'Game of Thrones' was the first fantasy thing I've done, and like a lot of people who enjoy the show watching it, I didn't expect to respond to that world, but when I started doing it, I really started to love it, started to realize that some of the things I'm naturally drawn to.
'Game of Thrones' is shot on a very similar kind of schedule to a TV show, but there's a lot more time and focus put into the script.
You pull anyone from an alien planet down to Earth, and you want to show them great work, show them Tywin Lannister on 'Game of Thrones.' I mean, it's just as good as it gets.
For 'Game of Thrones,' I realized immediately that it was about the characters.
There's always the pressure on the director of how to transition from one scene to another, especially when it can really be oblique on 'Game of Thrones.'
'Game of Thrones' is the broadest of narratives. I don't know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what's on the show.
It's very unusual on 'Game of Thrones' for there to be a deleted scene because the scripts are pretty locked in. There's rarely a reason to say, 'Hey, we don't need this scene.'
It's funny because 'West Wing' is similar to 'Game of Thrones' in some ways, as it was very hard to pull off back then.
No director directs 'Game of Thrones' without reading all the episodes and knowing what's going on. All the episodes are written in advance, so you can do that, which is an important point.
I was really, really stagnating and getting bored in the steady work of television and didn't really know what movies I would be making that Hollywood would be making, and then I went on to 'Game of Thrones,' and it was just like, everything I've been waiting to do was handed to me by really nice people.
