Episode Director David Nutter on The Pain of Mother’s Mercy

David Nutter has all the luck. His last double feature of episodes were the end of Season 3, “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa.” Last week, not only did he have to stage the emotional gut punch of Shireen’s death, but also the huge arena scene that included gladiator-style fighting, a terrorist attack on Dany and her companions, and Dany and Drogon’s maiden flight.

As Stannis asked this week “How much worse can it be?” Famous last words. The Season 5 finale, Mother’s Mercy, was one of the bleakest episodes in Game of Thrones history, offering a smorgasbord of death and punishment. The Hollywood Reporter sat down and asked Nutter how it felt bringing so many terrible things to the screen.

It turns out, the scene he was most worried about wasn’t a death—it was Cersei’s emotionally scarring Walk of Shame.

“I was on pins and needles about wanting to get it right because Lena Headey and I are friends and I think she’s such a great talent. I wanted it to turn out wonderful. Wonderful  probably isn’t the best word, but I wanted it to turn out right. I wanted to get a sense of being with her as much as possible and you go through this walk with her. The extras in Dubrovnik were incredible with their responses and reactions to her. They reacted to her as the queen going into Flea Bottom, the worst part of town. This is a slum she created. Lena went on an emotional journey through it. It was a situation in which you really felt like she was in excruciating physical and emotional turmoil and pain. I felt a little bit sorry for her, which is what I was going after.”

Asked about the death of Meryn Trant, which the director had to set up in the last episode and then follow through with in the finale, Nutter said he was going for something really grotesque. A lot of people behind the scenes, including executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss plus editor Tim Porter, though the sequence was “a little Quentin Tarantino-esque,” something that Nutter, and probably most of the viewers, could agree with.

Another two-part story Nutter staged over episodes 9 and 10 was the the fall of Stannis, which began with Shireen’s death in “The Dance of Dragons” and carried over to “Mother’s Mercy,” wherein Stannis’ men abandoned him right before his crucial battle. In this case, Nutter said his main job was getting out of the way and letting actor Stephen Dillane carry the drama. “It was a sequence about how simply I could shoot it to make sure intent is brought across to what happens to Stannis,” he said.

On the other hand, staging the Dothraki arrival on the plains of Essos required serious visual effects. According to Nutter, the first several riders were actual people on horseback, but after they had been established, the horde was created with visual effects. 

And of course, Nutter weighed in on the one thing we all want to know about—Kit Harington’s last day on set. (OR IS IT? Yes, it probably is.)

It wasn’t unlike the Red Wedding where everyone gets attached to people when you work with them for such a long time…It was a lot of sadness on the set.  The guys on the crew knew Kit really well, and people who are extras — the members of the Night’s Watch, they take this very seriously…They live the part so much. I took all of the extras aside prior to shooting the sequence and we read the Night’s Watch creed together, because I wanted them to feel like they are part of it. Without them being involved, it wouldn’t have worked as well. I wanted the scene to happen rather quickly, where it didn’t hang at all. That it would happen before you know it.

Also, because this is an interview about the the Jon Snow, the interviewer couldn’t help but ask this question: “The book is a little ambiguous. This looked final. It’s safe to say Jon is dead?”

Nutter’s response: “Jon Snow is dead.” Just in case we weren’t clear on that point.

• Published on 06/16/2015 at 11:15 AM CDT
• Last updated on 06/16/2015 at 11:20 AM CDT