Jeremy Podeswa discusses a deleted Brienne/Tormund scene from “Dragonstone”

“Dragonstone” brought Game Of Thrones back into our lives, and one of the men responsible for its smashing success is veteran television director Jeremey Podeswa. Now free of spoiler embargoes, Podeswa has made the rounds and discussed several key aspects of directing the episode.

First up, Podeswa spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about that Ed Sheeran cameo everyone seems to be talking about.

"The only thing he asked is if he could change the key of the song he was singing, and he asked it very tentatively. (Laughs.) He wanted to do a good job and was very concerned about that. He hung out with everybody on set all day, with all of the other guys sitting around the campfire. He was a team player."

Considering everything that happened in the episode, it’s odd that Sheeran’s brief appearance caused such a stir, but there’s no predicting the internet.

One of those events was the cold open where Arya Stark massacred House Frey,

"When you’re directing it, you hope that moment happens in an interesting way that gives the audience pleasure. Maisie’s performance at the end and says what she says to Walder’s wife … I had chills when we shot it and I hoped I would have chills when we cut it, and I did. I knew it was a great scene from the moment we shot it, really."

The hits didn’t stop there. Podeswa also discussed that slow shot of the army of the dead, which was an idea of showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. “We knew it would be one shot,” he said. “Nothing fancy in terms of camerawork. But it’s a shot that very slowly reveals itself over time, and we take that time.” But as carefully planned as it was, Podeswa doesn’t think the idea to end on a close-up of a giant’s eye was in the script. Kudos to whoever came up with that.

On shooting Samwell Tarly’s

epic

disgusting

memorable Citadel montage, Podeswa thinks Benioff and Weiss chose him to shoot it because of his previous experience shooting Arya’s corpse-washing montage back when she was working at the House of Black and White.

"I love doing [the Sam montage], generally. It’s something where you go into the cutting room with an idea of what it might be, and then it’s really finessed and made manifest for real in the cutting room. It was very complex both tonally and practically because there were so many different sets and component pieces. Many of these sets only appear really for this montage: the mess hall, the infirmary, the privy, the washing room … so many different elements that had to be built."

Much as he enjoyed making it, Podeswa did describe Sam’s montage as “uncharacteristic for the show, but one that was very satisfying to play with and try.” The quick cuts indeed a change of pace, but new isn’t always bad.

One final note on the Sam scene: apparently, the first cut of it was around “seven or eight minutes.” So somewhere out there, there’s a seven-eight minute montage of Sam cleaning up human waste. How scary would that be as a Blu-ray extra?

“Dragonstone” ended with Daenerys Targaryen returning to the titular island fortress, which received a bit of an upgrade from back when Stannis was occupying it. “It was a very big sequence and very exciting to shoot — every single aspect of it, cinematographically, was amazing,” Podeswa said. “There was so much to work with on location and in those fabulous sets. Creating this new geography was a very big challenge, but a good one.

Moving on, Podeswa revealed to Insider that Brienne and Tormund’s exchange in the Winterfell courtyard was initially a bit longer, as the pair were “ad-libbing a bunch of conversations.”

"There is one thing that they scripted and they riffed on that, which is Tormund says something about his relationship with Sheila the Bear. And nobody knows what that means or what that’s all about, so that’s meant to make Brienne look at him askance. He’s either trying to shock her or he’s just oblivious that he’s saying something that’s crazy."

Sheila, for those who don’t recall, is a bear Tormund claims to have had carnal knowledge of. Ygritte, for one, didn’t believe it.

Anyway, would that we have seen this bit! That’s probably what Tormund and Brienne were talking about when Sansa is looking down on them from the ramparts.

Now that’s a Blu-ray extra I’ll look forward to.

Next: Game of Thrones Screencap Breakdown: “Dragonstone”

Finally, talking to Newsweek, Podeswa poured cold water on a theory about a line that was cut from the scene where the Hound stares into the fire. “It’s where the Wall meets the sea,” the Hound says. “There’s a castle there.” In HBO’s official recap, there’s an additional line. “The waves are frozen.” Was this line cut from the episode to avoid giving fans a hint about the White Walkers possibly circumventing the Wall by walking on the frozen sea around it?

“No, nothing was cut,” Podeswa said. “That was exactly how it was written.” Oh.

"I’m pretty sure in this episode everything we shot is in there, which isn’t always the case. There’s some things that we re-ordered a little bit from the original script, and some things have been trimmed, but substantially it’s all there."

So where did HBO pull the “waves are frozen” line? Maybe it was from an earlier draft of the script, but in any case, it looks like we can step reading into it.