Westeros Blog: Director to Helm Two Episodes

[Westeros]

Via Twitter, it’s apparently been revealed that an Irish television director, Brian Kirk—whose credits include episodes of The Tudors, Dexter, and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire—is set to direct two episodes of Game of Thrones. In recent years, Kirk has been a regular nominee in the Irish Film and Television Awards for direction and for best single dramatic episode. This item of news comes from a tweet by Daragh Carville, a fellow native of Armagh in Ireland, who wrote Middletown, a 2006 film directed by Kirk.

This is the first director publicly attached to the series since Thomas McCarthy directed the pilot, although it’s been suggested that McCarthy may return to helm one or more episodes going forward.

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[Brude]

He also did two episodes of the excellent Showtime series "Brotherhood," according to his IMDb bio.

[Ran]

Updated the original post with the fact that Kirk is set to start work on pre-production for his episodes next week.

This makes me wonder whether Kirk is being brought in to handle the pilot reshoots. What would the director credit situation be like if that were the case? Would Kirk be credited as the director, or McCarthy? I know they're not big on co-director credits, at least in film direction.

[Brude]

This makes me wonder whether Kirk is being brought in to handle the pilot reshoots. What would the director credit situation be like if that were the case? Would Kirk be credited as the director, or McCarthy? I know they're not big on co-director credits, at least in film direction.

Dunno, it would probably stay with McCarthy if it's just a partial reshoot. He set the tone originally and whatever Kirk might do on that would probably just be more or less copying the original shoot to make it match.

As for co-director credits, the DGA some years ago opened up to that and there can now be two directors credited on a film. For a long time they didn't allow it because they were trying to promote the idea of auteur directors - the singular vision of the director as the "author" of a film. But they ran into problems with teams like The Coen Brothers or the Hughes Brothers, who were very clearly directing as a team, yet couldn't take credit that way. That's the only reason why in their earlier years, the Coens split their credits between Producer and Director, but now take equal credit for both. The workload hasn't changed, just the DGA rules did. And then I don't know what the DGA would do about a group like Traktor who are a team of filmmakers who take director credit as a group, not as individuals. There may be specific rules about how two directors get credited vs. one, even when two worked on a film. It might have to do with percentage of footage in the final film that was shot, etc. Like if it's 50/50, obviously both get credited, but maybe not if it's 60/40? There are very specific rules along those lines for the Writer's Guild regarding scripts.