occurred to me because I've studied screenwriting, but while reading City of Thieves, at some point it hit me — this is the first novel I've ever read that feels like it was structured according to the three-act screenplay paradigm.
Benioff: [Laughter] Oh, no.
Bolton: Was that intentional?
Benioff: No, not at all. In fact, I work with some young screenwriters and I'm always kind of bashing the three-act paradigm. There are many, many great scripts that follow it to the letter, but I also think there are some great scripts that don't. Carnal Knowledge is one of my favorite screenplays and I'm pretty sure that's a two-act script — or maybe two-act with a coda. People who get into the business read these books about screenwriting and they all talk about three-act structure, so everyone believes there's a three-act structure. But you could give the same screenplay to ten different educated readers and they could come up with ten different places where the acts break. There's no curtain coming down in a screenplay, so there are no actual act breaks — it's all a little bit arbitrary. I don't believe a screenplay needs to follow the three-act structure. I think many of them do, maybe even most of them do, but it doesn't seem like a requirement to me.
That said, I do think this story, whether or not it's a three-act structure, I think the storytelling is very traditional. It's definitely inspired by traditional stories and fairy tales.
Bolton: It has a fable-like feel.
Benioff: I was definitely going for that. I love those stories. I'm sure that's where the three-act structure derives from. I think Robert McKee and other screenwriting teachers talk about that, the essence of classic storytelling, which is something that contemporary fiction ignores — sometimes successfully, and sometimes at its peril. To me, the best storytellers these days tend to be genre writers, because so much literary fiction has drifted away from the idea of telling a story. Narrative fiction is often looked down upon.
Bolton: There were just little moments that hit me like: "Wow, that feels like the Plot Point at the end of Act One." [Laughter] But it worked so amazingly well. I don't know if it just kept the novel on task, rather than digressing for 300 pages or something, but... I absolutely meant it as a compliment.
Benioff: I certainly wasn't consciously doing it, but after working in screenwriting for as long as I have, it's probably unconscious. You just get into certain habits, and I think more than anything I've got a very low tolerance for boredom and get very impatient. I think some of that is probably from writing screenplays, where you always try to get the story told in 110 pages.
The books I wrote before The 25th Hour that were rejected by everyone across the country tended to be much longer and full of digressions. I just can't write that way anymore. For better or for worse, I've lost the ability to tell a drifting, meandering story, even though some of my favorite books are like that. I love A Confederacy of Dunces and The Moviegoer, both of which love cavorting in the digressions and are genius at following their characters through a very meandering storyline. But I just don't think that's the book I can write.
Bolton: Reading City of Thieves, I flashed back to "The Devil Comes to Orekhovo" from When the Nines Roll Over. I was struck by some of the parallels: a reluctant young soldier; the Russian army, albeit on a different side and many years later; the empty house as a sanctuary; and the brutal winter setting. Was that story a way into the novel?
Benioff: Yeah, it was definitely a precursor. I think it made me feel confident that I could write this novel, because I'm pretty sure that was the first time that I wrote about a foreign character as the protagonist. That ended up being my favorite story in the collection, so it made me feel that I could do this, that I could write about Russians. And the winter setting is appealing to me, for some reason. The 25th Hour as well was set during a blizzard in New York. Snow is something I've always written about. And dogs.
Bolton: That's right, the dogs! That's historically accurate, I'm assuming, the scene with the dogs used by the Germans as anti-tank mines?
Benioff: Yeah, absolutely.
Bolton: That's mind-blowing.
Benioff: That's something I think I first learned about in Kaputt, the Malaparte book, and then I have this encyclopedia of World War II weaponry that also has an entry about the anti-tank dogs. I found it everywhere, the more I started looking into it.
It turned out to be a not-particularly-effective weapon. The way the Nazis did it was to starve the dogs and train them to look for food under tanks — and they'd have these trigger devices on their backs so they'd run under a tank and blow it up. The dogs were pretty good at that. The problem was, they couldn't tell the Russian tanks from the German tanks.
Bolton: That would backfire quickly.
Benioff: It really did.
Bolton: Was there anything in your research that was just too amazing to imagine readers were going to believe?
Benioff: I don't know about too amazing. Someone asked me at one point if I exaggerated anything, and I think if anything it was the opposite. Part of the reason you don't want to put in all your research is because then it starts to read like a history book. I really didn't want that kind of dry, musty feel. I can't think of one, specific thing, but the extent of what people put up with stretches the imagination.
