Miguel Sapochnik on filming the sack of King’s Landing: “Is this really what you wanted?”

Director Miguel Sapochnik — who helmed episode like “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards” before taking on “The Long Night” and “The Bells” — is opening up about his work on season 8. Speaking to IndieWire, he drilled down on directing “The Bells,” when Daenerys Targaryen took her shocking turned and burned King’s Landing to a crisp.

Sapochnik didn’t know exactly what would happen until he got the scripts, but had been anticipating a turn from Daenerys for years. “The way she has treated humans, and the conviction she has, means that conviction is eventually going to fall afoul.”

"She’s not questioning herself anymore, which is the difference between somebody who, I think, has kind of lost their mind. That’s part of what makes us human, is we question whether we’ve made the right decisions or not."

As many fans have noted, once she starts reining down fiery death, we don’t see Daenerys’ face for the rest of the episode. That was intentional. “At that point, you don’t need to see her,” said Sapochnik. “We decided not to cut back to her. When she makes that decision, she and the dragon become one.”

As a dragon, Daenerys visited horrible death and destruction on the most populous city in Westeros. “The destruction of King’s Landing, for me, has always been an audience participation event,” Sapochnik said. “You wanted this, you wanted this, you wanted this. Here. Is that really what you wanted?”

"I felt like there was this thing of this bloodthirstiness that exists in the fans, for revenge, for this payback that is personified by Dany. I just wanted to get to the core of what that actually means. Because even though the characters that don’t exist in the end, what you’re looking for, as an audience member, is death and destruction. I wanted people to know how bad death and destruction can be in the safe environment they’re living in."

For every episode Sapochnik directs, he creates a motto. For “The Bells,” it was, “What have we become?” It was a question he leveled at himself. “I think that I am complicit, and part of, a society that embraces violence as entertainment, and it’s messed up. Here I am doing the fifth – I don’t even know how many – but there are a lot of battles. At some point, you’re like, ‘Why am I being participatory in this? Why am I creating this for people to see? Isn’t there enough bloodshed and horrible stuff going on in the world?'”

In the end, Sapochnik embraced what he took to be the message about war being delivered by showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss: “there are no winners, only survivors.” That might apply to directing, too:

"If you spend 45 days violently enacting, recreating murders of the most brutal kind, it does have an impact on you. Then you sit in your own home, and you suddenly feel … it’s really weird. It’s really uncanny, and it makes you suddenly just get a glimpse of an idea of how destructive war is, after the fact."

In preparation to film “The Bells” Sapochnik watched the movie San Andreas, where ultra-violent earthquakes rip through California causing untold chaos. He also watched real-life clips of explosions and accidents, all so he could learn where the eye was drawn. “What’s pulling me in?” he would ask himself. “What’s making this feel real? You and I can’t even understand that, because we’ve never been in that situation, right? I try to find the story in that. Because destruction is not something that there is much of a story to. It’s like something’s there and then you blow it up, or something’s there and then it collapses. Then it’s all about gravity, and mass moving, and stuff like that. It’s more mathematics.”

There was so much destruction in “The Bells,” that it almost became uncomfortable to watch. As so much with Sapochnik, that was also purposeful. “How can I re-sensitize both myself, and the people about watching this? This idea that every single person that dies in this story, every single person that is buried by rubble, every kid, that little girl, they are people, and they have mothers, and fathers, and lives, like us. They had aspirations and dreams, and they got cut short by this event. That feels like what we were trying to do there.”

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But in order to accomplish this, Sapochnik would have to change his directing style a bit. Instead of focusing on one character’s point of view — like Jon or Arya — he chose to focus on the ordinary citizens of King’s Landing. “What I wanted to get to in King’s Landing was the idea that every single fucking one of these characters matters,” he said. “Not just the characters, but the extras, and the people you don’t know, and all the people you’ll never see, and never know about.”

"They all matter. That’s maybe me, or maybe that’s Dan and David [Weiss and Benioff], I don’t know. But it was something that evolved out of the need, or my desire, to not just add to the equation of violence in television, but rather to at least propose, ‘Think about it.’"

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