Game of Thrones’ Director Breaks Down Ned Stark’s Final Scene

It is funny that we were

very proud of ourselves for doing this,

we thought we were being very clever.

We thought this was revolutionary television.

And we killed our main character.

Then we started season two, we thought,

Oh shit, we've killed our main character.

[bells tolling]

Hi, I'm Alan Taylor, director of this episode, Baelor.

It's episode nine of season one of Game of Thrones.

This is Notes on a Scene.

The scene we're showing today

comes at the end of the episode.

It's the combination of several story lines.

What we're seeing is the public confession of Ned Stark,

who is lying about having committed treason

in order to buy off his freedom

and the safety of his daughters.

And it doesn't go as he intends.

If you want more back story, you can google it.

It winds up being quite a major event in the series,

and my approach was to, therefore,

cover it like it was nothing.

It culminates into something terrible

that's about to happen.

I'm sure none of you know about that yet.

Made a very conscious choice not to amp it up,

not to do sensational shots,

but just to shoot it as though we were covering dialogue,

and the most horrible thing in the world happens.

This is Arya Stark,

the one of Ned's daughters who is just realizing that

something's going on and it involves her father.

For me, the scene kinda starts here.

There's a little detail where she's killed a bird

because she's trying to survive on the streets.

Here, we see her drop the dead bird.

The bird imagery is something that carries over to later.

Doing a scene like this, point-of-view,

is incredibly important.

And the only way we found a structure

at which to think of it.

This is something my DP said actually, Alik Sakharov,

that it's really a story about a father and two daughters.

So we followed their points of view through what,

to us at the time, was a big scene.

And the point of view begins with Arya here.

It's funny watching it now and seeing just how small

and sort of rinky-dink the scene is

because Game of Thrones has

gone on to be very well-funded by HBO.

But at this stage, this was season one,

no one had seen the show yet.

We had no idea if it had an audience or not

and we didn't have a dime.

So, this is the establishing shot of the scene.

I wanted to do it through the daughter's point of view,

but you'll see the shot we used is kind of strange.

It tilts up into the sky for no apparent reason

and then tilts back down to show

the real scene and the stage.

First of all, [laughing]

it's charming by Game of Thrones standards now,

because we have not nearly enough extras here.

The most telling thing is

that shot was designed to show us

the awesome architecture of the Sept of Baelor,

which is this sort of dome-like structure

that covers the whole square that we only lost in post.

So the shot remains, but not the structure.

When I watch it now,

I see just how little money we had at the time,

but I think it still packs an emotional punch.

The scene continues from here

once you established it with Ned Stark being brought out.

The structure for shooting it

was to connect him to his daughters.

So, the only time we amp up the coverage

was pushing in on Arya.

And later on, we do the same shot on Sansa.

That's the only time we do a

kind of over-the-top crane in shot.

Everything else is more standard coverage.

The important thing was to position the two daughters

and watch the scene from their point of view.

So as the crane shot completes itself,

we tilt down to the crowd.

We couldn't afford those guys.

[laughing]

Gemma Jackson did an amazing job with what she had,

but really, the entire set consists of these banners.

I think we probably argued over how many we could afford.

She built the stage that we're on.

Everything else is architecture from Malta.

I think we probably shot this in two days.

It only became crazy in later episodes.

Last episode I did was

the frozen lake battle in the last season.

That was crazy, 75 days or something,

which is opposed to your usual week or two.

At this point, it was not out of hand, it was not extreme.

I think this scene is strong, and this scene works,

but it's almost entirely because of what came before.

That we care deeply about this guy,

we think he's the star of the show.

We know he's the moral conscious of the show.

We care about his daughters thanks to wonderful writing

and their great performances.

So, it comes to this moment.

All the work's been done already,

the audience really cares about these people.

We did little things to make it seem like he might be saved.

I think it's unrealistic.

But we see Arya draw her sword, and we know she's badass.

So I think, of course, now the audience thinks

that she's gonna run up and

beat a revolution and save her father.

We knew we were messing with expectations and structure.

Throughout the season,

we shot him as though he was the hero,

and then we did this sort of perverse thing in episode nine.

It is funny that we were

very proud of ourselves for doing this.

We thought we were being very clever.

We thought this was revolutionary television.

We killed our main character.

Then we started season two, and we thought,

Oh shit, we've killed our main character.

We realized, Oh, there's a reason why you don't do that.

Because you depend on the audience

being invested and caring through to season two.

And we yanked out one of their main reasons

for being there.

But for this moment in this scene,

we still are shooting this as though Ned Stark

is the hero of Game of Thrones.

Carrying on, Ned is doing the best we can.

We couldn't afford visual effects, so that was a real rock,

but it was a foam rubber rock being tossed at his head.

Nowadays, that would be a visual effect.

