Game of Thrones cinematographer promises multiple “showstopping” episodes in season 7

We’ve watched the trailer for Game of Thrones season 7 quite a few times now, and among the other things we noticed, we can’t help but observe that it’s drop-dead gorgeous. One of the men responsible for that is cinematographer Robert McLachlan, who’s been with the show since season 3. McLachlan, who also works on fellow HBO drama Westworld, recently spoke to Deadline about what to expect. “Season 7 is going to be fantastic,” he said. “We did a showstopping, pretty epic scene in Europe just before I came back, and it’s really going to be great.

"I don’t know the facts and figures, but they only did seven episodes this year, but I think their budget’s probably the same, so I think you’re going to see, whereas before, we’d have one or two showstopping, major episodes per season, this season, probably at least half of them are whoppers. They’re not going to disappoint."

So can we expect half of the episodes to be showstoppers on the order of “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winer”? Be still my beating heart.

McLachlan also discussed the kinds of preparations he has to make when filming HBO’s premiere dramas. “On Game of Thrones, with the huge vis effects component, everything is storyboarded for the bigger sequences ahead of time, and quite frankly, on the day, it takes a lot of the creativity out of lighting on the set,” he said. “We had some storyboards for Westworld, for a couple sequences, but mostly we didn’t, and we almost never do for Ray Donovan, for instance.” Westworld comes with its own challenges, though. That show is filmed on…well, actual film, whereas most production nowadays is done with digital tools. That can make McLachlan’s job tricky:

"I pushed the film stock to its limits, and we just had to bring in a lot more light than you would typically use on a big, epic scene in Game of Thrones. We had some vast expanses of nighttime prairie to light up on Westworld. We were doing stuff on there that they wouldn’t even dream of doing on Game of Thrones. Only very occasionally do they do a really big, expansive, exterior night shoot."

Or, to sum up, “I’ve done now a couple of the biggest episodes of Game of Thrones ever, and Westworld’s harder. [Laughs] Definitely.”

To read more about McLachlan’s work on Westworld, head to Deadline.