“Battle of the Bastards” director Miguel Sapochnik on what he’s going for

“Battle of the Bastards,” the ninth episode of Game of Thrones Season 6, is nearly upon us, and the hype is continuing to build. The production submitted the episode for more Emmys than any other this year, and the cast and crew continue to talk it up. Kit Harington contributed the hype in a new interview on This Morning, where he called the conflict “the biggest thing we’ve ever filmed for Thrones.” Skip to 3:37 for the pertinent parts.

Entertainment Weekly is doing its part. It’s tried to give fans an idea of how big this battle will be by cataloging the numbers involved. According to EW, to film the Battle of the Bastards, Game of Thrones used:

• 600 crew members.
• 500 extras. We can assume that, once the special effects department is done, it’ll look like a lot more. The extras, who will be playing archers, swordsmen, spearmen, and more, were trained in two groups: one on the Stark side and one on the Bolton side. The idea was that they would develop an offscreen rivalry that will show up onscreen.
• 70 horses. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have talked before about what a pain horses can be on set (Benioff: “They take forever to do anything, they’re really not interested in your directions.”), so if they’re involving this many, they must care passionately.

Horses. Why did it have to be horses?

• 25 stunt men and women.
• 4 camera crews.
• 160 tons of gravel. Going back to how difficult horses are, the ones used in this sequence weren’t happy after heavy rain turned much of the field where the show was working to mud, so gravel was shipped in to give them traction.
• 25 shooting days. In other words, it look a long time. As EW points out, most dramas take 9-12 days to shoot a single episode, but Game of Thrones spent double the upper limit of that to shoot the battle portion of this episode alone. And remember, there will be parts of this episode that are more traditional drama.

In another article, EW interviewed Miguel Sapochnik, who directed “Battle of the Bastards.” Sapochnik also directed Season 5’s “Hardhome,” and Benioff and Weiss were so pleased with his work that they “thought we should bring him back, this time with horses.” Again with the horse hate. “Some of the shots he’s pulled off are some of the best on the show,” Benioff said, presumably while throwing paintings of horses onto a bonfire and laughing.

Sapochnik has some specific things he’s going for with this sequence:

"Every battle on Thrones is unique. I think that’s why [Benioff and Weiss] keep doing them. In the case of ‘Battle of the Bastards’ – or ‘BOB’ as we affectionately called it in production – David and Dan wanted to do a thing of spectacle, a strategic pitchfield battle they hadn’t had the resources to do back in season 1 or 2. I was particularly interested in depicting both the horror of war and the roll of luck in battle."

Luck, huh? Interesting. “Miguel’s really outdone himself,” Weiss said. “Fully fleshed out medieval battles require a tremendous amount of resources and choreography to get them right. It feels like we’re doing something fresh that you don’t see on TV and movies very often.”

Will “Battle of the Bastards” live up to the hype? We’ll find out this Sunday.