David Benioff is a lucky man. Not only is he a successful novelist and screenwriter, he’s also married to the beautiful actress Amanda Peet. Perhaps best of all, though, is that his work schedule happens to coincide with his newborn baby’s sleep cycle.
“I have a friend who calls me Hasselhoff,” Benioff told TODAY’s Natalie Morales Friday, referring to actor David Hasselhoff, who once starred in the TV show “Knight Rider.” “I’m the Night Writer.”
The screenwriter for “Troy” and “The Kite Runner,” among other films, Benioff’s current project is the screenplay for “Wolverine,” the highly anticipated prequel to the “X-Men” movies. But his reason for visiting TODAY was the release of his latest novel, “City of Thieves,” which is set in Leningrad when that city was besieged by the German army for 900 days during World War II.
Benioff had begun the novel while Peet was pregnant with their daughter, Frankie. He was about halfway through writing when Frankie was born 15 months ago, and initially he was worried that having a newborn around would interfere with his work.
“I was nervous about it. All my friends warned me, ‘Once the baby comes, you’re not going to have time,’ ” he told Morales. “It kind of worked out, though. I tend to write very late at night. My wife would go to sleep at about 9 or 10, and when Frankie would wake up for her night feeding, I would give her her bottle at midnight, at 3 a.m., and then at 6, I’d go to bed and Amanda would wake up.”
Living through Sept. 11
Benioff and Peet — an actress who starred in the critically acclaimed show “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” — are both native New Yorkers. They have a loft in the city as well as a home in California. And Benioff said that living through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York inspired him while he was researching and writing “City of Thieves.”
Despite unspeakable suffering, starvation and deprivation, the citizens of Leningrad refused to give in to despair. “Not only did they survive and fight back, but they kept attending concerts, they kept going to theater, they kept reading books,” Benioff said. “Many of them kept these wonderful diaries, which were filled with humor. I found it incredibly inspirational at that same dark time in our history.”
The novel begins with the narrator talking to his grandfather, who had emigrated to Florida after the war. He learns that his grandfather killed two Germans before he was 18, and when he presses for details, the old gentleman tells his grandson to make it up.
An impossible quest
What follows is the story of Lev Beniov, who is jailed for looting the body of a dead Nazi paratrooper who landed in the city. He is thrown in jail with a handsome young soldier, Kolya, who is guilty of desertion.
The boy and the young man expect to be executed, but are given a reprieve. The daughter of a powerful colonel is getting married, and the colonel tells them he needs a dozen eggs to bake a wedding cake.
In a city in which people are eating the glue from book bindings, the seemingly impossible quest takes Beniov and Kolya through the ravaged city and the devastated countryside.
Benioff said that he has a love-hate relationship with writing, be it a novel or a screenplay. “Novel writing is a torment for me, because I’m slow and lazy and getting to the end of a single page always seems impossible. But nothing feels better than finishing — there is a sense of accomplishment unrivaled by any other work I've done,” he told TODAY.
Morales asked Benioff if he could give out any plot details about “Wolverine,” which is the object of feverish speculation on Internet fan sites.
“I’m not supposed to give too much away,” he replied, saying only, “It’s a prequel. The story takes place about 16 years before the events in the first X-Men movie.”