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Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor on romance, dragons and ravens

NEW YORK — Alan Taylor was a key director in early Game of Thrones episodes, overseeing the first two season finales, as well as signature moments like the hatching of the dragons and Ned Stark’s execution.

Joe Naufahu, left, and Emilia Clarke in a scene from the season six premiere of Game of Thrones. Photo: HBO via AP

Joe Naufahu, left, and Emilia Clarke in a scene from the season six premiere of Game of Thrones. Photo: HBO via AP

NEW YORK — Alan Taylor was a key director in early Game of Thrones episodes, overseeing the first two season finales, as well as signature moments like the hatching of the dragons and Ned Stark’s execution.

But after several years away directing films like Thor: The Dark World and Terminator Genesis, he returned to find that the upstart show he remembered had become a phenomenon.

“I thought I was coming back to something I knew very well,” he said. “I was stunned by the transformation.”

He recovered enough to deliver an exciting episode Sunday (his first Thrones instalment since the Season 2 finale), which featured a battle on a frozen lake and the death and resurrection of a dragon — along with quieter scenes, like one in which Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow deepen their bond.

On Monday (Aug 21) afternoon, Taylor discussed returning to Thrones, those speedy ravens and why Dany and Jon are definitely going to hook up. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: So how fast are those ravens anyway?

A: I’ve only looked at one review online, and it was very much concerned with the speed of the ravens. I thought, that’s funny — you don’t seem troubled by the lizard as big as a 747, but you’re really concerned about the speed of a raven. It is true there are time issues, and I’m not exactly sure how many kilometres there are between Eastwatch and Dragonstone. But it was a bit dreary to hear somebody who said, “I cannot enjoy this episode because, you know, that speed of that raven... “ There’s was a lot of wonderful stuff going on here and if it really gets that much in your way, that’s not good to hear. But that said, Gendry’s a really great runner. (Laughs.) Ravens go super fast. And who’s to say how much time passes on that island, since it’s always sort of an eternal twilight north of the Wall? With those three ideas in mind, I think we can lay the timing concerns to rest.

Q: How have things changed at Game of Thrones since you last worked on the show?

A: It’s become a global thing, which it certainly wasn’t when I was there the first time. And the scale of the activity is amped up so much. Everything has gotten bigger, partly because HBO is giving it more money and partly because you have dragons growing. So the scale of what we were doing in the frozen lake was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in television, where so many shots had to be composites of three or four shots to achieve the effects.

Q: The shoot north of the Wall was split between Iceland and Belfast. What happened where?

A: All the walking and talking and travelling was through Icelandic landscapes, and the capturing of the wight was in Iceland. So there was concern that we could pull off something so stunty, because when you’re in Iceland it really is a guerrilla production. You’re carrying stuff in by foot; actors are carrying camera cases. So it’s tough to pull off big action sequences with prosthetics and fire and all that stuff. The transition comes with the frozen lake, which was a 360-degree set created in the quarry outside of Belfast, where the ice effect had to be maintained every day and it seemed to go on for a very long time. (Laughs.) We were there for weeks and weeks of arriving before the sun comes up to see, What kind of weather are we getting today?

Q: I’ve talked to a few Thrones directors, and it sounds as if the dragons are always complex. But was there perhaps a more surprising aspect of this episode that gave you anxiety?

A: It’s not a zero sum game — there’s an infinite supply of anxiety. So I had plenty of anxiety about the dragons, mostly about the layers of shooting you have to do to build the dragon moments. But the bigger concern was, is this going to feel emotional? Are people going to care when a visual effect dies? But I was more freaked out about things like, we’ve got eight pages between Sansa and Arya and they’re just standing there talking. How are we going to make that alive? It helps that you’ve got great dialogue and actors who completely know their characters. The actresses I knew when they were kids in Season 1 have grown into such wonderful actors; they carry it with so many layers, and you really feel the tension shifting between them in a great way.

Q: You directed the penultimate episode of Season 1, in which Ned died and Jon got the Mormont sword. Both things came up in Sunday’s penultimate episode of Season 7. Was that a conscious structural parallel?

A: There’s always been this grand arc storytelling in mind that reveals itself occasionally. We were going to blow the world open with the death of Ned Stark, scatter things to the winds, and then be the story of everything coming back together again. So the story will braid tighter and tighter together, and those characters will reconnect, each one having lived a kind of full, three-dimensional, often horrific life. It was fun for me to be there and have Arya talk to Sansa about that day when they watched their father die, when I was there with them on that day when those two little girls watched their father die. It felt like a great sort of closing the circle for me to be able to preside over their reconnecting. But that’s going to keep happening, and be winding tighter and tighter into the next season.

Q: Is the Daenerys and Jon Snow romance inevitable at this point?

A: Yeah, I think it’s kind of hard to see that not happening. When we were shooting Season 1 and no one had seen the show yet, we were in Malta. Back then, there was not a lot of secrecy because nobody was paying attention, and George R R Martin came to visit and he was being quite open about his plans. He said something: That it really is all about Dany and Jon. I was surprised because at the time, you know, I thought, well Robb Stark’s going to be king next, probably. And who knows where this story’s going? But it was absolutely clear to him that within this sprawling scale the whole story was coming down to this partnership.

So yes, we’ve seen them take a big step in my episode. And I love this moment between them where you can sort of see it welling up for Dany, and it was great job by Emilia (the actress Emilia Clarke) of sort of feeling it and almost falling into it and drawing back from it. But yeah, it’s gonna happen.

Q: So we’re just hoping everybody’s cool with the incest thing?

A: Oh, you know, it’s worked for Cersei and Jaime. (Laughs.) Nothing went wrong there. THE NEW YORK TIMES

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