Dan Weiss: Codex.

David Benioff: Codex is this little machine on the camera that records all the information and for some reason it always breaks. And in my dream the Codex had broken, and we were just sitting around, waiting. I woke up and I was like, “Really? That’s what I’m dreaming about? The Codex breaking?”

Did you have the skill to direct movies or TV before you did the show?

Dan Weiss: No, but we did it anyway.

And now you know, for real.

Dan Weiss: We had a very charmed situation where we got to work with people we were already close with, actors and crew, people we had known for years, and we had fantastic DPs and a fantastic A.D. both years, who really let us concentrate on—on, you know, what we were going to have for lunch. And Drop7. And Candy Crush.

David Benioff: I think it would be hard to go back to the previous work, where I was writing scripts and turning them in and losing all control over it. After having been through this, just thinking about the casting—neither of us had done any casting before, and it’s such a crucial part of any screen storytelling. So the idea of going back to the place where you just have no say over it, I think it would be too frustrating. You know, you’re writing a feature script, you don’t have any say over the editing. You don’t even get invited to the editing room most of the time.

And once somebody owns your words, they can rewrite them.

Dan Weiss: It’s just a given that you’re being paid for the option of being told to go any way at any point in the process.

Would you go back to writing fiction?

Dan Weiss: That I could do.

David Benioff: Yeah.

Will you collaborate after this? Or do you think this is going to exhaust you?

David Benioff: My guess is that we’ll go on to do some things in collaboration, some things separately. Maybe one of us will direct something and the other one will produce and vice versa. But I think we’ve worked together for almost eight years now.

Dan Weiss: Is that what is was? 2006? Jesus fucking Christ.

Is there anything you can say about season four?

Dan Weiss: Making it almost killed us. How about that?

David Benioff: It was the hardest season to shoot.

Did you have the same number of production days?

Dan Weiss: It’s more about what you’re trying to do in those days. The logistical complexity of this year was such a dramatic leap.

Are they more expensive episodes?

Dan Weiss: More expensive. Every year it goes up. Every year it gets bigger budget-wise and accordingly bigger in terms of production logistics. Here, I think, the budget went to here, and the appetite for more new or different kinds of shooting and scenes went even beyond that.

Meaning more fights, more action?

Dan Weiss: The sorts of visual-effect type things that we hadn’t really done before.

I suppose the dragons are effects and they get bigger as the show goes on.

Dan Weiss: Yeah.

David Benioff: So there’s that. And it was more action this season than there ever has been before. And it’s just much more time consuming. To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days. But the actors have gotten better at the fighting. Yesterday we were watching this fight scene with Kit Harington [Jon Snow] in it, and he did this movement—“Is that sped up? Because it looks a little—”