Former Lost director James Bender has promised to make a meal of it when he takes the helm of Game of Thrones.
The next run will see the hugely successful HBO series overtakes its source material, George RR Martin's ongoing series of fantasy books.
Bender - best known for directing 38 episodes of Lost - will direct episodes 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones next season, and has revealed that he had turned the show down in the past.
"You have to commit to four-and-a-half to six months [for the shoot] because of the enormity of the episodes," he said, before adding that he's looking forward to rising to the challenge that awaits him on the show's Belfast set.
"(Showrunners) Dan Weiss and David Benioff are enormously brilliant and unpretentious guys, and I know they communicate closely (with author Martin)," he said.
"This is how I look at it: as a director on Lost, for example, I liked to say we get recipes from (showrunners) Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Then, me and the writers and the rest of the team, we'd cook the meal. That’s always how I saw the metaphor."
Production on Game of Thrones season six will begin in Belfast in the coming weeks. The series will return to HBO and Sky Atlantic in early 2016.
