Daniel Brett Weiss is an American television producer, writer, and director. Along with his collaborator David Benioff, he is best-known as co-creator and showrunner of Game of Thrones, the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of booksA Song of Ice and Fire.
Weiss worked as personal assistant on films such as The Viking Sagas for New Line Cinema. For a brief period, Weiss also worked as a personal assistant for musician Glenn Frey. Weiss went to Dublin in 1995 to study Anglo-Irish literature and met David Benioff, the screenwriter of Troy. Three years later, around 1998, they met again in Santa Monica, California. Weiss and Benioff co-wrote a screenplay for a film titled The Headmaster, but it was never made. In 2003, they were hired to collaborate on a new script of Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game, in consultation with the then-designated director Wolfgang Petersen. It was not used. Weiss's 2003 debut novel, Lucky Wander Boy, is themed around video games. In 2006, Weiss said he had a second novel finished that "needs a second draft". That same year, Weiss completed a screenplay for a film adaptation of the video game seriesHalo, based on a script written by Alex Garland. However, director Neill Blomkamp declared the project dead in late 2007. Weiss also worked on a script for a prequel to I Am Legend. However, in May 2011, director Francis Lawrence stated that he did not think the prequel was ever going to happen. Weiss collaborated with David Benioff on the HBO television seriesGame of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin's book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Benioff and Weiss also directed three episodes together. For the first two, they used a coin-flip to decide who would get the credit on the show. Weiss received directing credit for "Two Swords", Season 4episode 1, while Benioff was credited for "Walk of Punishment", Season 3 episode 3. Benioff and Weiss were both credited for co-directing the series finale, "The Iron Throne". On July 19, 2017, Weiss announced that he and Benioff are going to begin production on another HBO series, titled Confederate, after the final season of Game of Thrones. Weiss and Benioff said, "We have discussed Confederate for years, originally as a concept for a feature film - But our experience on Thrones has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO." On February 6, 2018, Disney announced that both Weiss and Benioff would write and produce a new series of Star Wars films after the finale season of Game of Thrones is completed, in 2019. Towards the end of the final season of Game of Thrones, a petition to HBO was started on Change.org. It described showrunners Benioff and Weiss as "woefully incompetent writers", and thus demanded "competent writers" to remake the eighth season of Game of Thrones in a manner "that makes sense". The petition eventually amassed over 1.5 million signatures. Richard Roeper, writing for the ChicagoSun Times, described that the backlash to the eighth season was so great that in his 25+ years of reviewing movies and television, he doubts that he has "ever seen the level of fan vitriol leveled at" Game of Thrones. In early 2019, Weiss and Benioff entered into an exclusive US$200 million deal with Netflix to produce several films and television shows exclusively for the streaming service. In late October 2019, it was reported that Weiss and Benioff had exited their deal with Disney due to their commitments to Netflix. Weiss and Benioff's first project on Netflix will be as directors of the stand-up comedy.
Personal life
Weiss and his wife, Andrea Troyer, have two children.
