David Benioff
David Benioff is a writer, born 1970.
The odd credit on this page is a book. City of Thieves, published in 2008, sits in a working life that otherwise runs through studio screenwriting: 25th Hour in 2002, Troy in 2004, The Kite Runner in 2007, a co-writing credit on X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009, Gemini Man in 2019. David Friedman, born in New York in 1970 and working under the name Benioff, had a decade of that behind him before the job that ate the rest of the career.
The job was Game of Thrones, which he and D. B. Weiss created for HBO out of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and ran from 2011 to 2019. Adapting Martin is mostly a problem of subtraction, and the early seasons are the best evidence anyone has that Benioff is good at it: enormous amounts of book get moved without the seams showing, and the dialogue that replaces interior monologue does the same work in a quarter of the space. The writing took Emmys in the drama series category and the show took a Hugo, which is the science fiction readership voting on whether the adaptation earned its source.
The pair returned in 2024 with 3 Body Problem. Two of the four remaining titles here are documentaries about Game of Thrones in which Benioff appears as himself, which is a fair picture of how completely one series can absorb a filmography.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Books (1)
Where to start with David Benioff
Start with the novel. City of thieves is the only thing on this page he made without a partner, a novel written by the man everybody now thinks of as a showrunner, and it is the shortest route to his voice with no committee on top of it.
Then Game of Thrones, with one piece of advice: watch the first four seasons for the adaptation craft, and treat the later run as a separate object with separate problems, because the writing is doing a different job by then. 3 Body Problem is the harder sell, colder and more interested in ideas than in people, and worth it if that is what you want from science fiction. Game of Thrones: The Last Watch is the honest companion piece, a crew documentary rather than a victory lap, and Game of Thrones: A Day in the Life is the short version of the same thing.