During a recent webinar with other television directors, David Nutter discussed his sense of professional pride for the Red Wedding and his “amazing” experience watching fans react to it.
Last Tuesday, the Special Projects Committee of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) hosted a webinar called A Conversation with Episodic Television Directors – How Inspiration Fuels the Art of Directing. Former DGA President, Paris Barclay, moderated the conversation, which featured Game of Thrones‘ own David Nutter as well as Michelle MacLaren (The Deuce, The Morning Show), Ken Whittingham (Atypical, Grace and Frankie) and Jessica Yu (Fosse/Verdon, Hollywood).
The guests covered a range of topics over the course of the webinar, from the stamina it takes to keep going in their competitive industry, to which directors they admired early on in their careers, to (perhaps inevitably), how they are maintaining their creative drives during the Covid 19 pandemic. While discussing their proudest professional achievements, Nutter talked about the Red Wedding and its extraordinary fan reception … which was fitting since June 2 was the 7th anniversary of “The Rains of Castamere”‘s airing.
“Directors in television don’t often get reviews because you’re directing television,” Nutter said. “But we worked very hard on the episode and thought it had turned out well, but what came after that I didn’t expect. What came after that was YouTube exploded and people who had read the books were shooting their friends watching the episode. It was amazing to see people’s reactions to what I had done. That was something that mattered to me quite a bit because I realized I could get the audience to care about something. And if they do that, they’ll jump into the show all the way. With Game of Thrones, we’d spent three long years building that background and that relationship with the audience, and I think we hit a home run and that was a real joyful moment.”
I imagine that was the first time anything relating to the Red Wedding has been described as “joyful.”
It really is extraordinary, though, to reflect upon the impact that the climactic scene of “The Rains of Castamere” had on the fandom, on the show and on the television industry itself just over seven years ago.
Unfortunately, no clips from the webinar are available at the moment. However, DGA promises to add video highlights to the webinar’s gallery in the near future.