We'd add blood to the visual effect,

and all the actor have to do is toss his head.

But this was the old days with no money,

so this is a piece of foam rubber.

He tosses his head,

the make up artist runs in from the side,

and puts red on his forehead,

and we continue the scene.

I'd like to cover the entire scene on actors,

so that they aren't just repeating out little spots,

so they have the whole scene to play.

We have three cameras going at once.

While we're covering Joffrey's closeup,

we're probably getting Sansa's close up,

or Cersei's closeup at the same, or a three shot of them.

That's helpful because

the performances match across different frames,

but it's also the only way to get through a scene like this.

They're all so good,

and we're all so ready for this big scene.

We probably did it in

three takes or something of the people.

This shot's kind of funny.

It sort of jazzes things up a little bit by sweeping around

Arya as she reacts to the crowd around her.

It starts to amp things up from

what has been standard coverage up until now.

Joffrey calls for Ned Stark's head

and he summons Ser Ilyn Payne

who is played by Wilco, a famous rock and roller.

He was in a band called Dr. Feelgood

and he has one of the great faces of rock and roll

and great faces of cinema.

I'm a huge fan of Ed Sheeran,

my son's a huge fan of Ed Sheeran, we went to see him.

But when he turned up on the show,

fan reaction was not so positive, which is odd.

I'm not sure why.

But here, it all started with Wilco,

that great name and that great face.

Ser Ilyn Payne.

Perversely, he's using Ned Stark's own sword,

which was really heavy.

We didn't have to have that many takes

that he could pick it up and swing it.

All of our weapons were built by our armors for the show.

I mean, all the ones that are featured.

This sword has a history.

Because in the pilot,

we see Ned Stark chop off the head of a guy

who's been accused of fleeing the Night's Watch.

He has a beautiful line with his son saying,

The man who passes the sentence, should swing the sword.

Which is an insight into

Ned's integrity in taking responsibility.

So perversely, it's that sword

that's being used to dispatch him today.

Of all the things we did,

one of the things I'm most happy with

is how we handled sound in this stretch.

The sounds of the crowd drop out,

and a few things are going on.

We lose this ambience sound of the crowd.

We go to Ned's subjective experience,

we hear his breathing.

It takes us into his head

and into that extreme frame of mind you get into

when something terrible is about to happen.

There's also a quality to this shot which his hyper-real.

There's something about the

lighting and the focus on him that is uncanny.

And it's that way for a reason because from this point on,

we're using a layering of elements.

The background plate of the architecture

was married to a shot of Sean Bean,

who was shot on stage under controlled circumstances

so that we could chop his head off.

This shot, and it's become the most important shot for me.

I didn't mean to use it this way,

but the last thing we see Ned Stark look at

is the absence of his daughter so he knows he saved her.

She's been taken away.

She won't be captured, she won't be watching him die.

So, he's got that slight moment of redemption at the end.

Looking at beautiful Sean Bean's beautiful performance

and what he's capturing in his eyes as he gets ready to

leave this world and leave his daughters.

It still gets to me.

Maybe because I have two daughters.

Sean is doing an amazing performance onstage in Belfast.

Everything else in the frame is shot in Malta,

including Ser Ilyn Payne and the swinging sword, Ice.

He's basically swinging through the air

and we're marrying that.

We had a body dummy that stopped at the neck

and he's swinging his blade in front of that.

Sean's head was shot in Belfast,

his performance was shot in Belfast.

We did it in such a way that the camera was on Ned,

and in the moment of his death,

the camera boomed up very quickly

which gave the effect of a head seeming to roll forward.

So, we could have dropped the head like a watermelon,

and it was decided that was one step too horrible.

[laughing]

This is all Malta.

This is Belfast.

If you frame through very slowly,

you'll see the sword actually passes through his neck.

There's the blade,

it's just passed through his head

in kind of an impossible way

cause we shot these as different elements.

We commit to it.

We see the blade actually pass through

but we don't stick around for what follows.

In the moment of his death,

that stops abruptly

and we transfer to his daughter, Arya's, breathing.

And it's the last sound we hear in the episode

is her breathing on the edge of tears.

We hear the flutter of wings

which is a practical thing because there's birds there

but also a transcendent thing.

It's her breathing and her gaze up to the sky

and the sound of the wings and

the sound of her breathing that ends the episode.

Ned Stark is no more.

She will be a major character going forward.

We end the episode with her breathing.

In her desperation, she just looks up to the heavens

and she sees a flock of birds going overhead.

It's a scene that started with the murdering a bird,

and it ends with the birds are alive and her father is gone.

The wave of reaction none of us saw coming,

and especially for me seeing this one

and seeing online people react to the death of this guy.

The demographics it covered, every ethnicity,

every economic category had really invested

in Ned Stark and saw him as their guide.

So, that was amazing and beautiful.