When Game of Thrones announced that director Jack Bender would be helming two episodes of Season 6, die-hard TV fans rejoiced. A veteran of the industry, Bender has directed some of the most famous episodes of Lost, The Sopranos, Alias, Felicity, and more. It was his work on the time-travel–heavy episodes of Lost—like the famous tearjerker “The Constant”—that inspired series creators Dan Weiss and David Benioff to put Bender in charge of the emotional, paradoxical final moments of Bran’s faithful companion Hodor. Bender’s gift for laying down an emotional track that can help audiences navigate even the trickiest narrative loops made last Sunday’s episode, “The Door,” one of the finest episodes Game of Thrones has ever produced.

Bender also tackled the dramatic return of uncle Benjen, the Lannister/Tyrell showdown on the steps of the Sept, and Daenerys’s latest rallying speech in this week’s episode “Blood of My Blood.” The director spoke with Vanity Fair over the phone to reflect back on some of his favorite episode moments on Lost and The Sopranos, explain why Summer the direwolf got such a brief exit, and describe the trippy Bran scenes that might have been.

VF.com: I’m curious about your interest or level of involvement with Game of Thrones before you got the call to direct? Were you already a fan?

Jack Bender: Well, I was asked very early on to do the show—Season 1 or 2. I had done The Sopranos and I have done this crazy show, Carnivàle. They had asked me to do it and I couldn’t commit that much time to go to Northern Ireland. They called again, and the time was right. I don{t tend to do a lot of shows that I’m not also producing. It is a leap of faith to go do Season 6 of a show that is considered the best show, maybe, ever on television, and the biggest show in the world.

I’ve got a fairly healthy ego, and at the same time I know how to leave my ego at the door, and if I’m going to enter David and Dan’s extraordinary world, Season 6, I go there saying, “I want to do the best episode of their show I can do.” I know that they were very interested in me doing Episode 5 [“The Door”] because they felt that given the playing with time that the episode begins to do, not to mention Hodor of it all, they were hoping that given my Lost experience it might be a good fit for me.

I know your D.P., Jonathan Freeman, has been on the show since Season 2. Did he help provide some connective tissue to the earlier style of the show?

He was brilliant. The way [executive producers] Bernadette Caulfield and Chris Newman actually build this insane schedule in this house of cards, which takes five directors over a number of countries and keeps two full units shooting simultaneously if not three—it’s dizzying what that schedule looks like.

I lucked out and had an exceptional team with me. Because as much as I’ve seen every single episode, there were times where I would think to myself, Where am I? What land am I in? It’s a little bit like filmus interruptus. Jonathan certainly helped me every step of the way occasionally telling me what land we were in, although I do admit that once or twice he was confused, too, and I said, “O.K., I feel better,” because he had done the show from early on, but it’s a lot of cast, it’s a lot of characters.