Director Jack Bender is headed to Westeros.
The veteran director and producer is preparing to travel overseas to tackle two episodes of Game of Thrones season six, which will pick up the pieces following the show's most controversial season to date.
Though Bender has worked on high-profile shows such as ABC's Lost and HBO's The Sopranos, he admits that tackling two episodes of Thrones is going to be unlike anything he's faced, "because of how complex and enormous their production is," he says.
"I'm very calendar-challenged and the Game of Thrones production calendar might as well be in Chinese, it's so complex," Bender tells The Hollywood Reporter. "That's how they achieve their extraordinary ten episodes per year."
He hasn't received any scripts yet, but he did get an outline for the season while season five was still airing. He says the writers have "about six or seven scripts written" for season six so far.
Bender was originally approached several years ago to work on the show, but the time commitment even to direct two episodes is so large that he wasn't able to make it work until now. He'll be overseas from the end of July until the first week of December, before returning home to work on an adaptation of Stephen King's Mr. Mercedes for Sonar Entertainment.
