‘Game of Thrones' News and Update: Showrunners have answered many of your questions

Showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have many answers to our questions.

 "We are writing the final act now," they say about 'Game of Thrones,' which may run for 10-15 more hours beyond season six.

The Hollywood Reporter interviewed the showrunners, when asked about the show approaching to an end they said,

"We're not walking away. We're approaching the finish line. From the outset, our hope was to tell a complete story - beginning, middle and end. We are writing the final act now, and the last thing we want to do is stay on stage after the play is over."

When asked about the deviation of the storyline from the books and the process of creating a plan of action that fulfilled show's need and interacted with George's needs, the showrunners answered,

We realized we'd probably catch the books when we spent several days with George in Santa Fe in 2013, discussing the future of the book series and the television series. George's schedule is very much his own, as it should be for a novelist. But we're locked into a set schedule - a new season every year. In the beginning, we hoped that if the show worked, we'd get seven seasons to tell the tale. Seven kingdoms, seven gods, seven books - seven felt like a lucky number. The actual messiness of storytelling might not be quite that numerologically elegant, but we're looking at somewhere between 70 and 75 hours before the credits roll for the last time.

The show has diverged from the books quite dramatically by this point, but it's still George's world: The characters he's dreamt up in the world he created. At this point, given the fact that we're outpacing the novels, we all see the upside in the divergence: book readers won't be spoiled by what's to come on the show, and the show audience won't have to worry about spoilers from the unpublished books. And we're very happy that the show has led so many people to discover George's amazing books.

The subversive storytelling is one of the beauties of the show but what does it mean for season six and the show at large that a character of such importance is off the board at this late stage of the game?

Central heroes don't have any particular claim on immortality. In fact, we could argue that the notion of "central heroes" is one of the fantasy tropes that George's books have so brilliantly exploded. Look, we all love Lord of the Rings, but none of us really believed that Sauron was going to kill Frodo. Was any gambler dumb enough to bet money on Voldemort defeating Harry? In traditional fantasy, when the forces of darkness are arrayed against the armies of light, everyone knows who's going to win. And that's one of the elements that bored us about traditional fantasy: the predictability of it.