“The Winds of Winter” ended Game of Thrones Season 6 with a bang, and while there were many memorable moments, the opening sequence where Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor and kills all of her enemies in one stroke is the one that’s sticking out in fans’ minds. Miguel Sapochnik, who directed “The Winds of Winter” (as well as landmark episodes like “Battle of the Bastards” and “Hardhome”) talked to Vulture about the influences behind the sequence.
"The Godfather definitely had a hand in the conception of this sequence, but I also looked at various James Bond sequences for the explosions of the villain’s lairs. We wanted to make sure that it didn’t feel like a cheap trick to blow up the Sept of Baelor, and at the same time embrace the fact that it was something that people probably saw coming. How could we make it still feel like a shock?"
I can see all of that. Cersei has never been closer to being a James Bond villain than she was in the first 25 minutes of “The Winds of Winter,” and the way show cut between characters getting injured or killed and Cersei presiding over all definitely recalled the climatic baptism scene from The Godfather.
The baroque score doesn’t hurt, either.
Indeed, the music was something Sapochnik focused on from the start. According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he underscored his cut of the sequence with a piano theme he liked, but figured Benioff and Weiss would replace it in the final edit, since piano wasn’t really in the show’s musical vernacular.
"I was surprised and very pleased when [composer Ramin Djawadi] scored such a beautiful piece of score using piano as its main instrument. As The Dude in The Big Lebowski would say; ‘It really tied the room together.’"
So that’s another movie that kinda-sorta influenced “The Winds of Winter”: The Big Lebowski. Who would have thought?
Talking to TVLine about the episode more generally, Sapochnik discussed the unique challenges of directing not only an episode of Game of Thrones, but a Game of Thrones season finale, which are apparently “a law unto themselves on this show.”
"While most episodes have a beginning, middle and an ending, finales on Game of Thrones are just one ending after another after another as each of the storylines needs to [be] wrapped up or at least attended to in some way. I had been told this prior to getting into the edit, but I was still surprised at how complicated a task it was to find the right balance of satisfying conclusion —but not at the expense of keeping the hour entertaining and moving it along."
When Sapochnik got into the editing room, he and editor Tim Porter treated “The Winds of Winter” a bit more like a standard episode, and at one point tried to edit everything down to under 60 minutes. (Also, they hadn’t seen the other episodes while editing “The Winds of Winter,” since they were all being edited at the same time.) Happily, they realized that finales operate under their special rules, and gave “The Winds of Winter” the room it needed to breathe.
Taking that approach may have left room for some of Sapochnik’s more personal contributions. For example, as originally written, we only saw the Sept blow up from the outside, but Sapochnik, “really wanted to see the High Sparrow get it,” so he storyboarded a sequence that included his death, and it made it into the final cut. All of these moments, big and small, contributed to the overall effect, so I’m glad they were left in.
Unfortunately, Sapochnik couldn’t shed any new light on something Lena Headey said in an interview a few days ago, that the scene where Cersei tortures Septa Unella was originally “worse” than what we saw, and that we got “the tame version.”
"I don’t know the details of that. Although I suspect it wasn’t pretty. I think everyone pretty much got what they deserved in pretty much the way it was written. And anyway, who says Septa Unella’s dead?"
Nobody. Nobody said she was dead. Somehow I don’t see her coming out of that dungeon with much fighting spirit, though.
While the opening sequence was the most involved thing to shoot for the episode (many of those scenes were shot in different countries and then edited together), there were other things in the episode. Sapochnik talked about the complications of shooting that final scene, where Daenerys sets out for Westeros with her fleet.
"The final sequence of seeing the armada on its way to Westeros was complicated because it involved so many different ships, and we only had one that we had to redress and shoot again and again. It was also raining and freezing when we shot it, and it was meant to be a Mediterranean climate. Emilia [Clarke] got so cold, her jaw started shaking uncontrollably and she totally lost her thread as far as what she was meant to be thinking in that moment (the cold will do that). She asked me to help, so I suggested that she just hum the theme to Game of Thrones in her head while we were rolling the cameras, and apparently that worked because it’s the take we used in the final cut!"
It was a hell of a way to end a season. Unfortunately, Sapochnik isn’t on the list of directors who will be contributing to Season 7, but after turning in “The Winds of Winder” and “Battle of the Bastards,” perhaps he’s earned a break.