The Battle of Winterfell was a “logistical nightmare” to put together

Deborah Riley has been working on Game of Thrones since the fourth season, heading up the art department and making sure all of the splendiferous stuff you see on screen possible. She faced her biggest challenge yet ahead of season 8’s spectacular Battle of Winterfell, which she told De Zeen was a “logistical nightmare” to pull off. “It was a full year’s work for me, from pre-production all the way through to when I finished in July last year,” she said of season 8 as a whole. “It’s never an easy thing to do and this was incredibly time-consuming. It occupied my every brain cell, every waking moment. It was as intense as you can imagine. I don’t want anyone to think this is television by any normal standard. It’s really, really difficult and time-consuming.”

When it came to Winterfell, the production did things a bit differently this year, expanding greatly on the set they already had. “[W]e built the entire castle so the camera could be anywhere at any time,” Riley said. “There was too much action, too much going on for them to be concerned about doing any rotoscope work later. All of the shots inside the castle are for real.”

"It was a set so it was built with plywood backings and a hard plaster finish to help it survive the rain and the weather in Belfast. We were shooting in winter too, so that was a very big ask of the set. We had to level the ground outside to prepare for the massive area for the battlefield itself. There was a huge amount of groundwork involved."

And that was just the beginning. The Winterfell set is built over some very marshy ground, and water kept flooding the actual trench they dug for the Battle of Winterfell, the one Melisandre lit on fire. How to fix the problem? “[I]t was literally scraping back the ground to create proper drainage on the property where there hadn’t been before. Logistically, there was so much involved and it required everyone to work beyond anything we’d done before.”

They basically built a working castle…out of plywood. “We had never done anything as intense as that before, working over a long period of time and in difficult conditions,” Riley said. “I’d never worked with that much heavy machinery before. At one point in time, it felt like we had every piece of heavy equipment in Northern Ireland out in Winterfell!” And all this is done is incredibly rainy conditions with “mud would go up past your ankles.”

"We were exhausted. What you see on camera was reflected in everybody. It wasn’t just the characters going through it but the crew too. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what it was like for us at the time."

All of this was done in service of the mission to make the castle feel more real and immediate than ever. “It was a matter of expanding the castle we already had, but expanding it in a way that had never been established before,” Riley said. “I was really interested in humanising Winterfell, showing the back of house so we could have a better understanding of where the food came from, where the bread was made, and so on, so we could have a better idea of how they had been feeding these armies and how they’d been keeping the castle alive.”

"You want to feel for those characters, you want to understand who they are and you want to see that they’re vulnerable, and the spaces have to reflect that too. We wanted to show parts of Winterfell that had never been explored before and give them big, strong outer walls so, for all intents and purposes, would feel like the castle was fortified. This was so it would feel like a battle in the true sense, meaning that there were obstacles the Wights would have to overcome in order to penetrate the castle."

And that’s just the set. You also have to decorate it, say with mountains of dead bodies.  “Not only do you need the dead people but the armour that goes with them,” Riley said. “This was a massive budgetary issue as we had to clothe each one in the appropriate army uniforms.”

"We also had discs of dead bodies made. We were casting out dead bodies ourselves to try to increase the look of it and to make the battlefield look like it had so many dead people across it. If we were to show dead people across the camera, the further away we went, the less detail they needed. We cast three of four bodies together so we’d have clumps of bodies that we could lift around very easily but anything close to camera were individual bodies that would fill with water when it rained, making them very heavy."

Here’s a look at the kind of cast Riley is talking about:

Riley is right. From a distance, you’d never know.

To my knowledge, Game of Thrones hadn’t pulled this trick before, but then again, there was a much greater call for dead bodies in season 8. “We had a whole team of people just clothing these bodies and making them look like they’d endured a battle – to put wigs on them and helmets,” Riley said. “There’s also a whole team of people that had to look after these bodies after the shoot because you can’t have them laying in the field overnight. You have to bring them in, take them out of the weather, otherwise, they won’t last.”

Something similar had to be done with all the fake blood, which couldn’t be left out to mix with rain or snow lest it turn “a bright pinky orange colour.” So that’s probably another group of people on blood duty. “There’s different blood you can buy for different prices but with the amount we had to use, we had to be measured with the expensive blood and be careful with what blood we were putting where.” Interesting work, this.

And then there’s everybody who had to scrape away all the fake snow regularly to avoid the set “turning into papier-mâché.” And of course, all those dragonglass weapons:

"We had to make everything look like it’d been made of dragonglass. We had to make it look like the army’s weapons had been adapted with dragon glass. You can see that the Unsullied have adapted their shields to include dragon glass that had been clamped and screwed onto them….The fake props were actually bitumen, which stank, to be honest. It just smelt like roadworks. It had the look of obsidian with the cheapest budget possible."

In other words, this was a herculean effort by the Game of Thrones crew, who deserves a least a few hundred Emmys for their trouble. “It takes an army of people to do that and they’re not the people who get any of the glory at all,” Riley said. “It was a phenomenal achievement.”

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So the Battle of Winterfell was a monster of a scene to make. But was it fun? “It was a fantastic thing to be involved in but none of it was fun.” Oh. “We did the best we possibly could given the time that we had and that was a huge achievement in itself. I was very proud to have survived.”

Still, when asked if she would do it all again, Riley was unequivocal:

"Oh god yeah, I think we would all do it again if we had the chance. It was a real honour to be a part of Game of Thrones, but I would know better what I was getting myself into, that’s for sure."

Thank you to all the crew members who have worked on this show, now and in the past. As Riley says, they’re “unsung heroes,” but they’re heroes nonetheless.

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