I think maybe I left certain things out just because I was trying to be very careful in measuring the amount of horror with humor. The amount of horror that people survived — or did not survive — would have overwhelmed everything else if I'd thrown it all in there. One-point-five million people died during the siege, and just how they got rid of the bodies when no one had the strength to bury anyone at that point, and the ground was frozen... God, just seeing the corpses everywhere. Also, what people did to find food every day, because the rations weren't enough. No one could really survive off the ration bread. So everyone who lived basically did so through the black market, trading, finding whatever food or water they could.
But I can't think of one thing so far beyond the pale that no one would have bought it. I guess, if something actually happened, there's a way to present it that would seem believable. If you can't make an historical fact seem believable, then you're probably doing something wrong.
Bolton: I loved both The 25th Hour and City of Thieves. But I have to gush a little bit here, because it's very rare that I read a short story collection from cover to cover. When the Nines Roll Over was so good that I've read it probably four or five times.
Benioff: Oh, God. Thank you.
Bolton: There was a solid year where, whenever somebody wanted something good to read, I just gave them a copy. [Laughter] If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to do sort of a word association game with you.
Benioff: Okay.
Bolton: I'll name a few of the titles of stories from the book and get your responses to them. "Neversink."
Benioff: When I was a kid, we used to take these family trips to the Catskills. Neversink is a real reservoir in the Catskills near a town called Liberty. One of my earliest memories is seeing that reservoir, and the name always stuck in my mind. Neversink, I think, is a translation from the original Indian name. I always thought it was a great title, and I think I had that title before I knew what the hell the story would be.
The first two stories that I wrote in the book were "Neversink" and "De Composition." "Neversink" was the first story that I finished and felt like, That's it. Every time before that I'd write a story and I'd like it when I finished writing it, but I'd come back to it a week later and think, God, that's not nearly as good as I thought it was. It's actually not even that good.
"Neversink" was the first time I wrote a story and, when I got back to it a week or a month later, whenever it was, I still liked it. It felt like a huge turning point for me in my writing. I hadn't had that experience before.
Bolton: I think it worked almost too well. I went through a breakup recently and I was trying to write a story that would capture what I was feeling at the time and exorcise some demons — and no matter where I started, I ended up back at "Neversink." I was like, "Well, he's said all of this already, there's no point."
Benioff: I remember sitting in a car with an ex-girlfriend a couple of years after that story came out in Zoetrope. She was the inspiration for that story — not that she was as bad as the girl from the story, but she had this father whom I'd never met, and I was fascinated by him. She told me, "God, I read that story and I thought, Someone hates me in the world." [Laughter] That's not really fair at all, because she hadn't lied to me in the way that the character in the story lied. But when you've just been through a break-up, as you know, you aren't necessarily given towards charitable feelings about your ex.
Bolton: "When the Nines Roll Over."
Benioff: SadJoe was a character that came to me before the story did. I knew what he looked like, what his name was, and where he came from, but I had no idea what the story was. In a weird way it's not even really his story — he's not the narrator, and he's peripheral to the plot — but he was always the soul of that story for me. I thought he was going to be a character in a novel I was thinking of writing. I just couldn't find a place for him. Finally, I realized this is where he belongs.
I made a short film that was based on this story and the actor who was going to play SadJoe dropped out a week before we started shooting. I was desperately looking for a new guy, and I finally found him three or four days before we started. He turned out to be great. It was one of those lucky things where he was perfect for the role, and he was so into it he even offered to shave his head into a mohawk — which almost gave his agent a heart attack because he wouldn't have gotten another role for six months.
Bolton: That's dedication.
Benioff: [Laughter] We decided ultimately that he could play the character without the mohawk. But I've always loved that character. I've never had a desire to write a sequel to anything of mine, but sometimes I think about taking characters and using them again somewhere. SadJoe is one that I'd like to know more about.
Bolton: Is there somewhere I can see the short film?
Benioff: No, there's not. [Laughter]
Bolton: It's in the vault.
Benioff: It's very much in the vault. I look back on it quite fondly, it was a great experience, but like the first time you do anything, aside from rare geniuses, there were so many mistakes made. I think it was another of those "Fail again. Fail better" situations where I learned a lot from making that short movie and made many mistakes that I hopefully won't make on the next one.
