The wildly mismatched pairing of the violence and a rock song by a contemporary band was a very deliberate move.
“It’s such a shocking ending and when we read the scene in the books it was so shocking to us,” Weiss says. “To really hammer home the shock of that moment you need something unexpected. There’s no version of a traditional score that would keep you as off balance as we wanted that scene to leaving you feeling.”
“I can’t imagine having that conversation with Ramin [Djawadi] our composer — ‘Now we need the Jaime-gets-his-hand-chopped-off music,’” adds Benioff. who made his directorial debut with this episode. “What we always loved in An American Werewolf in London, we see our hero shot and killed and then his lover runs to embrace his dead body — it’s a sad ending — but then we cut to black and it’s [the bouncy 1961 Marcell's hit] ‘Blue Moon.’ And that jarring juxtaposition was fantastic.”