We thought we were being very clever.

We thought this was revolutionary television and we killed her main character.

And then we started Season two.

We thought, Oh, shit, we've killed our main character.

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

Baylor's Episode nine of season Warm in Game of Thrones, and this is notes on the scene scene we're showing today is comes at the end of the episode.

It's the combination of several storylines.

What we're seeing is the public confession of Ned Stark, who was lying but having committed treason inward 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 winds up being quite a major event in the series, and my approach was to therefore cover it like it was nothing.

It culminates in 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 is that we recovering dialogue in the most horrible thing in the world happens.

This is Aria Stark, one of Ned's daughters, who is just realizing that something's going on and it involves her father.

For me, the same kind of starts here.

There's a little detail where she's killed a bird because she's trying to survive on the streets, and here we see her drop the dead bird.

The bird imagery is something that carries over later.

Doing a scene like this point of view was incredibly important, and the only way we found the structure, it was to think of it.

And this is something that my DP said actually Alik Sakharov.

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

And so we followed their points of view through what to us at the time was a big scene, and the point of you begins with Aria here.

It's funny watching it now and seeing just how small and sort of rinky dink scene is because Game of Thrones is going on to be very well funded by HBO.

But this day, just a season one.

No one had seen the show yet.

We had no idea that had an audience or not, and we I didn't have a dime.

So this is the establishing shot of the scene, and I wanted to do it through the daughter's point of view.

But you'll see the shot.

We use this kind of strange.

It tilts up into the sky for no apparent reason and then tilts back down to show the real scene on the stage.

First of all, 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 SEPTA Baylor, which is this sort of dome like structure that covers the whole square that we only lost in post.

So the shot remains.

But the structure when I watch it now I see just how little money we had at the time.

But it's, I think it still packs an emotional punch.

So the scene continues from here.

Once you've established it with it's dark being brought out structure for shooting it was to connect him to his daughters.

So the only time we sort of amp up the coverage was pushing in on Aria and later on, we do the same shot on sounds.

It's the only time we do it kind of over the top.

Crane in shot.

Everything else is more standard coverage.

But the important thing was to sort of position the two daughters and watch the scene from their point of view.

So is the crane shot completes itself.

We talk down to the crowd and, you know, we couldn't afford those guys.

Uh, and Gemma Jackson didn't amazing job with what she had, but really, the entire set is consists of these banners.

I think we really argued over how many we could afford, and 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 on, and that was crazy 75 days or something, which was opposed to your usual week or two.

So at this point it was it was not out of hand.

It was not extremely.

I think the scene is strong and seen 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 conscience of the show, and we care about his daughter's thanks to wonderful writing and they're great performances.

So it comes to this moment and 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 mean, it's it's unrealistic, but we see Aria draw her sword and you know she's bad ass.

And so I think portion of the audience thinks that she's going to run up and lead a revolution and people save her father.

And we knew we were messing with expectations and structure, and so throughout the season, way shot him as though he was the hero.

And then we did this 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 and we killed our main character and then we started season two.

We thought, Oh shit, we've killed our main character and we realized there's a reason why you don't do that?

Because you depend on the audience being invested carrying through season two.

And we yanked out there one of the main reasons for being there.

But for this moment in this scene, we still are shooting.

This is the Nets.

Arc is the hero of Game of Thrones.

Carrying on net is doing the best he can.

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

But it was a foam rubber rock being tossed in his head.

Nowadays, that would be a visual effect.

And we had blood with visual fact.

And all the actors do is toss his head.

But this was the old days and with no money.

So this is a piece of foam rubber.

He tosses his head makeup artist runs in from the side and puts reading his forehead, and we continue the scene.

I'd like to cover the entire scene on actors so they aren't just here picking out little spots that they have the whole scene to play.

We have three cameras going at once, eh?

So what?

We're covering Joffrey's close up.

Probably getting sons is close up or seriously close up at the same time.

We're a three shot of them that's helpful.

Performances match across different frames, but it's just all.

So the only way to get through seemed like this.

They're also good.

We're also ready for this big scene that we probably didn't like three takes or something people, this shot's kind of funding to jazz things up a little bit.

Sweeping around Arias, she reacts to the crowd around her, starts to AMP things up from what has been standard coverage until now.

Joffrey calls for Ned Stark's head and summons Circle in Pain, Who is Ah, played by Wilko, 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 in great faces of cinema.

I'm a huge fan of Ed Sheeran.

My son's a huge fan of nature, and we went to see him.

But when you turned up on the show, fan reaction was not so positive, which is odd.

Not sure why, but here it all started with Wilco, that great name and that great face circle in pain and perversely, he's using at Stark's own sword, which was really heavy.

He didn't 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 way, see, Ned Stark chopped off the head of Ah, a guy who's been accused of fleeing the night's watch.

And he has a beautiful line with a sign saying, The man who passes the sentence, Swing the sword, Justin Insight into Ed's integrity and taking responsibility.

And so perversely, it's that sword that's being used.

Thio dispatch him today.

Of all the things we did, one thing I'm most happy with is how we handled sound.

In this stretch.

It sounds the crowd dropout and a few things going on.

We lose this ambient sound.

The crowd.

We go to Ned's subjective experience.

We hear his breathing.

It takes us into his head and thats of extreme frame of mind.

You get into when something terrible is about to happen.

There's also a quality to this shot, which is hyper real.

There's something about the lighting and focus on him.

It is uncanny and It's that way for a reason, because from this point on, we're using layering of elements.

The background plate of the architecture was married to a shot of Sean being 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.

And so he's got that sort of slight moment of redemption at the end, Just looking at Beautiful and Sean Bean's beautiful performance and what he's capturing his eyes as he gets ready to leave this world and leave his daughters.

It still gets to me me because I have two daughters.

Sean is doing amazing performance on stage in Belfast.

Everything else in the frame is shot in Malta, including circle in pain and the swinging sword ice he's basically swinging through through the air, and we're marrying that.

We had a dummy, a body dummy that stopped at the neck, and he's swinging his blade in front of that.

Shawn's head was shot in Belfast.

His performance was shot in Belfast, and we did 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 the head seeming to roll forward so we could have dropped the head like a watermelon, and it was decided that was just one step too horrible.

So this is all Malta.

This is Belle, I just If you frame through very slowly, you'll see the sword actually passes through his neck.

So there's the blade has just passed through his head on the kind of impossible way, because we shot these different elements.

We commit to it.

We see the blade actually passed through.

But we don't stick around for the follows.

The moment his death that stops abruptly and we transferred to his daughter Arias breathing.

And it's the last time we hear in the episode is her breathing on the edge of tears, and we hear the flutter of wings, which is a practical thing, cause there's birds there, but also a kind of transcended thing.

It's her breathing and her gaze up at the sky and the sound of the wings and sound of her breathing that ends.

The Ned Stark is no more.

She will be a major character going forward.

We end the episode with her breathing in her sort of desperation.

She just looks up to the heavens on Dhe.

She sees lock of birds going overhead, and it's a scene that started with her murdering a bird.

And it ends with the birds or live and her father's gone.

The wave of reaction none of us saw coming, and especially for me, seeing this one in seeing online people react to the death of this guy and the demographic covered every ethnicity.

Every economic category had really invested in that stark and saw him.

Is there there a guy?

So it was that was amazing and beautiful.