“Battle of the Bastards” director Miguel Sapochnik on his shooting style and Emmy nom

Miguel Sapochnik hasn’t been on the Game of Thrones directing roster long, but he’s already one of its star members. In Season 5, he directed the thrilling “Hardhome,” along with the solid “The Gift.” “Hardhome” remained the series’ high water mark for action until Season 6’s “Battle of the Bastards,” another Sapochnik episode. To top it all off, he directed “The Winds of Winter,” the year’s barn-burning season finale.

“Battle of the Bastards” earned Sapochnik his first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series. According to industry awards site GoldDerby, he’s favored to win. GoldDerby asked Sapochnik how he was feeling about all of this, and got some great insights into his creative process.

GoldDerby started at the beginning: was Sapochnik intimidated when he learned he would be directing “Battle of the Bastards?” It ends up that, after you’ve done “Hardhome,” nothing much scares you.

"When I read “Hardhome” the year before, my jaw had hit the ground, and I had gone to lie down for a short period of time so that I could recover, and then read it again, and realized that it wasn’t gonna change. It was still that big. So the second time I think I was kind of expecting it…It was as big as I expected it to be…After you do “Hardhome,” you get used to idea of working on that scale, and so it doesn’t become as frightening a concept."

The best thing about the interview is the way it digs into Sapochnik’s directing philosophy. He’s very big on everything in the episode serving the story.

"The key thing…is basically sit there and ask yourself what the point of this sequence is, what the goal is, whose point of view it is, whose point of view we’re telling the story from…Make sure that those stories make sense, and then you start to add the other bits back in. So you kind of deconstruct your sequence to be able to reconstruct it…Once you’re really familiar with the material, you can then start running multiple storylines at the same time, saying, ‘Well, if Jon is over here, doing this, then what’s Tormund doing at this particular point?’ Where is he physically? Where is he dramatically? Etc."

In “Battle of the Bastards,” the point of view would be Jon’s.

Sapochnik cares about the details, but he’s not the kind of director who plans out every shot ahead of time. In fact, he didn’t storyboard anything for “Battle of the Bastards,” despite once being a storyboard artist by trade. (“I find that as I direct more, I storyboard less,” he said.) Considering how involved the episode was, that’s very impressive.

It makes sense to Sapochnik, though. So long as he can see the story clearly in his head, he prefers to let the rest flow naturally.

"An enormous amount of it for me is about breaking it down in my mind so that I understand the story I’m telling…And then, in the process of doing that, I come up with ideas and images that I really like, and they may not even relate to the script, but they’re these ideas of, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to see Wun Wun silhouetted against the sun on top of a pile of bodies fighting off other people crawling up either side of the body pile towards him?’"

He calls those ideas ‘key frames,” and he tries to make them happen whether they’re in the script or not. We never saw anything quite like what he described above, but “Battle of the Bastards” certainly had visually stunning moments.

Sapochnik does make multiple drafts of his shot lists, but mostly as a way to get to know the material and learn which shots will be essential to the episode. He also makes use of pre-visualization. Basically, he prepares like mad so he has the freedom to be spontaneous on set. That served him well while directing “Battle of the Bastards,” where he invented, or at least greatly altered, the sequence where Jon is trampled by his own men. That ended up being Sapochnik’s favorite sequence, and probably wasn’t alone. (The Battle of Meereen was an exception. That had to be shot exactly as planned, due to the cost of animating the dragons.)

Sapochnik’s creativity clearly appeals to showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who were very “hands-off” during filming. This wasn’t the case during “Hardhome,” where there was a lot of supervision. But after Sapochnik proved himself with “Hardhome,” Benioff and Weiss gave him a lot more freedom.

Unfortunately, Sapochnik isn’t on the list of directors for Season 7. But you’d figure that after the success he’s had with Seasons 5 and 6, he may well return for Season 8.

The 2016 Emmys air on September 18. (Sapochnik found out over the phone while he was pushing his daughter in a stroller, and nearly ran her into a wall.) We wish him the best of luck.