In the world of Game of Thrones reporting, James Hibberd holds the keys to the kingdom. For years, he’s been one of the very few journalists HBO has invited on set, and he’s broken many a story about things to come in Westeros. His Entertainment Weekly cover story about Game of Thrones season 8 is the best resource yet for fans who simply cannot wait any longer for April, and now, speaking on a new episode of his Game of Thrones Weekly podcast, he dropped even more knowledge.
Let’s hit some of the highlights, starting with Hibberd’s take on the much ballyhooed-battle sequence said to go down in the third episode. Watching from afar, we’ve known for a while that HBO was preparing something special, but we’re still not sure we’re ready:
"It’s shaping up to be what probably almost certainly is the longest consecutive battle sequence in cinema history. They’ve looked to try and find other ones out there, like [the one in] The Two Towers, in The Lords of the Rings, which is about 40 minutes, and in the movie 13 Assassins, which was also around 40 minutes. This is going to be longer than 40 minutes. It’s pretty nuts."
I am all for an epic fight against the dead that rivals the Battle of Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers.
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But season 8 won’t be all about spectacle. Hibberd also assured listeners that HBO has also used the extra time spent filming over the past year to perfect “the regular scenes of two people talking in a hallway. If it’s a scene that would normally take a day to shoot, they’d spend several days shooting, because they’re trying to so hard to get every little thing right. So they’d do take after take, from all sorts of different angles, so that in editing they have different ways to piece it together.”
"There’s been so much focus on the ‘spectacularness’ of the battles, but they’re not skimping on the one-on-one scenes and the character scenes. I think people are going to be surprised about how intimate the final season is, in addition to the spectacular stuff that you’re expecting."
I’m also on board for this. Game of Thrones has always balanced bombast with grounded character drama, and I’m glad to hear season 8 will continue in that vein.
HBO has also gone all-in on sets for season 8, building out the Winterfell set to make it as close to a real castle as possible. “You can wander around, point the camera at any direction and it shows more Winterfell,” Hibberd said.
"One of the directors pointed out that even in a big budget Marvel or Star Wars movie, they usually only build what the actors are gonna stand directly in front of and fill in the rest with green screen. But for this set, and a few others too, they built it as a 360º set, so you don’t have to fill it in with special effects; you don’t have to favor one particular angle; you can have cameras follow people around; you can do unusual angles and come up with different things on the day of shooting. So it allows a lot more creativity, and it helps the actors. No acting required. They’re running around these sets, fighting, with fake blood on the snow, snow flying everywhere, torches burning, fires and smoke; it feels like you’re right there."
And they’re preserving some of these sets as tourist attractions, so fans will get a chance to see all of HBO’s hard work for themselves.
Finally, Hibberd talked about the ending, without giving away specifics, of course:
"What you want in any final season is things to be unexpected but also make sense. So you don’t want anything to surprise you for surprise’s sake. You want everything to feel earned and to look back and go ‘okay, yeah, I could see how they were building to that.’ And from that I know from the final season, it does that."
I keep thinking I can’t get any more hyped, and they keep bringing me back in.
You can listen to Hibberd’s full thoughts here!
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