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In the same 2019 in which David Benioff and DB Weiss attended the broadcast of the last episodes of Game of Thronesthe work they had been working on for more than a decade, a Netflix manager suggested they read the trilogy The memory of the Earth’s pastwhich begins with The three body problem. Shortly after, the writers and producers signed an agreement to create content exclusively for Netflix. Those science fiction novels that excited them then are the basis of their highly anticipated new creation, which will be released on Thursday the 21st on Netflix.
As in the story set in the Seven Kingdoms designed by George RR Martin, the challenge of this adaptation was not easy, and Netflix proposed pairing Weiss and Benioff with Alexander Woo, responsible for the second season of The Terror and that he had worked as a screenwriter in True Blood and, therefore, also with experience in adapting literary universes. The trilogy by Chinese Cixin Liu contains a lot of scientific information and the story has a scope that reaches up to 18 million years in the future and to distant galaxies. As Benioff, Weiss and Woo know, not everything that works on paper has to work on screen. So the main challenge for the scriptwriters was to bring that entire universe down to earth.
The story combines very diverse events. Scientists from different parts of the world begin to take their own lives for no apparent reason. The stars suddenly blink in unison. A metal helmet takes its wearer to a virtual reality game that takes them to the China of the Shang dynasty as well as to the England of the Tudors. A mysterious sect congregates aboard an oil tanker. And, above all, there is the threat of an alien invasion, a disturbing visit that will arrive in 400 years but that forces humanity to make decisions: how to prepare for the arrival? Is it possible to shortcut it? Or do we leave the problem to the next generation?
To adapt the content of the books to a global audience, the three creators thought that some changes were necessary with respect to the original material. They start at the same point, the China of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but while the plot and characters are Chinese in the novels, the series moves the main story to Oxford and changes some characters to show a more diverse and global. “In the novel, almost all the action takes place in China, and for the series, which in the contract specified that it would be in English, we decided to place the action in an English-speaking country,” explains David Benioff about the alterations compared to the original.
“The biggest change is in the characters. In the series, they meet each other. In the books, most of them work and live in parallel lives, they don’t interact. But in a series you want to see the characters interact, see their relationships, who likes who, who hates each other or are fighting…” continues Benioff. Woo abounds in the same idea: “The characters are the main link between the viewer and a series, it is what makes you want to see another episode and another, and another season, and in the end you have known those characters for eight or ten years, it is a relationship similar to friendship. Without strong, three-dimensional characters, there is no incentive to watch another episode. We spent a long time working on the characters, giving them relationships with each other, crossing their paths more than in the books, giving them conflicts and creating a past for them.”
The creators also told the author of the novels about their plans through a video call. “It was funny, because when you first talk to the author of a material that you’re going to adapt,” explains Weiss, “you’re always nervous about how he’s going to feel about the fact that someone is going to take his baby, something he’s been involved in. invested years and years of work. We wondered if she would draw red lines, what things she would say we couldn’t do, and what things she would force us to do. But we were very relieved to discover that he did not have any imposition or any request, he had an open mind, he understood that there were things about the books that we would have to change because he understood the difficulties that his books represent as source material.
Among these alterations were changes in gender and nationality in some characters and the appearance in the first season of characters and plots from the second and third books. “We wanted to work on the series as a whole, not adapt first the first book, then the second, and then the third,” adds Benioff. “Cixin Liu had once said that in books it is difficult to represent amazing images because words are not images, and he was eager to see in images what he had created with words,” adds Weiss.
The filming of the eight episodes of the first season lasted nine months, most of it in England, but also at the United Nations headquarters in New York, at Cape Canaveral in Florida and in Extremadura, a place that Weiss and Benioff already They knew about the filming of Game of Thrones. “It’s something we learned in Thrones that we wanted to transfer to the new series: that we love working in Spain and whenever we have the opportunity we will do it again,” says Weiss. On this occasion, the Red Coast base, the Chinese national defense project in the series, was filmed on a hill near Cáceres, as Benioff specifies.
As the creators of Game of Thrones, the adaptation of novels that have a large number of readers behind them entails some risks, such as not meeting their expectations. Did you learn anything from your previous experience? “Twitter won’t kill you,” says Benioff, to the laughter of his colleagues. “Although they will threaten to do so,” Woo concludes.
Chinese adaptation vs. global adaptation
In 2023, the Chinese platform WeTV premiered a series (available in Spain on Rakuten Viki) that also adapts the work of Cixin Liu but with a much more faithful approach to the original than the one proposed by the Netflix production. The creators of The three body problem when asked about the possible reactions of readers seeking fidelity to the work. “If anyone is interested in how the adaptation process works in different directions, this is a strange example, with two versions of the same story in which one is a very faithful adaptation and the other is faithful in some parts and changes a lot in others,” says Weiss.
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