We review all the commentaries on the Game of Thrones Season 6 home boxset

Episode 609, “Battle of the Bastards.” Commentary by director Miguel Sapochnik, Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), and Kit Harington (Jon Snow)

This track is another highlight. These three have fun together, but also give good insights.

• Around the set, everyone referred to the Battle of the Bastards as “Bob.” That’s a pretty nice piece of natural camouflage. To keep things about Jon’s resurrection hush-hush, Jon Snow was called “LC” and Kit Harington’s trailer was said to belong to “Hot Pie.”
• The bit where Dany’s dragons torch one of the slavers’ boats was filmed in Banbridge, Northern Ireland (they weren’t allowed to actually set the boat on fire because it was needed for other scenes). The conversation between Dany and the masters was filmed in Spain while the shots of Dany riding Drogon were filmed in Belfast. It looks seamless, but this scene was assembled from all over Europe.
• The purpose of the Battle of Meereen is to show what the dragons can do, so we know “what’s in store later on down the line.” Intriguing. Also, Sapochnik has a good line about the slavers’ predicament: “The summary of what just happened is these guys are now fucked.”
• Turner and Harington reiterate that, during the parlay scene with Ramsay, the horses would not freaking cooperate. In addition to the moving, there was much peeing and farting and pooping. Apparently, it’s even harder to get horses to stand still than it is to make them charge into a line of soldiers.
• Sapochnik identifies the scene where Sansa admonishes Jon for not taking her advice as a turning point in the relationship between Sansa and Jon. Turner: “And it was just nice having a good shouty scene. I love having a good shouty argumentative scene, especially since my whole run on the show has been me being fairly quiet. And crying.”
• Harington notes that, because he and Turner basically grew up together on set, they already felt like siblings, which helped with their dialogue scene. Turner: “You do feel like an irritating, shorter older brother.”
• Both Harington and Turner liked that the writing paid tribute to the history between these two characters, and didn’t make their renewed relationship completely magnanimous. Harington: “She always felt that Jon was a intruder, and he always felt that she was stuck up.”
• Unfortunately, Sapochnik also portends “the beginning of a split” between Jon and Sansa, which tracks with what Turner has said about Season 7 in interviews. Harington and Turner are adorable in this commentary, though, and even recite the scene from “The Winds of Winter” where Sansa, standing with Jon on the walls of Winterfell, tells him that winter is here.
• The Jon-Melisandre scene, where they chat in a tent, was filmed…in a tent, in the middle of a field. Harington was rather upset that he didn’t get to go into a studio for this occasion. Sapochnik: “There was definitely discussion about shooting this in the Paint Hall (a studio space in Belfast), and then we decided not to, because you were in it.”
• On the one hand, it’s amazing how little the actors seem to know about the parts of the show that don’t directly involve their characters. (They’re blown away by the idea that Daenerys has a scene with Yara and Theon, for example.) On the other hand, they’re pretty funny about it, so it’s fine. Turner: “We don’t actually know what show we’re on at the moment. It’s The Walking Dead or something.”
• As on the other commentaries, this group jokes around. However, there are two things that set them apart: 1) They actually take a break from the jokes to talk about substantive stuff, and; 2) The jokes are pretty funny, particularly when Turner takes a loud, perfectly timed bite of celery right before the Battle of the Bastards begins. There’s also a funny running gag where they make believe that Liam Cunningham (Davos) gets incredibly angry whenever he’s not on camera.
• Sapochnik shot the battle part of “Battle of the Bastards” sequentially, which had to have helped the actors get into the scene.
• Once the battle starts, the group tends to fall into sincere amazement—there is much oohing and aahing. A random sample from Harington: “Wow, fuck!” A random sample from Turner: “Oh my god. OH MY GOD.” Sure, there’s not much serious discussion, but it’s kind of hard to blame them.
• Harington, who also took part in “Hardhome,” points out the differences between those two battles. For one, the set for “Battle of the Bastards” was much barer, and depended more on the performances from Harington and Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton). One thing they had in common, though: “Both of them should feel…not in any way neat or comfortable….It’s just nasty and messy and dirty.” Well done.
• As Sapochnik points out, the Battle of the Bastards is “set up on a series of mistakes that the hero makes, and the fact that he survives—and really that anybody survives—is a complete miracle…You don’t survive this because you’re really skilled. You survive this because you’re really fucking lucky.”
• Sapochnik didn’t play Wun Wun the giant—that honor went to actor Ian Whyte. But he did occasionally run around the set carrying a 14-foot pole with a ball on the end of it to let the extras know where Wun Wun was supposed to be. Turner: “Miguel was doing a lot of pole work during production.”
• Sapochnik reiterates that the scene where Jon Snow is nearly trampled to death by his own men was invented on set. It just goes to show how big a role serendipity plays in greatness. That’s the best bit in the episode, and nothing about it was scripted, including the parallel to the Daenerys slave-surfing shot at the end of Season 3.

