Back in 2004, an American novelist with only one previous credit saw Troy, the adaptation he had made of Homer’s The Iliad, become one of the biggest blockbusters of the year thanks to Brad Pitt, who was then the star of the moment. . A couple of years later, David Benioff summoned an old friend who hadn’t been as lucky as him, but equally talented, D.B. Weiss, to try to repeat the phenomenon of adapting the unadaptable. In this case it was the novel A Song of Ice and Fire, which George R.R. Martin, fed up with his scripts for the big television networks never being filmed, wrote giving free rein to his imagination without thinking about how he could look on the screen.
As we all know, the two were the creators of one of the most successful series of all time, Game of Thrones, which over eight seasons accumulated 59 Emmys, more than any other drama series. And although it was logical that after ten very intense years of work the two would have taken a very long vacation, they both immediately got to work on a new, almost impossible mission, that of adapting Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy. Liu, accompanied by another television veteran, Alexander Woo, who emerged from True Blood and one of the creators of The Terror.
According to Benioff, the three learned of the book’s existence thanks to Barack Obama: “You don’t often hear good references from a president of the United States about a Chinese science fiction novel.” But when a Netflix executive, Peter Friedlander, asked them if they had read it, Benioff and Weiss decided to see what it was about on a flight from Osaka to Los Angeles: “I still remember when Dan came up to my seat and asked me if he had finished it. I had just read the last page a couple of minutes before,” David recalls with amusement and adds: “We looked at each other, and at that moment we both knew that this was going to be our next project.”
With a cast that includes many actors who went through Game of Thrones such as John Bradley, Liam Cunningham and Jonathan Pryce, along with the Mexican Eiza González, the New Zealander Jess Hong, the British Benedict Wong and Jovan Adepo and the American Rosalind Chao, the The first eight episodes of the series, which arrive this Thursday the 21st on Netflix, combine elements of Liu’s three books, but maintain their premise.
The 3-Body Problem tells the story of a Chinese astrophysicist who, during the Cultural Revolution, responds to an extraterrestrial message, which a long time later will transform the lives of a group of scientists, who will have to face a terrible threat. According to Weiss, the most complicated thing about adapting the books was their complexity and the vastness of the settings.
“On the one hand we had to show the historical reality of China in the sixties and seventies, and then there was the daily life of our present. To that we had to add virtual reality that plays an important role, especially in the first episodes, without forgetting the element of outer space, which takes us to the near future. Luckily we had a team that had already worked with us on Game of Thrones. Thanks to them we were able to go even further in this experience, because they all did a fantastic job,” he says.
Although most of the series was filmed in England, on this occasion Benioff and Weiss looked for alternatives in Spain. A Chinese military base that is supposedly in Inner Mongolia was recreated on an Iberian hill, where they filmed for two weeks.
