How did you approach shooting The Spoils of War?
We get all the scripts for the season more than a year before we start shooting anything, and thats vastly helpful, because it allows for huge savings in the physical production. The company only has to move 40 trucks and 150 crew members to some remote beach in Northern Ireland once, and then three or four, maybe five director/DP teams will come in and share that crew on that one location, because theyre all out there shooting at the same time. So when we were in northern Spain last year, we shot sequences for multiple episodes, because those scenes would be in the same location. It saved us flying the director back to Spain later, for half a days work.
Why dont they have one director shoot all the Dorne sequences, one director shoot all the North sequences, and so forth? It seems like that would be more consistent and involve less moving around.
Probably a lot of producers would like that! But the Directors Guild of America rules are very strict about a director having authorship of an episode, and the result is that even if you only have one page to film, maybe four hours of work in Dubrovnik or something, according to the letter of the law, they have to fly the director there to direct that sequence. Of course sometimes a director will ask another director whos already there to do it for them. Theres a fair bit of that sort of switching around.