Director Miguel Sapochnik on filming the Battle of the Bastards

Miguel Sapochnik left his mark on Game of Thrones last year when he directed “Hardhome,” and he continued to make an impression with “Battle of the Bastards,” quite impossibly the most cinematically ambitious episode in the show’s history. He broke it all down for Entertainment Weekly, revealing plenty of behind-the-scenes tidbits in the process.

On the origins of the Battle of the Bastards

George R.R. Martin famously based his A Song of Ice and Fire series on real-world history, and it seems that Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss do the same. “Initially we based BOB on the battle of Agincourt which took place between the French and English in 1415,” he said. “But as needs changed, as did budgets, it became more like the battle of Cannae between the Romans and Hannibal in 216 BC.” History is fun.

Sapochnik also talked about managing what Benioff and Weiss had in mind. “The strategy and tactical aspect was a key thing for David and Dan,” he said. “They wanted to specifically focus on that so that we could really see the way Ramsay ensnares and outguns Jon in the almost exactly the way the same way Davos had planned to defeat the Bolton army. I also did a bunch of research into Alexander the Great who was legendary in his strategic battle prowess.”

"That said at some point you need to put all the research down and tell a good story. The Bolton Shield wall, for example, was a production-friendly way to emulate a “double envelopment pincer move” [without] using horses as originally scripted, and also as a way to avoid seeing horizons on the field and therefore having to dress fewer dead bodies or stage background fights so deep because we didn’t have the money."

It’s funny when limitations create opportunities. The shield wall may not have been the original plan, but I thought it was a memorable, terrifying image. Along those lines, Sapochnik revealed that the whole sequence where Jon gets trampled under a horde of retreating wildlings was invented, or at least greatly altered, by him when it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to shoot the script as written in the time allowed. He doesn’t reveal how the original script was different, but that ended up being one of Sapochnik’s favorite moments of the episode.

The producers called this “the rebirthing shot.”

On how much horses suck, and other logistics

“Battle of the Bastards” featured a lot of horses, and apparently, they’re not the easiest animals to manage. “Everything takes about 50 percent longer [with horses],” Sapochnik said. “Also they need relatively solid ground to run on, and when it rains the field would turn to into a bog and we’d have to lay down tons of gravel to sure up their footing. Horses also get bored and spooked and some perform better than others. They also need an entire separate field to rest in. Oh, and they sh— and piss all the time.” In fact, Sapochnik fingers the parlay between Jon and Ramsay as one of the hardest scenes to film, since getting horses to stand still all day is hard, and the beasts kept farting over Kit Harington’s lines. Horses: rude.

As you can probably imagine, the logistical challenges of filming this episode were enormous. I’ll just let Sapochnik vent:

"Like every time we charge the horses it takes 25 minutes to reset all the fake snow on the field and rub out the horseshoe prints. So how many times can we afford to charge the horses each day knowing we need to give time for a reset that’s 10 times longer than the actual shot? Another thing was how to make 500 extras look like 8,000 when you are shooting in a field where there’s just nowhere to hide your shortfall. It becomes a bit like a bonkers math equation. And finally: How do you get these guys riled up enough to run at each other and get covered in mud and stand in the rain and then run at each other again and again for 25 days, 10 hours a day, without them just telling you to piss off?"

On the Battle of Meereen

“Battle of the Bastards” was a double-header. In addition to the battle in the North, we also got one in the far east. This one had to be more carefully planned than the Battle of the Bastards, since it involved more CGI (read: giant dragons). But Sapochnik had some specific ideas for how to shoot the beasts. “I also pushed for the idea of allowing the dragons to constantly break frame,” he said. “That is to say framing slightly smaller than the actual dragon is so that it felt more like wildlife “on the fly” photography. These things should be so big and fast it’s hard to keep up with them.”

He also mentioned an intriguing mandate from Benioff and Weiss regarding this sequence.

"For this sequence David and Dan said that what they wanted to see was a “demonstration” of what’s to come. So I tried to approach it in the most elegant, epic, big-movie way I could."

A demonstration, huh? A demonstration of what? Scenes to come in Seasons 7 and 8, perhaps?

All that, and Sapochnik isn’t done. He also directed “The Winds of Winter,” the Game of Thrones Season 6 finale. What about that episode excites the director? “That it feels equally as epic as episode 9 … but for completely different reasons.” Stay tuned.