David Benioff is a popular American screenwriter and novelist. He is best known for his work on the legendary HBO series Game of Thrones. Also known as a television producer, he has been involved in the production of the films The 25th Hour, Troy, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and others.
Biography of the screenwriter
David Benioff was born in 1970. He was born in New York. He was the youngest of three children in his family. His father is Stephen Friedman, but when David grew up, he took his mother's surname to avoid confusion with another famous American writer, David Friedman.
His ancestors were Jewish immigrants who came from different countries - Russia, Romania and Germany.
David Benioff graduated from Dartmouth College. At the same time, his first profession was far from creativity. He worked as a bouncer in clubs and bars in San Francisco. Over time, he began working as an English teacher in Brooklyn. He constantly strived to improve his education, in 1999 he became the owner ofMaster of Fine Arts degree from the University of Irvine.
Creative career
In 1999, David Benioff released his first novel called The 225th Hour. This was his graduate work at the University of Irvine. People around the story liked it so much that it was decided to film it. In 2002, Spike Lee directed the crime drama of the same name. Benioff became the head writer. The main role in this picture was played by Edward Norton.
A couple of years later, the hero of our article introduced Warner Bros. script for the action adventure "Troy", based on Homer's poem "The Iliad". For this work, he received two and a half million dollars.
In parallel, he worked on the script for the dramatic thriller "Stay", which was directed by Mark Forster in 2005.
Over time, working on films for David Benioff began to come to the fore in his creative career. He continued his collaboration with Forster, writing the screenplay for The Wind Runner, which was released in 2007.
For about three years he worked on the script for the spin-off of the X-Men saga. As a result, the audience saw the film "X-Men Origins. Wolverine" in 2009.
At the same time, he did not forget about literature itself. In 2008, his second novel "City of Thieves" was published, which tells about the adventures of two young people in besieged Leningrad. In Russian, the novel was released under the title "City". Timur Bekmambetovoffered Benioff to film the work, but he refused.
Working on Game of Thrones
A landmark in his career was the offer to film a series of novels by George Martin "A Song of Ice and Fire", which was received in 2006. David Benioff and Dan Weiss worked on this project. They started working on the pilot episode in 2007, and three years later they gave the go-ahead to the series.
They had already run into Weiss while working on the script for the film The Director, which was never filmed. In this series, they became not only writers, but also executive producers and showrunners.
"Game of Thrones" has become one of the most popular series of our time. Most importantly, she rallied Benioff and Weiss. It is already known that they, as screenwriters and directors, have begun work on their first author's project - a feature film called "The Tough Guys", which will be a free interpretation of the novel by Stephen Hunter. And after the release of the last season of "Game of Thrones" will be engaged in the production of the series "Confederate" on HBO.
