‘Game of Thrones’ Director on Jon Snow’s Past and Tyrion’s Reaction

When Jon and Dany hook up, we know it’s incest, but they don’t. So why does Tyrion look troubled? Why the reaction shot from him?

From my point of view, Tyrion always seemed three steps ahead. As long as there is a professional alliance between Dany and Jon, that’s something that everybody wants. We can imagine that that’s a helpful alliance. But when things get personal, then people make decisions based on their emotions, and that can complicate matters going forward, so I think he sees the potential here for things to get very messy. Usually, historically, nothing good comes out of relationships becoming more complicated! [Laughs] It’s also a question of what’s going to be his role within this new alliance, right? So there’s a kind of caution here.

Some folks suspect he might be jealous, too.

Well, there is something to that. Everyone seems to be in love with Dany, in a way, and I think Tyrion’s a little bit in love with her. But I don’t think it’s an actual romantic love. There’s a huge respect for her, and maybe there’s a slight romantic element to that, but it’s more of a jockeying in terms of who has real power. Not over Dany, but who has power in a relationship with Dany. Jorah, who really is in love with her, his relationship with Jon is complicated in a different way. With Tyrion, it’s all about who is going to have sway over her?

Tyrion’s bigger moment, of course, is his reunion with Cersei. Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey haven’t been in a scene together since season four.

That was one of my favorite scenes of the entire show. My favorite scene to watch, my favorite scene to shoot. It was very important to us that we let the audience believe, for at least a moment, that she could really kill him. That this might be it. The first time Peter rehearsed it, I was like, I believed it. [Laughs] That was definitely one of those scenes where I had a chill.

Cersei shows remarkable restraint. She would kill Tyrion, except then her double-cross wouldn’t work on the rest of them. So Lena is actually playing the scene to work on both levels.

That’s one of the great things about Lena [Headey.] She is one of those actresses who, within her stillness, there is everything. She can do so little, and still have all that complexity. Particularly during the summit at the Dragonpit, she’s able to convey so much without outwardly showing very much. It’s all in there. It’s all in the eyes. And the slight little things she does are incredibly telling. She is a very intuitive and very transparent actress.

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As showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss point out in a behind-the-scenes video, it was really easy for them to type the words, “And then the Wall comes tumbling down.” It’s much harder to pull that off. What was the trickiest part of that shocking sequence?

Everything was tricky about that one. That was one of the more complicated visual effects that I’ve ever done. It was a huge amount of conceptualizing, just to figure out how the scenes should track, and then the execution was very complicated. We had to decide how much of it was going to be real, and how much of it was going to be visual effects.

One of the things that was very helpful was we had these concept artists who did these paintings, about ten paintings, of the sequences in the script, that were very suggestive of what the sequence would feel like and look like. That was really helpful to figure what the flames should look like, what color they should be, what the dead dragon should look like, what the different interactive effects should be like. The top of the Wall is a set in Belfast, and the rest is all in virtual land, and it’s a complicated thing to marry all these things together.

There’s also this sense of anticipation from the wights. We used to see as just mindless zombies in thrall to their White Walker masters, just a slave army, and then we get a glimpse that they might actually know or understand what is happening here.

Yes. Exactly. That was an important thing for me, too, that you feel like there’s kind of a consciousness there. And I think there certainly is a sense that for an enemy to be a proper enemy, they have to have a certain kind of intelligence. That makes it a real fight, as opposed to a fight with something that doesn’t have the wherewithal to be a proper opponent.

Please tell me that Tormund and Beric were not on the chunk of the Wall that fell?

Tormund has a lot of fans, but I can tell you nothing.

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