• Sapochnik: The idea was that Jon “gets slightly reborn down there, ’cause he finds a desire to live stronger than before.”
• Turner when Sansa and Littlefinger show up with the Knights of the Vale: “You’re welcome, bitches!”
• Sapochnik’s favorite shot from Season 6 is the bit where Sansa starts to leave Ramsay to his dogs, but changes her mind at the last second and decides to stay and watch a while.

Episode 609, “Battle of the Bastards.” Commentary by director of photography Fabian Wagner, visual effects producer Steve Kullback, and visual effects supervisor Joe Bauer.

• After “Hardhome,” the team had a good idea of how to approach a big battle episode like this. “We had a good shorthand. We could get right to the panicking.”
• Obviously, most of the stuff in the Battle of Meereen is computer animated. However, some stuff is real. For example, the fire Drogon breathes in the scene where Daenerys confronts the Masters above Meereen was shot off of a motion-controlled crane on a 20-foot platform above the actors. It’s described here as “a 50-foot flamethrower shooting almost directly at camera.” These people have interesting jobs.
• It’s no secret that special effects are everywhere on Game of Thrones, but I’m still surprised when it turns up in unexpected places. For example, the field in Northern Ireland where the Battle of the Bastards takes place was dressed by the team, but everything in the distance is actually a panoramic shot from Iceland inserted into the sequence, because the natural horizon was too pretty.
• When Sansa tells off Ramsay Bolton and rides away from the parlay (“You’re going to die tomorrow, Lord Bolton. Sleep well.”), it’s not Sophie Turner on the horse. Actually, it’s not even a person! That’s a CGI Sansa. The team wanted her exit to be particularly dramatic and used digital wizardry to get a wider shot.
• Does Wagner ever light characters based on their psychology? Short answer: yes. “You always want to try and create a look that resembles the story or the character.” That’s an interesting line of questioning I wish would be pursued further.
• Only one of the burning crosses on the field of battle is real. The others were inserted digitally.
• It rained for one day on the set. Then there were “four days of horrible sucking mud.” Things got rough.
• They even overlaid Kit Harington’s face over that of the stunt actor when he falls off his horse. What can’t they do with special effects these days?
• We’ve known this for a while, but it bears repeating: this shot does NOT involve special effects:

• “It was a little disconcerting showing up every day and seeing a very realistic pile of dead bodies day after day.”
• Before filming, Benioff and Weiss looked at three different animated samples of the arrival of the Knights of the Vale. In each one, the size of the army was different: small, medium, and “preposterous.” They ended up going with the medium version.
• Wagner points out how the storming of Winterfell is sort of a reverse of a similar sequence from “Hardhome.” There, the wights were at the gate and we didn’t want them to get in and kill the heroes. Now, the good guys—Jon, Tormund, Wun Wun, and their army—are outside the gates of Winterfell, and we want them to bust in.
• In the episodes final scene, the special effects team removed the hounds’ wagging tails to make them seem more menacing.
• The special effects artists animated a bit where the dogs rip off Ramsay’s jaw, but Benioff and Weiss thought it was too much.

Next: The winter winds are blowing in