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.'

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.

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.'

Especially as a director on 'West Wing,' I directed a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and really stretched my wings.

For 'Game of Thrones,' I realized immediately that it was about the characters.

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.