Bolton: Are you working on your own film?
Benioff: Not yet, but I have a couple of ideas for what my first feature might be, if I ever get the money for it. Somewhere in the nebulous future.
Bolton: It's great you have a lead actress available.
Benioff: If she turns me down, that will be very embarrassing. [Laughter]
Bolton: The last story I'll ask you about is "Merde for Luck."
Benioff: I dated a ballerina at one point and had never heard the whole "merde" thing before, so I didn't know that's what they said to each other. I would have assumed it was just the standard "break a leg," but it makes sense that ballet dancers would not use the phrase "break a leg." I thought that was very interesting, and I found that whole world fascinating.
It's an incredibly cloistered world. This woman I dated had dropped out of high school to be a ballerina, and she was very successful, and she danced for the Joffrey Ballet and she was wonderful. It's a whole, separate world and I was fascinated by that.
I had two different things. I had that world, and the world of AIDS research. I don't remember where, but I read an article about testing anti-AIDS drugs. As with any medical testing, there has to be a control group, and the people actually taking the drugs. And there just seemed to be a story in that, in terms of two people who are both in the same study but one is taking the medicine that can help you and postpone your life, and the other is taking the placebos.
Like many of these stories and novels, it ends up being a kind of combination. The ideas come from a couple of places and get combined. That was the case here. It's a strange alchemy, where you've got a character from one place and a storyline from another place and try to smoosh them all together and hope it works. It doesn't always, but I think you get better the older you get. The more you've written, you get better at knowing what's not working and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work, or throwing away whole stories.
Bolton: Do you have another story collection in you?
Benioff: No. I haven't written a short story since 1999 and I have no plans to write another. I haven't had any ideas for short stories. All the ideas I'm coming up with now seem right for either a screenplay or a novel.
I hadn't really written short stories before that. They were all written between 1997 and 1999.
Bolton: Are you reading anything now that's getting you excited?
Benioff: The last book I read that I loved was Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon, which I thought was a great noir novel. And I read that because William Vollmann wrote an essay about it, which is actually the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition. It's a great essay about the book, and I figured if Vollmann liked the book this much I should check it out. It is as good as promised.
While I was writing City of Thieves, I was reading as many Russian books as I could. The Master and Margarita is just as good on the second go-around as the first. I finally finished War and Peace, which I was very proud of myself for doing. [Laughter]
Bolton: Congratulations.
Benioff: Thank you, thank you. I would say the first thousand pages are great, and then it falls off in the last hundred pages.
Bolton: Although you might as well just get through the last hundred.
Benioff: Yeah, once you've read a thousand pages of any book, you have to finish it.
I was a huge fantasy fan when I was a kid. I was a Tolkien obsessive and read all of his books, including the commentary of The Silmarillion. But I've been away from fantasy since I was 14 or 15, since my Dungeons & Dragons days were over. A year or two ago, someone sent me these books by George R. R. Martin [the Song of Ice and Fire series]. There are four books and some of them are 1100 pages long. I had no interest in reading them. They had these cheesy fantasy covers, and that's just not something I'm into anymore. But I started the first one and, lo' and behold, 80 pages in, I got hooked and ended up reading all four books, all 4000 pages. I liked it so much that we're trying to do it as an HBO series now. In terms of just pure entertainment, I haven't had as much fun reading since I was a kid until I read those books.
Bolton: Do you think you have a fantasy novel in you?
Benioff: Since I was 12 I've had an idea for a fantasy novel. I know exactly how it opens, and I know the first 50 pages of it. I don't know if I'd have the patience to sit through a year of writing about someone riding along, fighting with swords and what-not. I've certainly thought about it for a long time.
The two things I'm thinking of for the next novel, one is very much just contemporary American, not genre at all, and the other one is firmly in the realm of speculative fiction. I'm still trying to figure out which is the one that I'm willing to put up with for two years, or however long it takes to write.
Bolton: Has there been any interest in adapting City of Thieves to film?
Benioff: There is interest but I've decided not to adapt the book at present. Maybe someday I'll direct it myself, but this story took me too long to write and is too close to my heart to give to someone else.
I spoke to David Benioff by phone on Monday, July 7, 2008.
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