As Game of Thrones comes to an end, the directors behind the making of the epic eight season drama by HBO talk about their favourite moments in the show. They also reveal the effects on the crew after they were required to shoot those scenes as well as about the impact it has on the audience. All of these things revealed in an interview are the favourite moments of the directors behind ‘Game of Thrones.’
They begin the list with the Red Wedding, which is more or less the most impactful scene in Game of Thrones. Reportedly, David Nutter deviously wanted fans and viewers to be lulled into the scene with a sense of ease and the slow and pleasurable pace of a party. And once they were sure that what they had shot thus far would be enough to make any viewer feel safe, they simply decided to bring out the real reason the scene is called the Red Wedding and shock the audience into oblivion. This scene also left Michelle Fairley too traumatised to speak about the episode for a week.
“I remember when Robb crawls over to Talisa and is cradling her in his arms, seeing her life pass away, I was crouched down, whispering quite intimately to Richard [Madden] about relationships and love and all that kind of stuff,” recounts Nutter.”And I turned around and three or four of the make-up ladies had lost it. They were sobbing. It was that kind of situation for everyone.”
David Nutter said that when they’re making scenes like these, they partially already know what’s going to happen and they rehearse it so many times that they more or less get used to what’s going on. Hence, even if what’s being shown can be extremely grim, it still doesn’t resemble what the viewer actually sees in the actual episode. He says that he is happy about how his fans tend to be traumatised about the devious tricks which he pulled on screen.
“When you’re directing television you rarely get that immediate response from people,” said Nutter. “So when I started to see all of that happening, I felt very good about how it all came out. People still tell me how it affected them the most.”
Next in line was Neil Marshall who spoke about his two favourite scenes from the series including ‘Watchers on the Wall’ and ‘Blackwater.’ He reports that he had quite a lot of fun filming these scenes and that most of the things which made the heroes look cool in these scenes were actually his own ideas that deviated from the script.
“Stannis just stood on the beach and signalled, rather than getting into the thick of it with his soldiers,” Marshall recounted his time while directing ‘Blackwater.’ “I wanted our hero-king up a ladder doing suicidal things. It’s very important to give everybody something to do in these battles.”
As far as ‘Watchers on the Wall’ is concerned, it was his idea to film the sequence in a 360 degree panning shot to capture an all-around view of the entire battlefield and give the audience a better estimate or experience of the scale on which the battle was fought. It took them seven takes to get it right, but they finally managed to do it in the end.
“It links all the characters together,” reported Marshall. “We worked out a system where each section began fighting just as the camera arrived at them, so they hadn’t run out of moves by the time it reached them. It was the first thing we did that night and we nailed it in seven takes.”
Apart from this, he also paid special attention to the scenes where characters died and choose to use slow motion in such places in order to freeze the moment as a distinct occurrence on the screen where nothing else matters anymore.
While these scenes were surely amazing, key players are reporting that this season is going to be nothing like what fans have seen in Game of Thrones thus far. They are even going as far as calling it a sequence of six epic movies instead of episodes. With scenes like these and all the promises given by the crew and staff, the only thing which remains is to catch the season premiere on the 14th of April.
