'Game Of Thrones' Season 6 News: Creators To Change Approach To Sexually Violent Scenes In Forthcoming Seasons
Creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss have taken into account the widespread reactions to how sexual violence is depicted in "Game of Thrones" and may veer away from such scenes in the forthcoming sixth season of the HBO hit series, director Jeremy Podeswa says.
The director, who has helmed two episodes of the fantasy drama series, including Season 5's "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken," which infamously featured a particularly controversial rape scene involving Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), said that showrunners Benioff and Weiss "were responsive to the discussion and there were a couple of things that changed as a result." He added: "It is important that [the producers] not self-censor. The show depicts a brutal world where horrible things happen. They did not want to be too overly influenced by that [criticism] but they did absorb and take it in and it did influence them in a way."
Podeswa, speaking from a briefing at Fox Studios Australia, also talked about his approach to the sexually violent episode he directed in Season 5, admitting that it was a "difficult" and "brutal" scene and revealing that the production crew knew beforehand that it would be a "challenging" scene for viewers. The director also told the press that it was very important to him that the execution of the scene would not be exploited and that it would be handled with as much sensitivity as possible. He recognized the reactions to the hard-to-watch scene but said that the criticism was about the notion of the crime itself, not the execution of it in the episode.
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Though Podeswa did not acknowledge it, many of the objections to the particularly upsetting scene he shot were directed not solely at the presence of the crime, but at the execution of the scene, which seemed to deny Sansa's experience by showing it through the reactions of Reek (Alfie Allen), a male observer.
For his part, Podeswa said that he welcomed the conversation about how violence is depicted on television, its use as a narrative tool, and its questionable nature. "We were aware ahead of time that it was going to be disturbing," the director added, "but we did not expect there would be people in Congress talking about it."
