The Many Saints of Newark Director Alan Taylor Talks Whacking Ned Stark and Julius Caesar

He also lopped off the head of the popular and seemingly indestructible Ned Stark (Sean Bean) on Game of Thrones.

“As an episodic director, you never quite know what you’re going to get when you go in,” Taylor tells Den of Geek. “When you see you’re killing a major character, it is like you won the lottery. When I got to do Ned Stark, that was great.”

While speaking about his latest film, The Many Saints of Newark, death is a recurring subject, and one which never comes expectedly. The director knows the secret of an epic death scene often lies in underplay.

“Maybe I’m just perverse in my head, but one of the guiding things for doing something like the Ned Stark death was to deliberately shoot it in a kind of mundane way,” Taylor says. “I wanted the angle that, where his head gets chopped off, to be a coverage angle that we’ve already been using. No special, heightened dramatic angles for the big event.”

The commonplace vantage point of the ground also played specifically to an audience unaccustomed to the shock value of entertainment rule-breaking.

“I think a lot of people watched that scene, not ready to believe that he was going to die because they knew he was the main character,” Taylor says. “Of course, anybody who read the novels knew what was coming at some point, but a lot of people thought, ‘Okay, got it, a big TV show, here is the main character.’ So, I was trying not to telegraph the inevitable or to overdramatize it. In that one, I was actually shooting his coverage almost like it was a conversation.”