Director David Nutter says Sunday’s episode was harder to film than the Red Wedding

The last time David Nutter directed a Game of Thrones episode, it was episodes 9 and 10 of Season 3, “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa.” By the time the first of those two episodes finished airing, Nutter’s name was sealed in the annals of Game of Thrones history, since he staged one of the most brutal and bloody moments of the series, known as “The Red Wedding.”

His return to direct the last two episodes of Season 5 also presented challenges. Although this Sunday’s episode, “The Dance of Dragons,” ended on a more hopeful note than “The Rains of Castamere,” it still packed quite a punch. Although there are those who will argue that the Massacre at Hardhome represented the real climax of this season, “The Dance of Dragons” was no slouch. Nutter not only had to stage Stannis’ Choice, but also the huge arena scene in Daznak’s Pit.

Talking to Vulture after the fact, Nutter said he thought he would never have to film anything crazier than the massacre at the Red Wedding. Then he got this script.

I had to read it about a thousand times before figuring out how to do it. It was like a pyramid that you have to take one block at a time because of the complexity of it all. The more organized you are for the riotous moments, the more it feels like it’s out of control. But it was extremely controlled. The first part of the sequence is the gladiator battle, then there’s the second gladiator battle, and then the riot. You think it’s over, and then Drogon appears. Each subsequent sequence trumps the last.

According to him, the sheer scope and size of the ending scene in the arena made this episode hundreds of times harder than filming the Red Wedding. “[It was] much more involved because of the scope of it, and 1,000 extras every day. It took 12 days to shoot the entire sequence.” But Nutter admitted that another sequence was just as hard to film—Shireen’s sacrifice.

It was quite a serious and somber day. Basically, the world you’re filming and the tone on set have to match. As with any story with such an intense nature, you try to match real-world reality. Even the reaction of some of Stannis’s soldiers indicates they didn’t sign up for this, and sadness on their part. But Stannis has been told that this is his destiny, and it had to happen. So the situation for me, doing a sequence like this that’s on a huge scale, is about making sure the actors don’t have to wait, so they can keep their wits and emotions about them. As for Kerry, she’s a wonderfully talented and seasoned actress who understood very clearly how she would react as a young woman in Shireen’s place.

The interviewer picks up on a couple of the choices made in the scene—for example, the decision to not show Shireen actually burning, as well as the overlap between the silence after she dies, and the roar of the crowd as we cut to Meereen. The first choice was one Nutter made himself. “It was much more emotionally powerful,” he said. “The rest I felt would have been very gratuitous to even attempt to visualize.”

But the second choice apparently was not. “I hand in my director’s cut, and the producers are basically involved in all the postproduction,” he said. So it was someone else who chose to make the aural link between the two scenes, both of which ended in fiery deaths.

As for what’s coming in “Mother’s Mercy,” Nutter won’t give anything away. But he does drop one very interesting hint:

All I can tell you is that it’s like no season finale they’ve had before.

That could be taken so many ways…

• Published on 06/09/2015 at 5:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 06/09/2015 at 5:06 PM CDT