Game of Thrones director Jack Bender teases Season 6, moving beyond the books

Jack Bender, the prolific director arguably most famous for helming a huge number of Lost episodes, has been making his presence felt among Game of Thrones fans since signing on to direct two episodes of the show’s sixth season. He caused a minor stir when he hinted that he may have gotten to read an advance copy of George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter, although that ended up being a miscommunication. More recently, he sat down with sat down with BGR and dropped some hints about how he and his fellow Thrones directors will go about building the next year of the show.

First of all, Bender revealed that he’d read most of the scripts for the Season 6 episodes, including the ones that he’s going to shoot (5 and 6). Unless this is another miscommunication, this means that the scripts for Season 6 are already written. Until very recently, it was still thought that, at best, an outline had been made, but Season 6 does start production fairly soon—I suppose they’ll need scripts to shoot.

Season 6 will be the first season of the show that will be well and truly made up of material that has yet to appear in Martin’s books. While executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss have gotten more and more comfortable going their own way as the show has progressed, Bender did remind BGR that the two of them still “communicate closely” with Martin, so the odds are good that we’re going to get a sneak peak into material The Winds of Winter and maybe even A Dream of Spring come next year.

How will Bender handle all the new material? With cooking metaphors.

"This is how I look at it. As a director on Lost, for example, I liked to say we get recipes from (Lost showrunners) Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Then, me and the writers and the rest of the team, we’d cook the meal."

If Bender approaches Game of Thrones like this, it implies that he’ll exert a good deal of directorial control—the best food happens when you add your own little quirks to a recipe, after all. This makes sense on a show as logistically complicated and visually intricate as Game of Thrones. The director will need to have his hand in it, and we’re lucky that Bender has a long history of directing a wide variety of complex stories. (In addition to Lost, he’s also worked on The Sopranos, Carnivàle, Under the Dome, and much more—the guy’s been around.) He’ll employ his experience and professionalism during the many months he’ll spend working on his episodes, day by day.

"Right now, every day you just get up and do the best you can. It’s like building a pyramid, one block at a time."

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