‘Game Of Thrones’: Director David Nutter On Approaching Show’s Season 5 Finale

Director David Nutter (left); scenes from the ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 5 finale (right) (HBO)

After a season away, director David Nutter returned to the “Game of Thrones” fold for the final two episodes of Season 5.

Last time he went behind the lens for the HBO drama, Nutter helped craft the show’s most heartbreaking and devastating episode – the Red Wedding – and its follow up — “Mhysa” — an episode that, for Daenerys Targaryen at least, ended on an uplifting note.

When Access Hollywood caught up with the director this week, we asked him how the final two episodes of Season 5, compared to his last “GoT” run.

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“This show has ramped up dramatically every season and every episode that they’ve done. David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] are so brilliant at being able to charter these stories in a way that when I read 510, it was jaw-dropping on a story perspective to me, and it was also jaw-dropping saying to myself, ‘How in God’s name am I going to be able to do all this?” Nutter told Access Hollywood.

Nutter promised that Sunday’s finale, “Mother’s Mercy,” “is not simply a denouement of Episode 9.”

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“This [finale] will have, of course, a lot of aftermath, effect, of Episode 509, but there will be a lot of new territory and uncharted territory that will be brought forth in Episode 510 that’ll be amazingly profound, completely surprising and utterly involving, I think, for the audience,” he said.

The director (known for his powerful, tone-setting work on pilots, including last season’s brilliant “The Flash,” 2012’s “Arrow,” and Lena Headey’s former Fox show, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”) told us he actually approaches scripts – like 510 – by borrowing a method used by the legendary Stanley Kubrick.

“I follow the path of the great director Stanley Kubrick where Stanley Kubrick basically, whenever he read a book, after every chapter, he would actually sit down and write down his first impression because he knew that he would never have that again, and that’s the only thing an audience of a film ever [has] is a first impression. So to me, it’s so very important for me to address my first impression because what I remember, address and solidify and then set in stone — my first impression reaction from the script — then I can hopefully be better there to interpret for an audience the important stuff, because it’s easy to get caught up, especially in so much detail, especially in so [many] things that are so amazingly thought provoking that you can kind of not see the forest through the trees and get caught up in the minutiae and forget about the important stuff, forget about the big picture stuff, forget about the stuff that really does matter,” Nutter told Access.

Nutter couldn’t dish on details about the “Thrones” Season 5 closer, so Access instead asked him what emotions he felt reading the script.

“Every emotion that you can have, I would actually have, of course. And then, of course, the minute I closed the script, the biggest emotion of all — fear — came into play, because it’s basically, you know I take this stuff so personally and I don’t know how to do it any other way than that,” he said. “It’s such a priority of mine and such a proprietary thing that I feel that it’s — I put the weight on my shoulders and on my back and I have to carry it until I get a chance to see I it through, so it’s something that I really take very, very seriously.”

Pod and Brienne and Margaery and Loras are among the characters who have been missing from the realm of the show in recent episodes, and Access asked the director if they would be return in the finale.

“You will catch up with some characters that you had not seen in a while and that’ll definitely come to fore. I won’t tell you who, but…. you won’t feel like you’re missing anything at the end of this episode,” he said.

The “Game of Thrones” Season 5 finale airs Sunday, starting at 9 PM ET/PT on HBO.

— Jolie Lash