Inside the Episode: “Walk of Punishment”
HBO has released the Inside the Episode video for “Walk of Punishment”.
In addition, there have been a couple of interviews with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the writers/directors of last night’s episode, talking about THAT scene.
In an interview over at Entertainment Weekly, David and Dan talk about why they played The Hold Steady’s “Bear and the Maiden Fair” over the end credits.
“It’s such a shocking ending and when we read the scene in the books it was so shocking to us,” Weiss says. “To really hammer home the shock of that moment you need something unexpected. There’s no version of a traditional score that would keep you as off balance as we wanted that scene to leaving you feeling.”
“I can’t imagine having that conversation with Ramin [Djawadi] our composer — ‘Now we need the Jaime-gets-his-hand-chopped-off music,’” adds Benioff. who made his directorial debut with this episode. “What we always loved in An American Werewolf in London, we see our hero shot and killed and then his lover runs to embrace his dead body — it’s a sad ending — but then we cut to black and it’s [the bouncy 1961 Marcell’s hit] ‘Blue Moon.’ And that jarring juxtaposition was fantastic.”
At the Los Angeles Times, Benioff and Weiss note that pitching the part of Jaime Lannister to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was tricky and the promise of this season had a lot to do with getting him to sign.
“It was kind of an interesting conversation when we were first making the deal with Nikolaj,” Benioff continued. “We warned him, ‘It’s going to be a good first season, then you’re going to be mostly absent in the second season’ — we ended up writing him more scenes for the second season just because Nikolaj’s so good we didn’t want to be away from him for so long. ‘But I promise you, if we make it past the second season, where we’re taking this character is going to be fantastic.’”
Winter Is Coming: As I mentioned in the comments of my recap, the song over the credits was a little off-putting at first. But it has really grown on me. I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of Jaime’s journey this season.
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