Of all the directors who have worked on Game of Thrones, easily the most notable is Miguel Sapochnik, the guy responsible for spectacular episodes like “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” and “The Winds of Winter.” And while people have problems with the final season, it’s hard to argue that the sack of King’s Landing in “The Bells” wasn’t horrifyingly thrilling.
I mean, good god, people.
But as intertwined as Sapochnik has become with the show, he got off to a rocky start. He was brought in as a replacement director on season 5, and was initially overwhelmed by the scale of the show. He had to approved a number of sets 60 miles apart, and if it wasn’t for production designer Deborah Riley taking pity on him and showing him around, things might have turned out very differently. “If I hadn’t of had Deb, I would have never found any of those places, I would have sunk at that point,” Sapochnik said on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “And later on, I realized that was kind of their policy. It’s like sink or swim, and I’d lost my passport on the way, so it’s like, ‘This guy’s an idiot, let’s let him sink.’”
Eventually, he swam, but it was rough going for a bit, starting with his work on the season 5 episode “The Gift.” He made of artistically bold choices, including shooting a conversation between Cersei and Tommen through bars to symbolize being imprisoned…
…and graphically matching a cut between Maester Aemon on his deathbed to Maester Aemon on his funeral pyre:
Choices like this were at odds with the vision showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had for the show — they wanted something more unified, without directors putting their individual artistic stamp on episodes. “ said ‘so self-conscience and we hate it basically,’” Sapochnik recalled. “I was visually policed for the first three months of my shoot and it made the creation of ‘Hardhome’ really difficult because I pissed them off.”
“Hardhome,” a landmark episode of the show, ended up being Sapochnik’s proving ground. He struggled with time constraints and with making the battle feel as big as it was written when so much of it would depend on special effects and he was constrained as to what parts of the set he could shoot. He got around these problems by leveraging the passion of the very dedicated extras and creating limited spaces where he was free to play with scenes without having to relay on pre-visualization and other tools commonly used by action directions, which he feels don’t lend themselves to exciting sequences.
"The problem I have with most action scenes today is they are too designed. I can’t shoot this if I can’t create a sustainable environment for my actors to work in. I wanted to create a place, a playground the actors could get so immersed in it that they were in the real thing."
Obviously, he pulled it off, and the methods Sapochnik developed with “Hardhome” formed the basis of his future work on the show. He also learned how to work with his bosses. ”Dan and David don’t want to be told you can’t do something,” he said. “You need to offer a solution as well.” When he returned to shoot “Battle of the Bastards” in season 6, he had a lot more freedom, and was even allowed to use more cameras and a faster shutter speed to make the episode feel special, which it very much did:
Overall, I think Sapochnik did a fantastic job of coloring within the lines of the normal Game of Thrones style while still adding his own flair. You always knew when you were watching one of his episodes, but it never felt like a different show.
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Sapochnik’s next project is a movie called BIOS, about a robot on a post-apocalyptic Earth built to protect the life of his dying creator’s beloved dog. It’s due out next year. That sounds pretty out there, but after his work on Game of Thrones, I’m ready for whatever he does next.
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