George R.R. Martin names his favorite Game of Thrones episode he wrote

George R.R. Martin, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey and more remember the making of “Blackwater,” the first big battle episode of Game of Thrones.

“Blackwater” was a pivotal episode for Game of Thrones. If you don’t remember, this was the one where Stannis Baratheon attacked King’s Landing with his fleet, but was successfully repelled by Tyrion Lannister and his father Tywin, who arrived at the last second with the Tyrells.

It was also the first time Game of Thrones had waged a proper battle sequence, something it would become known for as the years went on. Up until then, the battles had either happened offscreen or, in the case of the Battle of the Green Fork in season 1, just blown past.

At the time, the show simply didn’t have any money to mount a big battle scene, but according to an excerpt from James Hibberd’s upcoming oral history of Game of Thrones, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, the team knew they had to step things up for the Battle of the Blackwater. “Some battles work fine off-screen,” said showrunner David Benioff. “Season two was so much about a country at war, we felt like if we didn’t see the most important battle of this entire war onscreen, we were going to be shortchanging viewers.”

In the end, the battle worked out and brought the show to a new level in terms of spectacle, but it was a near thing. “We were nervous, really nervous, going into the second season, about that episode,” remembered showrunner Dan Weiss. “There was talk of turning Blackwater into a land battle, which would have been terrible.” There was also discussion of the battle happening entirely offscreen, which could have been worse.

And so Benioff and Weiss pleaded with former HBO programming president Mike Lombardo for additional funding and more rehearsal time. Lombardo granted their requests, but they were still trying to do a movie-style battle on an inflated TV budget, and there were lots of hurdles yet to jump. A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, who wrote this episode, was tasked with sizing down his own creation. “We had to scale down ‘Blackwater’ considerably from the book,” Martin said. “They told me right at the start that the bridge of boats would be impossible.”

The bridge of ships was probably the biggest set piece cut from the version of events Martin wrote in A Clash of Kings. He explains it best himself:

"There’s a giant chain strung across the bay so Stannis can’t get away and they are trapped in the flames. Boats are slamming together and get locked together so they form a temporary bridge across the river. Stannis has a huge army on the south side of the river and he’s trying to get them across. So when the bridge of boats is formed, his men start rushing across. And the defenders have built three huge trebuchets flinging wildfire across at them. Then Joffrey starts flinging the bodies across the river of traitors who were planning to sell the city out…"

Martin has said that he wrote A Song of Ice and Fire in part because he was tired of restrictions being placed on his TV writing, and he filled the story with things that would have been impossible to do on film. This episode is where that was put to the test.

Image: 2017 A Song of Ice and Fire calendar, art by Didier Graffet

“What you see on the screen is 10 times removed from not just the book but the first outline,” said producer Christopher Newman. “Compromise was set in pretty early on.”

Still, the resulting battle is spectacular, especially for a TV show of that time, with the enormous explosion of wildfire on Blackwater Bay being the highlight. “When the wildfire explodes, it’s glorious,” Martin continued. “It’s one of my favorite episodes of the show. Certainly my favorite of the four I wrote [throughout the series].” (For the record, he also wrote season 1’s “The Pointy End,” season 3’s “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” and season 4’s “The Lion and the Rose.”)

To pull it off, the team decided to focus very closely on a few characters in the thick of battle, rather than pulling back and seeing the full expanse. “There’s the vast, epic way of shooting a battle, where you see an army of a hundred thousand and an attacking army of 200,000,” said Benioff. “There’s also the kind of more ground’s-eye view, where you’re an infantryman and you’re running out there with an ax or a sword. You’re just kind of seeing what’s directly in front of you. And that can be a really visceral way of shooting a battle. We were trying to get it to feel real and gritty and dirty.”

Weiss agreed. “Any time you read any military account of an actual soldier’s experience of battle, whether it was in ancient Rome or all the way up to Vietnam and beyond, it’s never, ‘Then this flank moved over here and that flank.’ It’s always, ‘This was a chaotic clusterfuck and I didn’t know which way I was going and I was half the time not sure if I was shooting at my own guys.'”

To helm the episode, producer Bernadette Caulfield tapped Dog Soldiers director Neil Marshall, who she knew had a reputation for directing action on a budget. But the tricky part was that they only called him after the original director had to pull out due to a family emergency, leaving very little time to prepare. “I was aware of Game of Thrones when season one was happening,” Marshall remembered. “I thought, ‘This is really my kind of thing,’ and had my agent contact HBO and say, ‘If there’s any chance, I’d like to be able to direct an episode.’ Their response was like, ‘We have our directors, thank you very much.'”

"Then a year or so later on a Saturday morning, I got an emergency call from Bernie to come and fix a situation that, from what I gathered, was a bit out of control. She asked if I would like to direct an episode. I was like, “Absolutely!” I’m thinking this will be in few months’ time. Then she said, “It’s on Monday morning and you’ve got one week to plan.”"

