Over the weekend at SXSW, Game of Thrones creators and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were joined by stars Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) and Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) for a panel discussion about the series. With production wrapped on Game of Thrones Season 7, the producers are now starting to prepare the eighth and final season, and now it has finally been confirmed that the last season will actually be just six episodes long. Here's what David Benioff had to say during a featured speaker panel at SXSW, when asked about the final season.

"It's only going to be six episodes for the final season. From the beginning we've wanted to tell a 70-hour movie. It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it's stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle and now we're coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way, I'm very happy we've kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to."

Entertainment Weekly also reports that the Game of Thrones showrunners have already split up the writing duties for each of the final episodes, with David Benioff joking that they have argued over who gets to kill off Sansa Stark. With the show coming to an end, the producers also reminisced about the worst scene they ever shot, which as it turns out, was for the original pilot they shot, which was never aired and significantly re-worked into the episode that aired on HBO in 2011. Here's what D.B. Weiss had to say about this scene that never saw the light of day.

"There's a scene in the pilot that might be the worst scene we've ever written, probably the most embarrassing, with the Stark boys and Jon Snow and Theon. They're all shaving each other, like getting their haircut. And they were all shirtless, and it's like, 'Wait, why is this in here?' And the only reason it was in there was no continuity between scenes in the pilot where their beards are all different (due to how much the actors had grown from when the pilot first started shooting to when it was re-shot a year later). And if you look closely, you could tell they were all flexing because they're shirtless. They're all flexing their abs. They were all doing crunches all day between takes."

HBO finally confirmed last week that the Game of Thrones Season 7 premiere will air on Sunday, July 16. The network still hasn't released any official plot details yet, but one of the show's new cast members, Jim Broadbent, recently revealed in an interview that he's playing, "an archmaester" character who appears in five of the seven episodes this season. The actor also revealed that he shot all of his episodes in Belfast, and didn't get to go out on location, while also adding that he shares scenes with Samwell Tarly (John Bradley). There has been speculation that Jim Broadbent is playing Maester Marwyn, although the actor wouldn't confirm if that was the character he's playing or not. Hopefully we'll find out more about Game of Thrones Season 7 very soon.