This post contains spoilers for “Game of Thrones” season 6. Read at your own risk.  Mark Mylod had a tough task ahead of him when he signed on to direct two episodes of “Game of Thrones” this season. It wasn’t his first stintÂ working on the show — he directed two episodes in season 5 — but this time he had to oversee the Hound‘s (Rory McCann) big comeback and the likely end of Arya Stark‘s (Maisie Williams) story line in Braavos, all while setting up the blockbuster final two episodes of the season.  That’s another way of saying that Mylod’s episodes this year were crammed to the rafters with important detail and development, fromÂ how the director staged a daring chase through the streets of Braavos to how he oversaw the Mountain decapitating a man with his bare hands in the Red Keep in King’s Landing.  Mylod talked about how he did much of it in an interview with Speakeasy. An edited excerpt follows.  You had the Hound’s big comeback. How did you help Rory McCann get back in the swing of things?  I taught him everything he needed to know about how to swing an ax. That is a total lie. He is the best axman. He’s actually a qualified forester and can swing an ax like you couldn’t believe. In terms of getting back into the character, probably the best direction I gave to Rory over the [two]Â episodes was, “Hey, Rory, remember you’ve got a limp!” And that was about it. The guy knows the character so damn well. There’ll be a lot of conversations about levels of humanity in the character, and restraint in how much we wanted to show that. He’s one of my favorite characters because of that deeply buried sense of humanity the character has. … We know it’s in there, that little flickering flame of humanity in the character. We rarely see it. We also know he’s an absolute butcher and a child killer. He’s a fascinating contradiction, but Rory understands that character so beautifully and instinctively.  He’s an actor that just lives restraint, so it’s always there. Particularly that sense of pain is always behind the eyes. Whether it’s the little pain from this ongoing injury from his battle with Brienne, or actually just that haunted past of being bullied and burnt by his brother. It’s always there on his face. It’s almost enough in itself, but he always brings into that such a great spectrum of emotion, but always with incredible underplaying. He does that totally off of his own back. I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s all Rory.  How long did you take to planÂ that chaseÂ between the Waif and Arya in Braavos?  Not a lot of rehearsal, apart from the stunt elements. That particular chase is a director’s dream. The script says “a dazzling foot chase,” and so I went with the team to Girona in Spain, and we basically walked around the Old City saying, “That’s a good bit. That’s a good bit. And that’s a good bit. How can we stitch them together?” Through just walking the streets a shape started to evolve. There’s the kind of physical limitations of how can we actually shoot this, and how much can we actually shut down. In terms of how much we could shut down, pretty much anything we wanted. The people and city of Girona were just so fantastic in their support of the program that we were able to get access to pretty much anything we wanted.  Related: Actress Faye Marsay on the Waif’s Big Moments With Arya Stark  One of my favorite locations I walked around was a set of steps where Arya jumps and then falls, tumbling down, knocking over all the oranges. That became the fulcrum to work toward and from. It was high speed up until that point and then a slow march toward death, or apparent death, after that. So, it was really just working the jigsaw puzzle on that, just working toward it, and actually knowing exactly tonally where I wanted to be at each beat, hopefully, in this misdirect that this was ultimately going to lead to the death of Arya. And hopefully the audience will be caught up in that beat and then only retrospectively flip back and realize that actually Arya had been running things the whole time in terms of luring the Waif back to the place where she could have an advantage over her.  The oranges: Were they a conscious reference to “The Godfather”? (Note:Â Oranges are a common motif in “The Godfather” movies, often as an omen of death.)  I wish it was because “The Godfather” is one of my favorite films. But the truth is, when I stood on these gray steps I wanted some color and contrast in it because the stone steps were beautiful, but they were all the same hue. I wanted contrast, and it seemed to me that orange would be a great contrast to that particular gray. I asked for barrels and barrels and barrels of oranges because I wanted a chaotic sense of movement down the steps when she fell. Can I lie and say, yes, it was an homage to “The Godfather”? I wish it was!  After a while it became evident that Arya was leaving a blood trail for the Waif to follow. Was this her plan all along, going back to the previous episode when she was hiring passage back to Westeros and standing on the bridge?  Personally, I don’t think so. You could certainly read into that. My choice is no. My choice is, in episode 7, the character has made herÂ decisionÂ to leave the city, and really makes a mistake. She lets her guard down. We forget how young this kid is, and she makes a mistake. This is in my head, at least. Having booked passage with the captain, she has a moment of reverie where she’s looking over Braavos and particularly looking forward to making a move toward home to a new adventure. She’s not going to be this assassin, and she lets her guard down and nearly pays for it with her life. I think that, subsequently, she knows once she’s recovering at Lady Crane’s apartment that the Waif will come after her. She knows it’s inevitable. She hopes it won’t be there. That, in my head at least, in terms of my own internal logic, that is where the thought process is: How can I get myself to a position where I have an advantage over this character? In terms of [Arya] choosing that particular basement area where the character hides out — no windows, one door in, one door out, no other light sources — one could make the argument that she set that up long before then and is simply caught out in the open in episode 7.  It was a big week for decapitations, not only with the Hound but with the Mountain’s brutal attack in King’s Landing. How much of that was practical effects, and how much was done in post-production?  What we actually shot — it was all in the inference for me. The most important shot, for me, is when the poor stuntman is crawling across the floor, and the Mountain’s hand comes down over his head and starts to lift his chin. At that point, you’ve pretty much told the story, so the rest is just a question of how far you want to go with the actual image. I think our intention, initially, was less blood. We had a weighted dummy head for that reverse shot where you see the head thrown across the frame. We had a small amount of blood on the set there, and that was enhanced by our genius visual-effects team to actually create that particular spray of blood as the head was thrown across the frame. The head itself was in the camera, the blood element was post-production.  We hear about the Blackfish’s fate. Did you film any fight scenes that were cut out because of time?  No, it was a conscious decision. We have a series that specializes in an awful lot of death, and that’s with everything. I think it’s one instance where I can speak for the writers clearly: Their attention to detail and their vision over so many seasons is unsurpassed. I’ve never seen anything like that in all my years. It’s quite extraordinary. There was a very conscious decision.  The story that they chose to focus on was really about this sense of the samurai’s death, the warrior’s death. And the scene that precedes his death is really about one warrior to another, acknowledging the dignity in his choice. Brienne really needs the Blackfish and the Tully army up at Winterfell, and desperately, desperately wants that, and yet that kind of samurai code of respecting and knowing it’s his time and choice to die with dignity, that was the emotional beat we wanted to focus on. Having told that story, the actual physical killing was not irrelevant, but we made our choice. That was where we made our emotional focus for the scene. For another character, we might do something differently, but that was a writing choice from the very start. And I obviously fully agreed with that.
The director gives an inside look at the creation of the Waif's high-flying pursuit of Arya Stark, among other details.