The first episode of Game of Thrones season 8 brought almost everybody together in Winterfell, including George Lucas! The creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones unfortunately didn’t appear in his own Ed Sheeran-style cameo but his presence was still impossible to miss on set, as a new behind-the-scenes video from HBO reveals.
"When we found out that George Lucas wanted to visit, we thought maybe it was a practical joke, and then we were really excited and also nervous because it's George Lucas," Thrones co-creator David Benioff admits in the video. Meanwhile, David Nutter (who returned to the series after a two-season, injury-related absence) said it was "so cool" for him to have George Lucas sitting on his director's chair and running out to give direction to Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke.
Lucas, meanwhile, seemed to just be enjoying himself: "No direction for you, I don't really care about you, I don't care about what happens to you," we see him jokingly tell Harington between takes. Nutter added that Lucas even had some input on the axe scene, which also happened to star Game of Thrones writer Dave Hill as the cranium-cloven victim.
It's tough to single out George Lucas' influence when there isn't anything outright pulpy or monomythical in the episode. But it sounds like just having the venerated filmmaker around was enough to inspire folks on both sides of the camera. Plus, I've got to imagine that D.B. Weiss and David Benioff took the opportunity to pick Lucas' brain for feedback and ideas on their own upcoming Star Wars film.
"The first time I could remember telling stories was me as a little kid mashing together these Stormtrooper dolls,' Benioff says. "For so many of us, he's the one who started our obsession with this kind of big, epic storytelling."
See where the show could be going from here with our predictions for the Game of Thrones ending. Or catch our video recap of the first episode below.
