Alex Graves Quotations

When you finish writing the scripts they have time to take a breath and think about everything. There's just a little more time to think. Network does not allow for that.

The whole mythology of Westeros begins with the struggle between the Children of the Forest and different warring factions before the first men arrive.

Well my motto was "Never Monologue a Clegane", because Beric Dondarrion and Thoros were messing around with The Hound and Beric essentially got killed, even though he got to come back, and then the monologue is just a foolish thing to do. But it's also psychological state of mind, he can't get over his sister.

And one of the things that's interesting about how they're doing the show is that the audience almost knows more than the characters do in some of these scenes, and the extent of that is unique. So it's grown into a different show in a way. It's sort of grown into a different experience watching it.

Because if you remember - and people forget this - the first two years of Game of Thrones everybody was going, "I don't know what's going on, but I really like it." And you really didn't know what to make of a lot of people, and now it's changed and people aren't really talking about that. Now it's like you're watching West Wing or Friends, you know the characters and you're like, "What in the world is going to happen?"

You can certainly shorten things and tighten things, we tightened up Jon's walk to Mance Rayder's tent. That was something that got tightened up a little bit because I had shot the hell out of that.

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.'

There weren't any deleted scenes, it was just a matter of tightening stuff. I didn't have any deleted scenes in what I did as far as I know. 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."

Obviously the highest pressure scene, I guess it might've been a tie - what was the bigger death, Tyrion with Shae, Tyrion wth Twyin, and then Joffrey were all scenes where I wanted to deliver what was in the script married to what fans will be expecting, and it was a lot of pressure and I'm really glad it's over.