Marshall hadn’t actually seen the show, so Benioff and Weiss quickly caught him up to speed, and he brought a lot of ideas to the table. “Military history is a hobby of mine, so I brought a sense of strategy to the battle,” he said. “Because in the script, 40,000 people arrive on a beach and they stand around a door. They had all this stuff at sea and the green fire, but once they got to the beach, it wasn’t really clear who was trying to achieve what. Stannis basically marshaled the whole battle from the beach. I felt that that wasn’t really in character and wasn’t interesting. I was like, ‘They can’t just stand around, they have to be doing other things, and we have to get Stannis in on the action.'”

"I invented the boat that came in and was turned upside down with a battering ram suspended underneath to batter the gate. By bringing the ladders and the grappling hooks, it gave the scene more sense of purpose. And we had Stannis climb the wall and have a good fight up there and cut somebody’s head off."

Martin, who had been frustrated with the original director telling him to cut things, credits Marshall with saving the episode. “Neil Marshall reversed everything the previous director said. Marshall was like, ‘Put in more.’ He put so much back that I’d previously taken out and even added some stuff I hadn’t thought of. He was the hero of that episode.”

But once the top-level stuff was settled, they still had to shoot the actual episode, and it was brutal. The majority was shot in Magheramorne Quarry in Northern Ireland, where the team had to deal with some environmental hazards. “We had three days of rain,” remembered Eugene Michael Simon (Lancel Lannister). “On the fourth day it stopped. Suddenly everybody was like, ‘Oh shit, what are we going to do?’ Because the continuity wouldn’t match and we had tons of stuff to do.”

"What happened was the most elaborate example of adapting I’d ever seen on a film set: There was a natural salt lake at the bottom of the quarry, but the water in it was below freezing—it didn’t ice over because it was salt water. They ran a fire hose from the bottom of this freezing cold lake, and had a man hold a fire hydrant at the top of the wall for that scene where Tyrion is giving his speech—“If I’m half a man, what does that make you!?” The deadly cold water from the lake was fired up into the air so it would rain down on us while Peter had to expertly give this pro speech. You can see our breath evaporating since we’re all freezing and it looks like we’re in the North."

Tyrion’s speech is another great moment from the episode, and apparently it wasn’t hard for Peter Dinklage to act. “In those scenes [he] doesn’t have to act tired because by four o’clock in the morning he’s had 41-degree rain pouring on him for eight hours straight,” Weiss remembered. “He is bleary, weary, and tired. It was miserable.”

At the same time, Neil Marshall remembers that Dinklage was “giddy” over the opportunity to get out there and chopping people with an axe. “It was a nice change for the character rather than, you know, drinking and whoring and whatever else.”

Thinking back on the experience, Dinklage almost seems not to know how he pulled it off, although he definitely did. “You gotta have a certain amount of confidence to pull that type of stuff off,” he said. “I make it not my confidence, but the character’s confidence. So maybe that might seem like I’m confident? It’s really just the fact that this character, Tyrion, is sort of confident. I guess.”

It all worked out well in the end, with Martin praising Tyrion’s near-book-accurate speech. “I love that scene,” the author said.

Meanwhile, some of the best stuff was happening in the Red Keep, as Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) waited out the battle with the rest of the noble women as tensions slowly built. “I remember talking to Lena and saying, ‘Cersei is basically acting like the drunk aunt at a wedding,'” Marshall remembered. “It’s like she’s had a few too many drinks and can’t control her mouth.’ She was like, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’”

Headey could sympathize with Cersei feeling cooped up. “I kept begging them for a sword and a horse,” she said, remembering how she wanted to do more action scenes. “It was one of the first times we see Cersei so brazen. She’s usually pretty snaky. Being drunk and thinking she may die, she’s just letting Sansa have it direct. It’s like this masochistic mentor relationship where she can’t help but torture Sansa. And I think that’s driven by envy that you see in her views. And frustration that, as women, we’re stuck. You know what I mean? She thinks she’s helping her. But yeah, she’s just horrid.”

Finally, everything was in the can, but getting the finished episode on the air came right down to the wire. “We were turning in VFX shots on ‘Blackwater’ a week before airing,” Benioff remembered. “HBO quality control got the tapes with 20 minutes to spare [before the deadline].”

Of course, in the end, the episode was a smashing success, and showed that Game of Thrones could offer action scenes on a scale never before seen on TV, and it would only get more spectacular from there. “Neil texted me a review from Rolling Stone that said, ‘This is possibly the best hour of television that’s ever been made,'” remembered Liam Cunningham, who played Stannis’ right-hand man Davos Seaworth. “And Neil, who had never done television before, wrote, ‘Not bad for a first-timer.’”

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h/t Vanity Fair