The final season of Game of Thrones proved controversial, as fans were not thrilled with the way some of the saga’s stories came to their ends. In a rare post-finale interview with Star Channel in Japan, showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff look back on one of their favorite scenes from the divisive season.
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The scene comes from an episode that Weiss and Benioff neither wrote nor directed, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” The episode was written by Bryan Cogman and directed by David Nutter. Benioff points to the scene that gives the episode its title as a standout of the season.
“One that sticks out to me, because Brienne of Tarth has always been one of our favorite characters, and the moment when she’s knighted by Jaime Lannister is just a wonderful thing in the story, and to see Gwen [Christie]’s face in that moment, I’ve probably watched that scene 400 times and every time it gets me,” Benioff says. “It makes me a little bit thrilled, and a little bit tear up, so love that scene.”
This was Cogman’s eleventh episode of Game of Thrones. He spoke in a previous interview about giving Brienne her big moment.
“We wanted to take the audience by surprise,” Cogman says. “It’s not a ceremonial scene on a cliff at sunset with billowing capes. It comes out of a throwaway moment that even some people in the room think is a joke and then they quickly realize it’s not. It’s a monumental thing. It’s a moment of grace and beauty in the middle of a nightmare and the main reason I wanted to write this episode. The episode’s title, ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,’ refers to both Jaime and Brienne.”
For Gwendoline Christie, who plays Brienne, it was also her favorite scene of the entire season. “I think the knighting scene,” Christie said. “I thought about it so much and what it means to me conceptually. It’s so emotional for the character to get something she wants and to be acknowledged.”
Benioff and Weiss also looked back at the entire decade they spent working on Game of Thrones. “To have it become what it became, and to be able to spend not one year or two years but more than ten years of our lives making it at this level, with the people we got to work with, all them, behind the camera…”, Weiss says.
“We didn’t have any idea that the show would be so big because when we first started going to Northern Ireland, where we shot the show, the customs officers would ask us what we were doing there,” Benioff adds. “We’d say ‘We’re working on this show…’ And they’d say, ‘What is Game of Thorns?’ And then, by the third season, we’d see the customs guys and — literally this happened in the Heathrow Airport — and the guy was reading A Game of Thrones, George [RR Martin]’s book, and we knew that something was starting to cross the threshold of public awareness.”
What did you think of this scene in Game of Thrones? Let us know in the comments.
(h/t Watchers on the Wall)
