Game of Thrones director still dragging final season: “It was really rushed”

Sometimes a sound bit gets stuck in your mouth and it’s hard to spit it out. Such is the case with Neil Marshall, the director behind two of the biggest action episodes on Game of Thrones: season 2’s Blackwater and season 4’s The Watchers on the Walls. About a week back, he made a comment about he thought the show finished in “a bit of a rush,” and he’s been asked about it ever since, easing up on his take and now, putting the pedal to the metal.

Marshall returned the subject of Game of Thrones season 8 while speaking to Metro. “It’s very difficult to second guess [showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] because they are geniuses and they have done such an amazing job,’ he started, tenderizing the meat. “Inevitably, I would’ve taken a different approach to directing. One of the greatest experiences I had with working on both those episodes was that they were so open to bringing my ideas, particularly about battle scenes and how battles worked. I would’ve definitely added my strategy and knowledge to that.”

"I kind of agree with a lot of the criticism that it was really rushed. Everyone ended up where they were meant to end up but they got there in a little bit of a rush in the end."

Although most of the current cast and crew members have defended the final season of the show against its attackers, Marshall isn’t the only former team member who didn’t enjoy it. “I just didn’t understand,” Natalia Tena, who played the wildling Osha, said a couple months back. “The calibre of writing towards the end and the plots and everything that happens and how they wrapped it up compared to any other season, any other bit, it just feels like it’s been written by different people. It doesn’t make sense, for me.”

Honestly, at this point, I feel like the reactions to the final season have pretty well crystalized: while there were plenty of fans who enjoyed it, lots had issues of the kind that Marshall points out: that even if the plot developments themselves were interesting, they weren’t executed particularly well. Now I’m just waiting for the retrospective when people closer to the top, like Benioff and Weiss, reconsider their work once they’ve gotten some distance.

Incidentally, Marshall is giving interviews in the first place to promote his work on Kraken Screamfest: Director’s Cut, an immersive horror experience that will go up in London for Halloween. But good luck to him finding someone to lead with that now that his Game of Thrones comments are in the air.

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