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

Image: Game of Thrones/HBO

13. A key shot was cut from “Battle of the Bastards”…and another iconic one was created on the fly to replace it

While Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon provides many surprises about the production of Game of Thrones, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the Battle of the Bastards was difficult to film. There was immense pressure to make the Battle of the Bastards (or BoB, as it was commonly called on set) “bigger and better” than the Massacre at Hardhome.

To prepare, director Miguel Sapochnik scoured the annals of history for actual battles to draw inspiration from, and watched many famous battles from movies. As he took notes on what worked and what didn’t from other fictional skirmishes, Sapochnik realized that the closer he could keep the action fixated on the perspectives of the characters engaged in the fight — like Jon, Tormund, and Davos — the deeper the viewer would be pulled into the experience. He wanted to portray what it would actually feel like to be in those chaotic moments when you were surrounded by thousands of people slaughtering each other or standing before a line of charging horsemen. He opted to go in for close, personal shots instead of aerial views that showed more of the battlefield, which is the more common approach.

Although there were still some of those bigger aerial shots. But one in particular didn’t make the cut. “There was a part in the script where Jon was going to run up the body pile and he and Tormund would stand up there with a 360-degree view of how the battle was progressing,” Dave Hill recalled. “But to do that, you’d have to keep re-dressing that entire field.”

Sapochnik elaborated further:

"On the body pile, Jon was going to survey the carnage, unaware that a horseman with a spear had locked on to him. As Jon watches his men perish, we were going to have an ‘all is lost’ moment. The horseman charges up the body pile toward Jon. At the last minute, the pile of bodies explodes and the giant Wun Wun bursts through, coming between the horseman and Jon and punching the horse, knocking it back down and saving Jon in the process."

“Miguel was like, ‘I need three extra days to do it,'” said Hill. “The production didn’t have three extra days.”

Instead, Sapochnik pitched a new idea to Benioff and Weiss, who generally did not approve of last minute changes to scripts: Jon gets knocked down and trampled by his own men. It would be a “suffocating, claustrophobic” scene, much easier to shoot — and once again, it kept things focused on Jon’s personal story as opposed to getting a broad view of the battle. “I hadn’t even worked out exactly how to do it, I just knew we needed a Plan B,” Sapochnik said.

The scene in question turned out to be one of the battle’s most memorable moments. As Hibberd succinctly puts it: “Once again, a creative pivot to an unexpected problem resulted in a classic Game of Thrones moment.”