20 takeaways from Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, behind the scenes of Game of Thrones

10. The eerie ending of “Hardhome” was a mistake

Probably my favorite episode of Game of Thrones’ entire run was “Hardhome,” the season 5 battle episode that saw Jon Snow and his Night’s Watch comrades teaming up with the Wildlings stranded at a makeshift city north of the Wall to fight the army of the dead. It was a stunning sequence with slow burn tension and explosions of violence and action that kept viewers on the edge of their seats for the better part of 20 minutes.

And it very nearly could have gone very differently. Originally, the Game of Thrones producers reached out to Neil Marshall to direct the episode. Marshall had successfully shot the Battle of Blackwater Bay in season 2 and the battle at Castle Black in season 4, but he wasn’t available to take on the Massacre at Hardhome. Marshall said that turning down the episode was his “biggest regret” on Thrones.

But it all ended well, as we know, because Miguel Sapochnik was brought in to do the episode. It might seem hard to imagine now, since Sapochnik is the director behind most of the biggest action set-pieces of the back half of the show, but at the time, hiring him was a huge leap of faith.

“It was trial by fire for Miguel Sapochnik,” said Dave Hill. “It was: ‘Here’s our biggest action sequence for season five. We all love it. You don’t know all the actors or the crew. Make your magic happen.’ But Miguel is a super prepper. He came in with a plan of attack. It was all hands on deck for that month, and it came out even better than what we had on the page.”

Image: Game of Thrones/HBO

Sapochnik does go into detail in the book about some of those page-to-screen changes. Originally, the battle took place entirely on a huge beach, with the wights running down the Wildlings on the shoreline. But it was later realized that the wights would simply have slaughtered their opponents too fast that way — not to mention that it would have been basically impossible to film a battle between the army of the dead and 95,000 Wildlings.

Sapochnik and the writing team came up with the idea of the palisade wall, so that they could have a “microcosm of the action” where they could “point the camera in almost any direction.” As we all know by now, that worked out very well, even in spite of a fierce rainstorm that drenched the cast and crew as they tried to get the shots they needed to make the sequence work.

“It was chaos,” Kit Harington recalled. “Joyous chaos. The weather helped [the performances]. A lot of people remember Battle of the Bastards, but for me Hardhome was the battle I loved the most. I loved shooting it. Story-wise, it was fantastic.”

There’s quite a bit of meat to this section of Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, but the coolest takeaway from it is that the eerie, silent ending where the Night King lifts his arms and reanimates all the freshly slaughtered Wildlings while Jon Snow watches on in horror…happened somewhat by accident.

“The silent ending in that moment came from a happy mistake,” Sapochnik said. “Someone forgot to extend the music track over that part of the rough cut, and I found it much more powerful without music. All these things are a process. As much as it would be nice to start at the end, it’s the process that brings out the best in an idea.”