Coming off 'Sopranos' and 'Mad Men,' I was starting to feel like I was being spoiled creatively. I wanted to move forward as a director in TV and get more involved in the process. After having those two great experiences, doing regular episodic TV wouldn't be quite the thrill.
— Alan Taylor
I think calling for more women in every aspect of this industry is a sensible thing.
I just love drawing on past human cultures; that's a thrill for me.
I've been sort of spoiled on the TV end because HBO feels like a small institution making independent movies. There's respect for the director's contribution in a way that mainstream television doesn't really reflect, I don't think.
My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.
There's a natural human compulsion to chase after freedom and then to actually hand it over as fast as possible and get away from it.
When I was going to film school, before film school, my hero was David Lynch.
The funny thing is more money doesn't necessarily get you what you think it's going to get you and the way where it does get you more value on screen.
There are all kinds of things evolving in filmmaking I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. A friend of mine just showed me an immersive 360 movie where you move from environment to environment and can look in any direction you want while you're experiencing it. Which is cool - but it kills directing, as far as I'm concerned.
I love staging action and wide-shots, not necessarily going to close-ups.
I'm not a shouter, but I like to put my stamp on things.
I had been trying to make movies, but they were really hard to get made. TV wound up, by surprise, a much more fulfilling place to work. That said, I've always been drawn to make movies.
I love things that have one foot in history - I was going to be a history professor before I sold out and went into TV.
When you direct a movie that makes no money whatsoever, there is no rush to your door for the next one.
In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.
Most people aren't lying awake at night worrying about a nuclear threat. But we are unnerved by a lot of how technology is coming into our lives and starting to infuse our lives. And we question whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I used to play with model trains when I was a kid, and then I used to study history.
On 'Game of Thrones,' we always shoot away from the green screen because it's bloody expensive to shoot green screen.
There's a very devoted fan base that really loved 'T1' and 'T2' and felt burned by 'T3' and 'T4,' so when we said, 'We're going to do it again!' the reaction was, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa - what do you think you're doing?'
There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.
I have this thing for anything Italian.
It's been a twisty-turny path for me. I was studying to be a history professor, and then I left that, went to film school, and tried to be like my heroes, like, Spike Lee and Hal Hartly.
'Game of Thrones' was the first fantasy thing I've done, and like a lot of people who enjoy the show watching it, I didn't expect to respond to that world, but when I started doing it, I really started to love it, started to realize that some of the things I'm naturally drawn to.
Compared to TV, 'Palookaville' was restriction-free, except we had no money and no time.
Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.
The Marvel experience was particularly wrenching because I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post, it turned into a different movie.
The weird thing is, 'Game of Thrones,' people go to Iceland for three weeks, and it'd be like a small guerilla operation. 'Thor,' we went there for, like, five days, because we couldn't afford to be there any longer, because we were airlifting the entire contents of Hollywood into this country.
I come out of TV, where you never reshoot, because you don't have time. If you do reshoot, it's because someone really screwed up.
On 'Game of Thrones,' I remember shooting in Croatia, and by lunchtime we'd see photos of what we'd shot online and think, 'My God - people really care.'
