Of all 73 Game of Thrones episodes, director Neil Marshall had the great pleasure of helming two of the most memorable: “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall.” Both of them featured enormous, high-stakes battles that required a whole lot of work. Looking back, they paid dividends and are generally in the conversation when we talk about the best-ever episodes of the show.
For Marshall, the experience of working on the beloved game-changing HBO fantasy show was extremely gratifying. “I mean, just to be a part of that show at all makes me proud. It did change the face of television and it upped everybody’s game considerably,” he told Den of Geek.
In the penultimate episode of season 2, “Blackwater,” Marshall was challenged with creating an epic battle that saw Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) attack King’s Landing in an ultimately futile, attempt to seize the Iron Throne from Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson). Fans still talk of this episode as a high point for the series, especially the part when Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) blows up Stannis’ fleet with wildfire. His next episode was the penultimate episode of season 4, “The Watchers on the Wall,” which depicted the Wildling attack on Castle Black. Again, it was very, very epic.
Opportunities to direct episodes like that don’t just come out of thin air. Marshall was eyed for the job following his successful 2010 movie Centurion. “I came to it almost entirely because of Centurion,” he explained. “I proved that I could do a battle sequence on a lower budget with just so many resources in a short amount of time. They needed somebody to do ‘Blackwater’ who had done something like that. I was available and close, and I’d done that and proved it.”
Game of Thrones was a “great experiment”
We all know how much of a great success Game of Thrones turned out to be. I mean, HBO is already in the process of developing a lot of spinoffs besides House of the Dragon. But what if it never stuck with viewers? Believe it or not, the concept of an adult fantasy show with everything from nudity to excessive blood and gore wasn’t nearly as viable for a big-budget series back then as it is today. It was pretty experimental, but obviously it paid off. “I think it was very similar to what Pete Jackson did with Lord of the Rings,” Marshall said. “They went to this faraway place that really didn’t have much of an infrastructure, and they built a studio from the ground up and spent the next 10 years in Belfast, making Game of Thrones what it is today. But at the beginning, it was seen very differently. I think it was seen as the great experiment.”
Interestingly, the upcoming spin-off series House of the Dragon doesn’t share the same filming locations as the original show. Instead, it has been filming in Cornwall, England.
We thank Marshall for his stellar work on the series. Those battles were spectacular. Since Game of Thrones, he’s gone on to work on other exciting projects including Westworld, Lost in Space, and Constantine. And now, you can check out his latest movie The Reckoning.
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