Game of Thrones director is “scared about what [Daenerys is] going to do next!”

David Nutter directed three of the final six episodes of Game of Thrones, half of the last season. “It was the best year of my life,” he told Deadline. “It was a great way to come back and do the show. It was a wonderful challenge and something that, after being away from the show for as long as I had been, I missed it so much. I missed everyone I worked with so much. I missed the family. It’s something that …it was just the greatest experience of all time.”

Nutter is a specialist when it comes to getting the best from actors, as you can see on display in laid-back episodes like “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” or the first hour or so of the most recent “The Last of the Starks.”

"The one thing I told the actors before the season started, after being away from the series for two years, is realize that the audience just wants to watch and see their characters breathe. They love them so much. So it was a situation where there was a relaxation to that. That you don’t have to, like, put on any false airs or whatever. There’s a natural volley to that, which is important, and also, I’m a big believer in excessive blocking in rehearsal…I’m also a big believer in getting as much coverage as possible so that you can actually give each of the characters their due. So much of the time when you’re shooting stuff, you don’t get a chance to kind of get an angle here or an angle there that could help make the audience closer to a character or allow the characters to be closer affiliated with each other."

Still, all the blocking in the world didn’t help anyone catch the coffee cup on set in the most recent episode. What about the coffee cup, David? WHAT ABOUT THE COFFEE CUP? “Well, I think that HBO I’m sure will come up with a response to that more appropriate than anything I can throw at you.” And indeed they did.

Nutter prioritized capturing little moments between the characters during Sunday’s feast scene, as when Daenerys makes Gendry lord of Storm’s End. “Then you see how Davos and Jon react to that, how Sansa responds, and then of course you get into Sansa being jealous of Dany and Dany getting a sense of Jon being taken as this madman who rides dragons and kills people and she is being left out in some respects,” he told Variety. “Dany realizes that Jorah is gone and her Hand, Tyrion, is over laughing it up with Jamie Lannister, her sworn enemy. It’s really a feeling of her being quite alone. I called it an ‘epic emotional episode,’ because people were dealing with these emotions on quite an epic scale.”

"Her determination becomes more crystal clear. When she’s talking to Varys in the Dragonstone map room, she was so calm and cool and collected like she’s almost figured it out. She mentions ‘Do you believe we’re all here for a reason? This is my reason.’ There was a calmness in that I thought was important. But then when you see her in Jon Snow’s room, she kind of loses it in the sense that she’s trying keep him from spreading his secret around. What was most amazing to me was Emilia’s performance at the end of the episode in which her face almost morphs and you see this hate that I’ve never seen from this character before. You see this determination of what’s to come and it’s really quite frightening."

Indeed, Daenerys has put through the ringer in the past couple episodes. I think we’re all nervous about where her character is going. Kudos to Clarke for taking us there.

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Nutter has worked closely with a lot of the other actors, as well. “When I first started on the show, Rory McCann, who plays the Hound, was someone who had a lot of promise,” Nutter told The New York Times. “He was fantastic, but he had some issues with his performance. He hadn’t done a whole lot of acting. So I basically sat down with him, sat down across the table from him, and we read through a couple of sequences together. Ten minutes later, I looked at him and I said, ‘O.K., here’s the deal. Stop acting. Just say the words like Clint Eastwood would say them.’ Once he started to do that, at that point, it was basically all done.”

"Sometimes, when actors reach out to their characters, they’re nowhere in sight. They need to find something inside of them. And then the characters are right there. As a director, I want them to find the character that’s already inside them, instead of trying to manufacture or manipulate or make something up. That’s not really honest or true."

Oftentimes, it’s about getting performances out of actors they didn’t think they had in them. Nutter will occasionally have actors say a line that’s not in the script (and doesn’t appear in the episode) to get to the emotion of a scene. Something like that happened while filming the scene where Jaime leaves Brienne in “The Last of the Starks”:

"I told Nikolaj [Coster-Waldau] that when Jaime is telling Brienne about how everything he’s done, he’s done for Cersei. And as he was saying his lines, we went into Brienne’s close-up, Gwendoline Christie’s close-up, and there was a moment where she is just watching him, at the very end. And I walked over to Nikolaj and I said, “The last thing I want you to tell her is that you don’t love her anymore.” And of course, he was essentially saying this to her anyway, in some respect, but she didn’t expect to hear it directly. Gwendoline didn’t expect that moment, and she just lost it. It was something very special. Sometimes surprising an actor in a good way like that can actually create a response you’re not expecting. And with those two, they’re very close as well, so I knew something like that would affect her character as well."

Actors have strange jobs.

Nutter also addressed something a lot of fans brought up about “The Last of the Starks”: Why didn’t Jon pet Ghost on his way out of Winterfell? Was it, as The New York Times asked, “a CGI issue?”

"Very much so. It’s all about how to balance that all out, and making sure it’s done properly, and reminding you of the characters and what’s at stake and what’s happening at any particular moment. Jon saying goodbye to the direwolf was so very powerful and rich because of the actors. They’ve spent many years doing this, and it’s the culmination of their characters in some respects, so it’s manipulating how much you want to give them. All that kind of stuff, we play with. It’s about finding the best idea and being able to rally around whatever that idea is."

I could have used elaboration on the “very much so,” but the rest is good to know, too. And god, how much must CGI giant wolves cost?

So let’s get down to brass tacks: Can Nutter talk about how the show ends? “I think [showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff] did a tremendous job in writing it, and I think the audience will be appreciative of the hard work went into making these eight seasons in the series,” Nutter non-answered. “It will not stop until the final beat of the show.”

"I’ll say that surprises are plenty in all of Dave and Dan’s episodes and all the stuff that they do. That’s a given, but I think it’s quite powerful how they end the show, and it’s fantastic."

Finally, Nutter reflected on what working on the show has meant to him. “I learned that when you work for the very best, you have to bring your very best,” he said. “This series, and the caliber and quality of the work that I’ve done and being able to be a part of is the epitome of my career. The caliber of people that I’ve worked with, there’ll never be another Game of Thrones crew, and it’s a situation in which I feel truly is the cornerstone of my career. This is it.”

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