Director Jeremy Podeswa on “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” and Season 6

Despite directing what is firmly established as the most poorly received episode of Game of Thrones in the show’s history (and yet also one that’s nominated for an Emmy this year—go figure), Jeremy Podeswa has always seemed like a class act, and is clearly very good at his job. “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” may have had some issues, but it’s hard to look at Arya’s introduction to the Hall of Faces or Sansa’s eerie snow-dusted wedding and say that Podeswa isn’t a fine director.

Podeswa recently sat down with The Credits to talk about his work on both Season 5 and Season 6. As a director, it takes around five months to complete two episodes of this show from start to finish, and The Credits wasted little time digging into some of the controversial scenes from Podeswa’s Season 5 work. Here’s what Podeswa had to say about the outrage that followed the final scene of “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” in which Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa Stark.

"To me it’s an indication of peoples investment in these stories and these characters. Look at the very first episode of the series— Jamie Lannister pushes Bran Stark out of the window, paralyzing him, and five seasons later, people love Jamie Lannister. I think the way people perceive behavior is relative to the way they relate to the show and the arc of the series, and the longer the series goes on, the more people invest in these characters, and the more they care when terrible things happen to them."

Podeswa also talks a little about how events like Sansa’s rape hit harder than they might have earlier in the series because the audience is so invested now. “Part of the viewing experience is the highs and lows, it’s a journey,” he said. I think he’s right, but unfortunately the interview doesn’t get in to the thornier questions surrounding that controversy, like whether the show is exploiting Sansa’s character just to shock the audience, but that’s more of a question for the writers, anyway.

The interviews also skims over the scenes in Dorne. Podeswa talks about how “beautiful” the Alcázar of Seville is and says that shooting scenes there was “really fun to do,” but doesn’t address the problems fans had with the fight choreography or the logistics of Jaime’s rescue operation. Maybe we should just join the production and try and forget those scenes happened.

More interesting are Podeswa’s comments on the Hall of Faces, which he had a major hand in conceptualizing. Apparently, the production was going to cut down on the scale of the Hall of Faces because of budget constraints, but Podeswa was able to find ways to use angles and effects to make the place seem vast without breaking the bank. Also, he reveals that the actual faces were painstakingly handmade and that several of them are modeled after real people, including David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and in the case of the face Arya almost touches, the mother of someone on the prosthetics team.

Podeswa also put a lot of work into planning and rendering Tyrion and Jorah’s journey through Valyria in “Kill the Boy.” Apparently, all the ruins were added in after the fact, something that I didn’t realize, so good job there, special effects team. The Stone Men, too, were memorably creepy, something Podeswa put a lot of thought into.

"The theory was they’d gone mad from their disease. But then again, we didn’t want them to be likeThe Walking Dead, or identifiable as anything that’s been done. There was discussions with choreographers and movement people to give them a certain character."

The sequence in Valyria was something else Podeswa nailed, so it seems like his strength may lie in introducing new areas. He’s directing the first two episodes of Season 6, and I wonder if those will play to his strengths. The last time we checked in with Podeswa, he was still shooting material, but now he says he’s “in the cutting room in Belfast right now, working on the editing,” which implies that he’s finished being on set. “I think season six is going to be amazing,” he said. “It’s very good story telling, every character has something interesting going on, and there are many surprises, great and terrible things are coming, with more fantastic locations and beautiful set pieces.” Let’s hope.

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