Last season was Jeremy Podeswa’s first chance at directing Game of Thrones since having to drop out in Season 3 due to a family emergency. Unfortunately, his first impression did not leave a good taste in viewer’s mouths. Episode 6, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” was considered the worst of the season by many viewers, for a myriad of reasons, from the Dornish fizzling badly to the controversial decision to have Sansa marry Ramsay Bolton (in the books, Sansa never gets anywhere near him—this was a streamlining of plots) and depict him raping her on their wedding night.
Podeswa avoided giving opinions about the controversy, and when asked, would find ways to sidestep it. But with Season 6 now finished filming, he admitted that the reactions did affect the show this coming season. Speaking at breakfast held by Fox Studios Australia, he said “It is important that (the producers) not self-censor. The show depicts a brutal world where horrible things happen. They did not want to be too overly influenced by that (criticism) but they did absorb and take it in and it did influence them in a way.”
“It was a difficult and brutal scene and we knew it was going to be challenging for the audience. But it was very important to us in the execution that it would not be exploited in any way. To be fair, the criticism was the notion of it, not the execution. It was handled as sensitively as it could possibly be; you hardly see anything.”
Podeswa also said that David Benioff and Dan Weiss “were responsive to the discussion and there were a couple of things that changed as a result.”
The director also gave away a very minor spoiler in discussing his locations this season: “This year we had one day in Croatia, then Spain and Northern Ireland.” That day of filming in Croatia, after the show insisted it wasn’t returning there this year, took everyone by surprise, and the scene, which includes Cersei and the Mountain, and certainly looked to be one that happened early in the season, can now be confirmed as happening in either the first or second episode, which are the ones Podeswa directed. His remark that “then Spain” would suggest that he filmed scenes in Almeria, which was the Spanish location that began filming immediately after that day in Croatia.
As for being responsible for the premiere episode, Podeswa says that the show worked hard for the opening not to follow the usual pattern of resetting the stage for events to come later down the line. “Doing the first episode of a new season is always a bit tricky because they tend to lay down a lot of tracks for the season and check on where the characters are now. They’re not usually the most dynamic episodes. Happily for me this year the producers tried to work against that. The season gets off to an amazing start, stuff of consequence happens and the first two episodes are really strong.”
That certainly jives with what everyone else has said about the coming season. Whatever it is that happens, it sounds like we should be prepared for the show to start with a bang.