At a recent PlayIT event in Hungary, Game of Thrones star Vladimir Furdik (the Night King) talked about a hotly anticipated battle sequence from the final season of Game of Thrones, one that the production spent 55 grueling nights filming. “It’s brutal,” Peter Dinklage told Entertainment Weekly. “It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park.”
The note that the #GameofThrones producers gave to the cast and crew after filming for 55 straight nights pic.twitter.com/fEYJZo5eMi
— Thrones Facts | HOTD 🐉 (@Thrones_Facts) April 7, 2018
Speaking to Sorozatwiki, confirmed the timing of the battle. (Please forgive the garbled translation.)
"In the third part of the last season, there is a battle that the creators intend to be the biggest in television history. Almost the full episode will be about the battle, it will take about 1 hour."
So basically, Furdik is confirming that the big battle between the living and the dead will go down in Episode 3, which was our guess, but it’s good to be sure. Writing about this historic sequence, EW’s James Hibberd called it “wall-to-wall action” and detailed how it jumps between the stories of several different characters. Showrunner David Benioff said that every thread “feels like its own genre.”
"Having the largest battle doesn’t sound very exciting — it actually sounds pretty boring. Part of our challenge, and really, Miguel’s challenge, is how to keep that compelling… we’ve been building toward this since the very beginning, it’s the living against the dead, and you can’t do that in a 12-minute sequence."
Furdik said that they filmed for three months in the wind and the rain outdoors, and then for another month in a huge studio, which makes this easily the longest battle shoot in the show’s history. Basically, this sequence is going to be epic and our hype is reaching dangerous levels. “I can tell you that there will be no shortage in season 8,” Furdik said. “There will be a lot of dragons, the Night King will return, and in the season the biggest battle for the Throne will be completed.”
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Now that Thrones is over, Furdik has already lined up another gig on the set of Netflix’s The Witcher, which sees Henry “Superman” Cavill step into the role of the white-haired demon hunter popularized by CD Projekt RED’s video games, albeit without the character’s familiar scruff:
Furdik will be working closely with Cavill, but as a stunt coordinator, not an actor. Then again, that was Furdik’s original job on Game of Thrones, and look how that turned out.
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h/t Reddit