When I started as a filmmaker, I never, ever imagined in a million years that I would be doing television because, at that time, TV was a very different medium.
We tend to rush through life, generally. We don't appreciate the people around us, the relationships we have, or anything.
In 'Queer as Folk,' we had three or four sex scenes in every episode, so I got used to doing that very early on. Those kinds of scenes can be challenging. They take a bit of time, and everyone's a bit nervous.
Cersei is a character who's done unspeakable things, and yet we also know that she's a mother who's lost her children - that she's been pushed to the end of her tether.
If you have children and you hear about a child being kidnapped, it makes you really appreciate your own children. It makes you want to spend time with them. But I think anything that shakes you out of your daily patterns in a good thing.
When any character gets killed, there's always a sadness about that, because they're part of the family in a way.
Whatever we try - to be rich, to be happy - death is unavoidable. It doesn't matter how much money you have; it doesn't matter how much love you have. At the end of the day, it's all heading that way.
Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.
Aidan Gillen is such a great actor, and it was so nice to have an opportunity to work with him, even if it's his last scene, because he had a tone that he'd never had before on the show.
Usually, historically, nothing good comes out of relationships becoming more complicated!
There's certain things that people hold as truth but that are not always necessarily true.
In general, I don't really think too much about pacing, myself. You kind of look at each script and what each script demands.
Even though you're filming something and it's all scripted, there's still a sense of ritual about it because you're filming a ritual. It has all these little details that you want to capture, and a very specific mood and tone.
As much as people were asking me and everybody else on the show constantly if Jon Snow is alive or dead, I think, really, in their heart of hearts, they didn't actually want to know. For us, it felt very important to maintain that secrecy for the fans, and we worked very hard to make sure that worked out.
Horrific things should be presented as horrific.
I'm very attracted to schematic structures. My brother is a chemical engineer, he has a very mathematical mind, and he's also a visual artist. I think we have a lot in common. And my first film had a very tight structure, narratively.
While I was thinking about the next film to do, I was also reading this book by Diane Ackerman called 'The Natural History of the Senses' - an anthropological and sociological look at the senses. But it also has this great sense of enthusiasm.
When doing a fantasy show - or a show with fantasy elements - the more you can anchor an effect to reality, the stronger the illusion is.
What I have learned from working on those great shows is what is the DNA that makes them so deeply involving and interesting for an audience over a long period of time. So much has to do with character, complexity, and sophistication.
You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.
